NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, fully assembled and undergoing final testing, is scheduled for a fall 2026 launch. The telescope will use advanced gravitational lensing techniques and cosmic surveys to study dark matter and dark energy.
The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey is one of three primary observation programs. This survey will cover over 5,000 square degrees, approximately 12% of the sky, and will identify hundreds of millions of galaxies across cosmic time.
Ryan Hickox, a Dartmouth College professor and co-chair of the survey design committee, stated the goal was to build the ultimate wide-area infrared survey to explore the universe’s fundamental nature, including its dark components.
The telescope’s 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument will precisely detect gravitational lensing, which is the warping of light from distant galaxies by intermediate mass. Roman is expected to observe more than one billion galaxies, with roughly 600 million detailed enough for weak lensing studies. The mission is projected to discover over 160,000 gravitational lenses, a significant increase from the hundreds studied by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
Bryce Wedig, a Washington University in St. Louis graduate student, noted that Roman’s wide net will facilitate the discovery of gravitational lenses and dark matter clumps.
Scientists have released over one million simulated images through the OpenUniverse project. This project used the Theta supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory to model the cosmos as Roman will observe it. The 400-terabyte dataset covers 70 square degrees and more than 12 billion years of cosmic history, enabling researchers to calibrate analysis methods prior to observations.
Alina Kiessling, OpenUniverse principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, anticipates that Roman’s observations will lead to significant scientific discoveries.
Construction of the telescope finished on November 25, 2025, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The observatory will undergo final testing before its transport to Kennedy Space Center in Florida this summer. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch the telescope. Roman is expected to improve the precision of dark energy measurements by 10 times, potentially revealing if this force has evolved over time.
