NASA completes Roman space telescope, targets fall 2026 launch
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) engineers have finished assembling the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), after technicians connected its two major segments on Nov. 25 at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The observatory is now in final system-level testing and remains on track for launch as early as fall 2026 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, with a baseline schedule targeting May 2027.
Roman is designed to pair sharp infrared vision with a wide field of view. Its Wide Field Instrument is a 288-megapixel camera, and each image will capture a patch of sky larger than the apparent size of a full Moon. Over its five-year primary mission, NASA expects Roman to return about 20,000 terabytes of data and enable surveys that would take centuries with older observatories, supporting research on dark energy, dark matter, exoplanets, and black holes. The telescope also carries a Coronagraph Instrument technology demonstration aimed at directly imaging planets around other stars by blocking starlight glare.
The mission carries a lifecycle cost of about $4.3 billion, and it has faced repeated political pressure over funding, including earlier attempts to cancel or sharply reduce the program. The fiscal year 2026 budget request proposed a major cut for Roman, even as NASA maintained launch-readiness planning for late 2026 or 2027.
For researchers in the Gulf and across the wider Middle East and North Africa, Roman’s biggest near-term opportunity may be access: NASA says all Roman data will be made publicly available with no exclusive-use period, giving universities, labs, and data teams a new, high-volume stream for astronomy, simulation, and machine-learning-driven discovery.
