NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Nears Launch, Set to Search 100,000 Worlds

NASA says the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is fully built and ready for launch, likely on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center later this decade. With a 288‑megapixel Wide Field Instrument and a Coronagraph Instrument, Roman will map the Milky Way’s center, hunt for distant galaxies, and directly image exoplanets. Built since 2016 on a roughly $4.3 billion budget, it will operate at Sun‑Earth L2 about a million miles from Earth and is expected to return more than 20,000 terabytes of data over its first five years, potentially discovering more than 100,000 exoplanets alongside existing telescopes like Hubble and JWST.