NASA's Roman Space Telescope is fully assembled and ready to launch

On November 25, technicians at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland joined the final pieces of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope together. After years of construction, the observatory is now complete—and it's about to change what we know about the universe.

Roman will launch from Florida in 2026 or 2027 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, traveling a million miles into space. Once there, it will do something Hubble never could: gather data 200 times faster, collecting roughly 20 petabytes of information over five years. To put that in perspective, that's equivalent to downloading the entire Netflix library 200 times over.

What Roman will actually find

The telescope carries two main instruments. The Wide Field Instrument is a 288-megapixel camera that will capture sweeping views across billions of galaxies, tracing how the universe evolved and hunting for evidence of dark matter and dark energy. The Coronagraph Instrument will do something even more ambitious: directly image planets orbiting distant stars by blocking out the blinding glare of their host suns—a bit like trying to photograph a firefly next to a searchlight, then finally getting the technique right.

In its first five years alone, Roman is expected to catalog more than 100,000 distant worlds and hundreds of millions of stars. But the real story isn't the numbers. It's what those numbers represent: answers to questions we've been asking for centuries. Are we alone? How common are habitable planets? What happened in the first moments after the Big Bang?

The mission will spend 75% of its time on three core surveys. One will map over a billion galaxies to understand cosmic evolution. Another will repeatedly observe the same patches of sky, creating time-lapse movies that reveal how the universe changes. The third will peer into the heart of the Milky Way, searching for planets in habitable zones and rogue worlds drifting through space without a star.

The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer, who spent her career fighting to make space science accessible to everyone, not just specialists. That legacy matters: the sheer volume of data Roman will return—available to researchers worldwide—means discoveries won't be limited to a handful of elite institutions. A graduate student in São Paulo or Seoul will have access to the same cosmic vistas as astronomers at Princeton.

With construction complete, the real work begins. Roman heads to Kennedy Space Center next, where it will undergo final preparations before launch. In a few years, we'll point it at the cosmos and start asking the universe its biggest questions.