NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble, is now being transported by barge off Florida’s Space Coast on the Pegasus, the NASA vessel previously used to move space shuttle fuel tanks and SLS rocket components. The observatory was completed in April 2026 after years of work and, unusually for a project of this scale, finished about eight months ahead of schedule and under budget.
Named for Nancy Grace Roman, widely regarded as the “mother of Hubble,” the telescope has a 2.4-meter primary mirror, complex electronics and distinctive orange solar panels. Although it resembles Hubble in mirror size, the similarities end there. Roman carries a roughly 300-megapixel camera and is expected to produce enormous images that no current screen can display in full at once.
Scientists say Roman should find thousands of new supernovae, map billions of galaxies, and survey the sky with a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s. It can capture in one image an area about 200 times larger than Hubble can map, and do so 1,000 times faster. Work that would take Hubble about 2,000 years, Roman is expected to complete in one year. It will also generate about 500 terabytes of data annually, compared with about 400 terabytes Hubble collected over more than three decades.
The telescope is scheduled to launch in August 2026 and then travel about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth to the L2 Lagrange point. There it will try to answer one of modern science’s biggest questions, what dark matter and dark energy are, the mysterious components that make up about 95 percent of the universe. Roman also includes an advanced coronagraph that can block starlight and help observe planets as faint as one hundred millionth the brightness of their stars.
