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Roman Space Telescope launches to study space in wide-angle view [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2026-08-31  

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched yesterday on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida and will soon begin its mission as NASA's latest eye on the final frontier. If the James Webb Space Telescope is the telephoto, this one is our wide-angle shot.

"The scope is extraordinary," Roman senior scientist Julie McEnery said during live commentary. "We will do a survey of our own Milky Way galaxy and find 20 billion stars. That would make it the largest catalog of astronomical objects that's ever been produced." … Its main instrument, known as the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), will take extremely wide images of the universe, capturing ultra-high definition views across broad swaths of the sky. It's also equipped with the first active coronagraph to be used in space, which will revolutionize exoplanet studies.

Nancy Grace Roman (no) was NASA's first woman executive and the creator of its space-based astronomy program; her great success being the Hubble Space Telescope, still operational after nearly four decades in space. Her namesake observatory has a similar mirror 2.4m wide but a field of view 100-times wider.

The Webb Space Telescope, in orbit since 2021, and with a much larger 6.5m mirror, has already shown individual stars and exoplanets in fine detail.

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/08/31/roman-space-telescope-launches-to-study-space-in-wide-angle-view.html

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