‘What a glorious dawn launch.’ Why the Roman Space Telescope’s picture-perfect liftoff beyond Earth is such a big deal
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CAPE CANAVAREL, Fla. — It was a bright and sunny morning here in Florida when the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off planet Earth against a magical blue sky.
“What a glorious dawn launch,” Jackie Townsend, the Roman Space Telescope‘s project manager, said during a post-launch press conference on Sunday (Aug. 30). “The ride was magnificent — it put us right where we wanted to be. All of the deployments went great.”
Roman lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket right on cue at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT), beginning its journey to revolutionize the way we see the universe. It will be able to do this thanks to the two stars of its toolkit, the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and the Coronagraph Instrument. The former is meant to image extremely wide sections of the cosmos to capture tons of fleeting phenomena that are hard to catch — things like supernovas, fast radio bursts and maybe even colliding neutron stars.
Its uniquely wide view will also help scientists decode the intricacies of dark matter and dark energy while perhaps clearing up some contradictions about our universe that scientists have been scratching their heads over for decades. What’s the source of the puzzling “Hubble tension?” Why exactly is the universe expanding the way it is? Are we alone?
Meanwhile, the coronagraph will take direct images of exoplanets and bring us a gallery of “Pale Brown Dots” from beyond our solar system akin to the Voyager spacecraft’s priceless “Pale Blue Dot” portrait of Earth.
What happens now?
Now that it has lifted off, the Roman Space Telescope will undergo a 90-day commissioning period while traveling to its station in space at the sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, or L2. This is a gravitationally stable point in space on the side of Earth always opposite the sun; it’s a popular location to send telescopes because the orientation allows spacecraft to remain safe from heat while still getting a great view of the universe. Notably, the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is also located here.
“Roman will travel nearly 1 million miles away from Earth to Lagrange Point L2 and begin transmitting imagery and data back home that will contribute to world-changing science along with captivating imagery like we see from Hubble and James Webb,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during today’s press conference. “I have no doubt that Roman will become a household name alongside those great instruments of discovery.”
Right after getting off the ground and successfully separating from the spacecraft, Roman started undergoing several typical post-launch procedures — for example, outgassing, referring to the spacecraft releasing any trapped gases once exposed to the vacuum of space, getting “power positive” and plunging to the really cold temperature levels necessary to keep its instruments safe.
The picture-perfect launch today adds to Roman’s glowing record of efficiency and performance. This telescope has been in development for over a decade and has an estimated total cost of about $4 billion — but while this may sound like lots of time and money, it’s pretty good for a space mission. The JWST, for instance, cost about $10 billion. Roman, in fact, was completed under budget and ahead of schedule. And now, it turns out that even the famously fickle Florida weather couldn’t stop this space explorer in its tracks.
“The weather got the memo that Roman is always early,” Townsend said.
What exactly will Roman do?
The Roman Space Telescope is a huge deal for astronomers. First of all, with its WFI, it’s meant to process a tremendous amount of data in relatively short periods of time in order to survey gigantic zones of our cosmos. For context, the Hubble Space Telescope has generated about 400 terabytes of data across its 35 or so years of service, while Roman will be generating about 500 terabytes every single year.
“Our main survey will take over a year and be really huge,” Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said during a prelaunch conference on Saturday (Aug. 29). “We would need over half a million 4K TVs to fully display the single Roman image on our largest survey.”
Roman will also view the universe in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum like the JWST, but with a wide-field, shallow view rather than the JWST’s super narrow but deep view. This is a big deal because infrared observations are key for astronomers; they allow us to view objects hidden behind interstellar dust and gas as well as objects in the very (very) distant universe emitting light wavelengths that stretch out from bluer, tight ones into redder, longer ones.
And second of all, Roman’s coronagraph is state-of-the-art. It’s the first “active” coronagraph to be flown in space, which means it’s able to actively adjust itself to enhance its observations. The concept is basically like a solar eclipse; a coronagraph blocks out the glare of a star such that anything around that star can come into focus. And that means exoplanets — specifically large ones for Roman’s capabilities. NASA will be using Roman foremost to find Jupiter-like worlds around other stars in the universe.
“If you try to imagine seeing an exoplanet next to a star, it’s going to be very challenging,” Vanessa Bailey, Roman’s coronagraph instrument scientist, said during the prelaunch briefing. “The starlight is going to be overwhelmingly bright. It’s like trying to see a firefly next to a lighthouse hundreds of miles away. We can use a technology called a coronagraph inside of our camera to block that lighthouse and see the firefly.”
But what’s special about an active coronagraph like this one is that it can change its hardware to increase the amount of targets it can study. Shawn Domagal-Goldman, the head of NASA’s Astrophysics Division, offered an analogy about going to see an optometrist:
“They measured my eyes, they measured my vision, and then they gave me a prescription, which I then mailed in, designed lenses to basically impart the opposite area that my eyes impart,” he explained. “What the coronagraph does is, it’s basically doing that measurement and then reshaping with deformable mirrors in a fast cadence to correct the vision that the telescope is imparting.”
“In 1990 when we launched Hubble, we didn’t even know there were exoplanets,” Nicky Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said during today’s briefing. “There will be maybe 100,000 [known ones] at the end of Roman.”
‘The edge of a precipice’
McEnery described today’s launch as a transition point, and said it feels like Roman’s technical team is on the “edge of a precipice.” Launch experts will now hand the baton to scientists, who will start using the machine they worked so very hard to get to space safely.
“We’re just about to set foot off into the unknown,” she said. “I’m looking forward to the next few months when we turn things on, figure out how well things work, and actually get to use this observatory, this telescope, these instruments in space, in the environment that it’s designed for.”
Soon, the science is going to come rolling in, she said: “You know, I have no real good words because it’s just so exciting.”
Another bit of excitement during today’s conference came from U.S. President Donald Trump, who called Isaacman right when Fox was beautifully describing what it’s like to say goodbye to Roman, a machine that has without a doubt become a member of her team.
“There is that moment where you think, ‘I’m never going to see that spacecraft again,’ and get that feeling of ‘You know, it’s never coming back,”‘ she said. “I liken it to sending your kids to college. They’re going to have great adventures.”
When Trump called, Isaacman left the room briefly before returning and putting his phone toward the speaker. “I just want to thank everybody and congratulate you,” Trump said. “Boy, it looked beautiful on television.”
“I just called Jared to find out: ‘Is there anything negative that I should know about? Like, it will never be able to return? Little things like that,'” Trump continued. “He said ‘No, it’s looking great. It couldn’t be better and it was another great successful launch.’ Jared’s doing a fantastic job. You are doing a fantastic job, and I’m supplying you all that money.”
During his first term, however, Trump tried to cancel the Roman Space Telescope.
From team Earth to team space
It will be a treat to see the first results that come in from Roman, whether it be a “fuzzy little smudge” of an exoplanet, as Bailey once told me we can expect from the coronagraph, or a sweeping panorama of millions of galaxies that can help us decode the truth about dark matter and dark energy. On that note, the dark universe is a huge point of interest for the Roman team, because the way we’re able to study this elusive yet ubiquitous aspect of our cosmos is by watching how dark matter and dark energy affect galaxies across vast spaces. It’s therefore important to monitor as many galaxies as we can simultaneously.
But as the Roman team has consistently repeated one particular role Roman will have in space: to be a team member to other space telescopes just the way it’s always felt like a part of Fox’s team.
While Roman has a very wide field of view — far wider than that of the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope — it doesn’t have the same resolution as Hubble or the ability to heavily zoom in on objects in infrared like the JWST can. The goal is to have a fleet of telescopes that can work together to show us the universe in as much detail as possible. Roman will work with Hubble, Webb, and even Europe’s Euclid space telescope, the ground-based Rubin Observatory and more. In fact, Euclid’s field of view is even bigger than Roman’s — but it isn’t doing the same surveys that Roman will.
Rubin will create a new 3,200-megapixel image of the southern night sky every 40 seconds for 10 years during its observing time — but it’s on the ground in Chile, so its view is somewhat compromised by Earth’s atmosphere.
“Roman, Rubin and Euclid, they’re siblings. They were all proposed and prioritized at the same time, so the design of each of those observatories has been in the knowledge of knowing what the other ones were doing,” McEnery said. “There is a reason that most of Roman’s observations are in the Southern Hemisphere, and that’s to maximize the overlap with Rubin. We’re not competitors. We’re stronger together, and we both need each other.”
“It’s kind of like layering paint on a canvas,” Fox said. “You layer the data, and it just really unlocks the secrets of the universe.”
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