This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The Roman Space Telescope is designed to directly image exoplanets using complex optomechanical systems developed by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy The Roman Space Telescope has been under development for about a decade under NASA's leadership and is scheduled to launch on Aug. 30, 2026, at 7:26 a.m. The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, who was considered the architect of NASA's modern science program and, among other efforts, dedicated herself to the success of the Hubble Space Telescope project.
Roman's destination is the L2 Lagrange point, a specific location 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth that lies on the axis connecting the sun and Earth on the side of Earth facing away from the sun. At this point, the gravitational forces of the celestial bodies cancel each other out, allowing Roman to orbit the sun without propulsion. The Roman Space Telescope's primary mirror is 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) in diameter and is a replica of the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror.
It carries two scientific instruments: The Wide Field Instrument has a detector area about 100 times larger than Hubble's and, in just five years, will image an area of the sky 50 times larger than Hubble did over 30 years. Together with the Euclid space telescope in orbit, Roman will set out to track down dark matter, which is widely distributed throughout the universe. Thanks to the Wide Field Instrument's high image resolution and sensitivity, researchers also plan to search large sections of the sky for cooler planets, which have not been as easy to find as hot, bright gas giants.
They will use two methods for this: Using the so-called transit method, they aim to detect about 100,000 new planets as they pass in front of their star and cause a minimal but measurable dimming of the star's light. Using another method based on the so-called microlensing effect, they hope to find an additional 1,000 exoplanets. Both methods detect distant worlds only indirectly.
The second instrument, the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI), is used to directly image and study exoplanets that have already been discovered using other methods. Coronagraphs use special masks to block out the bright host star to reveal fainter celestial bodies, such as a planet orbiting closely around that star. These distant solar systems are so far away that the imaged planets appear only as small dots next to their host star, which is obscured by the coronagraph.
With previous coronagraphs on ground-based telescopes, this was possible only for particularly bright gas giants located at greater distances from their central stars—stars that are so hot that they emit infrared light and thus can be imaged with infrared cameras. With the CGI, however, researchers aim specifically to image cooler and smaller exoplanets, such as Jupiter, which primarily reflect the light of their host star. The planets that Roman aims to image appear, as seen from Earth, a billion times fainter than their host star.
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