NASA's NGRoman Space Telescope Is Ready to Begin Investigating Dark Energy

[Buster's Uncle]

Extreme Tech
NASA's Newest Space Telescope Is Ready to Begin Investigating Dark Energy
Graham Templeton
Mon, December 8, 2025 at 9:30 AM EST
3 min read



Final assembly of independently constructed portions of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. (Credit: NASA)


No, not that Nancy Grace. NASA's newest space telescope, named after the agency's first Chief of Astronomy, is physically complete and ready to begin ramping up to launch. It's slated to enter orbit no later than May 2027, carrying with it several high-precision devices and a mission to investigate the fundamental physics of the universe.

Infrared astronomy mainly involves looking at the coldest, most distant, or hidden parts of the universe, obscured by storms of confounding information. The new Roman telescope, as it's also known, is equipped with two main instruments: the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph Instrument.

The Wide Field Instrument is a 300-megapixel infrared camera that delivers roughly 10 times the raw resolution of an 8K image. Its images should be able to discern details to the very edge of the observable universe.



nancy grace roman space telescope nasa infographic
Credit: NASA

A coronagraph is an instrument that helps remove light noise from images, in particular by dimming the highlights of stars to reveal hidden details in the shadows. This approach is aggressive enough at removing glare that it allows astronomers to observe some of the brightest stars around.

All that means that the Roman telescope will be mighty at imaging distant exoplanets, pulling their faint signatures out of the extremely bright background of starlight. It even unlocks a newly detailed level of "microlensing," in which foreground objects bend the light from behind them; in this case, Roman's microlensing could allow it to image worlds farther out than usual from their host stars, including those in the so-called "habitable zone." As such, the telescope is often touted as a step forward in the search for extraterrestrial life.

NASA is fond of pointing out that it could discern distant worlds equivalent to every one of our own solar system's planets, except Mercury.

Beyond that, it will also help image the large-scale structure of the universe, in the form of billions of galaxies, and, through that, help reveal the distribution of dark matter. By taking multiple snapshots over time and arranging them in a sort of animated astro-gif, they hope to discern the impact of dark energy on universal dynamics.

"In the mission's first five years, it's expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies," said Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist at NASA Goddard. "We stand to learn a tremendous amount of new information about the universe very rapidly after Roman launches."

The telescope will sit at the L2 Lagrange point, on the far side of the Earth from the Sun, along with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the ESA's Euclid observatory, and more. From here, it will have an unobstructed view of the cosmos, while expending minimal fuel to remain in orbit.

The team has announced that it could launch as early as late 2026. Whenever it ends up launching, expect to hear a lot about its findings soon after.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tech/science/articles/nasas-newest-space-telescope-ready-143059288.html