GREENBELT, MD. — The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch on Aug. 30, 2026, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The launch will originate from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The telescope, which is barrel-shaped and approximately the size of a semitrailer truck, will operate from a Lagrange point known as L2, located about 1 million miles from Earth. Development of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope took nearly two decades and cost $4.3 billion.

According to Julie McEnery, senior project scientist for the Roman telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the observatory is expected to survey the cosmos 1,000 times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990. McEnery stated that each image captured by the Roman telescope will cover a patch of sky at least 100 times larger than images from Hubble. She noted that a panoramic view of the Andromeda Galaxy that required more than 400 observations by Hubble can be captured by the Roman telescope with only two observations.

The telescope will perform spectroscopy, which involves splitting light into different wavelengths or colors. It will conduct three primary surveys, with one focusing on the Milky Way's galactic bulge over more than a year. Another survey will scan about 12% of the entire sky in under a year and a half, and a third will concentrate on supernova explosions that occurred up to 8 billion years ago. In its first five years, the mission is expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies, McEnery said.

Dominic Benford, the Roman telescope's program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said, "We know that Roman will give us the definitive data to help us understand the twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy." McEnery added that one month of Roman observations would correspond to a century with Hubble. Describing the mission, McEnery said, "It feels almost emotional."

The observatory is currently located in a clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Prior to launch, the telescope will be transported to Baltimore and then barged to the Kennedy Space Center. NASA has invited digital creators and social media users to register for a NASA Social event for the launch. Registration for this event opens on June 15 and closes at 11:59 p.m. EDT on June 28. A maximum of 50 digital creators will be selected to attend the two-day event, but current or former NASA civil servants, contractors, interns, and individuals under contract to provide products or services to NASA are not eligible.

No independent assessment was available for this report.