Through the glass on the second floor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was bigger than I expected. It filled the largest of 10 clean rooms at the complex, a sealed space where filtered air keeps out the dust that could ruin a telescope’s mirrors once in space.
Finished, Roman ran more than 42 feet long, about the length of a Tyrannosaurus rex. It weighed roughly 10 tons and was as tall as an eight-story building.
That was January 2025 when I was a junior at The University of Texas at Austin pursuing a bachelor of science and arts degree with a minor in science communication. I applied and was accepted to present my research on simulated galaxies at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society. A limited number of attendees could sign up to see Roman, and I jumped at the chance.
The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which was in development for a decade, launched Aug. 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Roman, named after an American scientist who was the first chief astronomer for NASA, was built to study dark matter, the expansion of the universe and planets beyond our solar system. It also was the newest link in a chain that runs back nearly 60 years.
One of Roman’s main tools is gravitational lensing. Galaxies and galaxy clusters are massive enough to warp space itself, so light passing nearby bends around them, and distant galaxies behind them look slightly stretched. Measure enough of those distortions and you can map dark matter, which nobody can see directly. Roman photographs about 100 times more sky in a single image than Hubble does, so it can draw that map across far more of the universe.
The first successful space telescope, NASA’s Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2, launched Dec. 7, 1968, from what is now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Nicknamed Stargazer, the telescope made the first observations of stars in ultraviolet light from orbit and taught astronomers how to work above the atmosphere.
Almost everything has grown since. Stargazer’s largest mirror was 16 inches across. Roman’s primary mirror is 7.9 feet, nearly six times wider. Width matters twice over: a wider mirror resolves finer detail, and it gathers more light, which makes faint things findable. The James Webb Space Telescope’s mirror is 21 feet across, and Webb has spotted some of the faintest galaxies ever seen.
Size is not the only thing that matters. Light arrives in wavelengths, most of them invisible to us, and each one shows something different. Infrared passes through cosmic dust that stops visible light, so Roman, which sees in infrared, can find stars and galaxies hidden inside dusty clouds.
Some light never reaches the ground at all. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs X-rays and gamma rays, so telescopes that study them have to fly above it. In 2010, scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope found the Fermi bubbles, two enormous lobes glowing in gamma rays above and below the center of the Milky Way. Each one stands about 25,000 light-years tall, a quarter of the Milky Way’s diameter.
Telescopes are built for different jobs, and astronomers routinely combine them.
Now working on a master’s in science and technology journalism at Texas A&M, my ongoing curiosity about Roman led me to ask a few questions now that it is one month into the trip and roughly one-third of its way to its destination.
Casey Papovich, a professor in Texas A&M’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, led a 2023 study that pulled data from Hubble, the retired Spitzer Space Telescope and Webb to count the stars in distant galaxies. Webb’s numbers came in lower than earlier estimates suggested.
“When we looked, the galaxies were much fainter in these mid-infrared images we got from James Webb,” Papovich said. “We realized it’s because they’re filled with very newly formed stars.”
Roman will work in that same relay. Its wide view makes it a survey telescope, built to sweep rather than stare. When it turns up something strange, astronomers can aim Webb at it for a closer look.
“It’s going to be Hubble, just on steroids,” Papovich said. “And it’s going to change how we do science.”
Roman, which cost $4.3 billion, is also a test bed for what comes next. Its Coronagraph Instrument blocks a star’s glare so planets beside it become visible, technology NASA says could serve the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory, a future telescope meant to photograph Earth-like planets and look for signs of life. That mission is still in planning and has no launch date.
Not all of this happens in space. Hundreds of research telescopes work from the ground, and Texas A&M is a founding partner in one of the most ambitious, according to the university’s Munnerlyn Astronomical Instrumentation Laboratory. The Giant Magellan Telescope, under construction at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, will combine seven mirrors, each 27.6 feet across, among the largest single-piece telescope mirrors ever made.George P. Mitchell ‘40, namesake of Texas A&M’s Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy and the George P. Mitchell Physics Building, funded two of the seven mirrors, said Jennifer Marshall, a professor in the physics and astronomy department. Marshall helped design a spectrograph for the telescope, and her earlier work turned up an unexpected number of small galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.
“With this instrument, we would be able to find many more,” Marshall said. “We could collect more light from the objects, and so we could see fainter things.”
Using technology that corrects for the blur of Earth’s atmosphere, the Giant Magellan is designed to produce images 10 times sharper than Hubble’s, according to Texas A&M. It should begin observing in the 2030s.
As of Oct. 5, Roman is about 900,000 miles from Earth, according to NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System tool. I’m proud to say a small part of me is onboard: my name. Before the launch, NASA invited the public to send in names to ride along. Mine went onto a memory card with 1.35 million others, and the card was installed in the telescope in July.
The first pictures are expected in early 2027.
Published: Oct. 7, 2026
Written by: Avery Abramson ‘28, Science and Technology Journalism master’s student and KAMU Content Contributor
Images:
1. Featured: Avery Abramson with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope while it was under construction at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in January 2025.
2. Illustration comparing Roman with a Tyrannosaurus rex, courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.
3. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launches the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Aug. 30, 2026. Photo courtesy of NASA/Joel Kowsky.
4. NASA’s Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2, launched in December 1968. Image courtesy of NASA.
5. Active space telescopes and the wavelengths of light they can see, from gamma to infrared. From left to right, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can see gamma rays; the Chandra X-ray Observatory can see X-rays; the Hubble Space Telescope can see ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light; the Euclid spacecraft and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope can see visible to near-infrared light; and the James Webb Space Telescope can see visible to mid-infrared light. Image has been cropped for clarity. Image courtesy of NASA, STScI.
6. An artist’s rendering of the Giant Magellan Telescope, under construction in Chile. Image courtesy of Giant Magellan Telescope – GMTO Corporation.
