21.03.2026
NASA’s Roman Observatory Passes Final Major Prelaunch Tests
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team recently blasted the observatory with extreme sound, shook it, and listened to its electronic hum. Roman passed all three assessments, which aimed to confirm that the observatory will withstand launch conditions and function as expected in space. The achievement keeps the mission on track for launch as early as this fall.
“All of the testing went smoothly and progress is well ahead of schedule,” said Jack Marshall, the Roman observatory integration and testing lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The team has done a great job putting the observatory together, and the tests show that everything is lining up with expectations.”
In January, the team set up an absorbent panel around the observatory for an electromagnetic interference test. This special configuration is designed to block external radio signals and absorb reflections inside the test facility.
Engineers powered on all of Roman’s electronics and measured the signals they generated, closely monitoring for any errors. Too much electrical noise could interfere with the observatory’s ability to detect faint infrared signals, but Roman passed with flying colors.
The team moved on to vibration testing in February. “Each time the observatory traveled between test facilities, it was placed in a custom-made portable clean room to protect it from contamination that could otherwise compromise scientific performance once in space,” said Joel Proebstle, a mechanical systems engineer who led the vibration and acoustic tests at NASA Goddard.
Engineers tested the observatory on a large shaker table to simulate the vibrations it will experience during launch, gradually building to higher frequencies. “Try to imagine sitting on that rocket and feeling all those vibrations,” said Cory Powell, the Roman structural analyst lead at NASA Goddard. “We simulated the shaking that the launch vehicle will produce to ensure the components and connections will all remain intact.”
In early March, the team conducted an acoustic test. The test took place in a state-of-the-art sound booth, where engineers ramped up the volume to 138 decibels — about as loud as a jet engine from 100 feet away.
“If you’ve ever been at a concert with an extremely loud bass, that load you felt was acoustic energy,” Powell said. “Now think about how loud a launch is. The acoustics can produce very high loads on a large structure like Roman.”
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Roman has now returned to the large clean room at Goddard where it will undergo a final series of smaller tests. The next one aims to replicate the shock Roman will experience shortly after launch when the observatory separates from the rocket. Then the team will deploy all of the elements that will initially be stowed (including the solar panels, “visor,” antenna, and “sunblock” shield), to verify that they’ll still work correctly even after launch and rocket separation.
Early this summer, the observatory will be transported to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations. There, engineers will verify that the observatory arrived fully intact and begin prepping the rocket — a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The team expects Roman to be ready for launch within a few months after the observatory’s arrival at NASA Kennedy.
“We have a great team, great leadership, and with our successful testing we continue to set the standard for staying within budget and schedule while balancing difficult challenges,” Powell said. “Meeting cost and schedule commitments without compromise to technical standards is a major point of pride for the Roman team.”
Roman Telecope 3D
Quelle: NASA
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Update: 28.03.2026
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NASA to Unveil Complete Roman Telescope, Host Media Briefing
Media are invited Tuesday, April 21, to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for a look at the agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which recently completed construction and is wrapping up prelaunch testing. This will be one of the last opportunities to view the fully integrated flagship telescope before it ships to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of a launch planned as early as this fall.
With NASA Goddard’s largest clean room as a backdrop, the event will include a news conference at 4 p.m. EDT, which will stream on NASA’s YouTube channel. Learn how to stream NASA content through a variety of online platforms, including social media.
NASA participants in the briefing include:
- NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
- Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington
- Jamie Dunn, Roman telescope project manager, NASA Goddard
- Julie McEnery, Roman telescope senior project scientist, NASA Goddard
Media interested in participating by phone must RSVP no later than two hours prior to the start of the briefing to Alise Fisher, alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov. A copy of NASA’s media accreditation policy is online.
Credentialed media in attendance also will have the opportunity to visit other center facilities and conduct interviews with subject matter experts on topics such as NASA’s Lunar Environment Monitoring Station candidate payload for the Artemis program, the DAVINCI mission to Venus, the Habitable Worlds Observatory mission concept, and the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.
To be considered for on-site credentials, foreign national media must register by Wednesday, April 1; U.S. media must register by Friday, April 10. Any media RSVPs must be sent to Rob Garner, rob.garner@nasa.gov.
Named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a deep, panoramic view of the cosmos, generating never-before-seen pictures that will revolutionize our understanding of the universe. The observatory will usher in a new era of cosmic surveys, unveiling troves of celestial objects and shedding light on some of the universe’s most profound mysteries, including phenomena we can’t see. Roman will also showcase cutting-edge technology, including a test of the most advanced technology ever flown in space to directly image planets around nearby stars, a key step in NASA’s search for life on other worlds.
The Roman telescope is managed at NASA Goddard with participation by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California. Contributions to Roman also are made by ESA (European Space Agency), JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
Quelle: NASA
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Update: 23.04.2026
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ROMAN SPACE TELESCOPE LAUNCHING IN SEPTEMBER
Nancy Grace Roman, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 93, stands next to a scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope outside the Hubble control center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland in an undated photograph. NASA
NASA said today that the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch in September, eight months ahead of schedule and under cost. Originally called the Wide-Field Infrared Space Telescope or WFIRST, it will survey the universe broadly rather than in the greater detail of the James Webb Space Telescope launched in 2021. The two complement each other, with Roman identifying targets that JWST can examine in greater detail, for example, but that is only part of what Roman will do.
The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy in the 1960s and 1970s and recognized as the “Mother of Hubble” — the beloved Hubble Space Telescope that just celebrated its 36th birthday.
Hubble primarily images the universe in the visible (optical) part of the spectrum plus some in the adjoining ultraviolet and infrared bands.
Roman and JWST are infrared telescopes. JWST has a narrow, detailed, field of view while Roman can look more broadly. NASA says together they can “reveal extraordinary new information about our universe such as primordial galaxies, black holes, and planets beyond our solar system.”
Roman has its own work to do, too. At a briefing today, Julie McEnery, Roman’s Senior Project Scientist, said “current observations hint that the standard model of the universe is incorrect” and “Roman will be able to confirm these and set us on a path to understanding what’s right.” For example, scientists now see evidence that the Hubble constant that measures the rate of the expansion of the universe “as inferred from very early times is not consistent with the Hubble constant that we measure closer to now.” In addition, “recently we’ve seen evidence that the cosmological constant might, in fact, not be constant.”
The Hubble constant (and the Hubble Space Telescope) refer to astronomer Edwin Hubble who discovered that the universe is expanding outwards. The cosmological constant explains dark energy — the unknown reason the universe’s expansion seems to be speeding up.
Roman has a Wide-Field Instrument plus a coronograph as a technology demonstration. Over its five-year primary mission, it is expected to discover tens of thousands of planets, billions of galaxies, and tens of billions of stars.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said today Roman will launch in September. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket will send it to the Sun-Earth L-2 Lagrange point about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth away from the Sun, the same region where JWST is located.
Isaacman and Science Mission Directorate head Nicky Fox praised Roman for being ahead of schedule and below cost. Asked how that came to be, Project Manager Jamie Dunn credited his team for designing it from the beginning with the understanding that success would be judged not only on scientific results, but staying within a cost cap. In return, they had funding stability from NASA Headquarters and Congress. “Year after year we did what we said we were going to do, and the resources, the support from them, was always there.”
Roman is the most recent in NASA’s series of flagship space telescopes referred to as “Great Observatories” that have been launched since 1990 including not only Hubble and JWST, but Compton (gamma ray), Spitzer (infrared) and Chandra (x-ray). Compton was deorbited in 2000. Spitzer was decommissioned in 2020.
Next up is the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), in the planning stages now. An infrared/optical/ultraviolet telescope like Hubble, it will search for signs of life on planets elsewhere in the universe. The cost and timeline haven’t been determined yet. Fox said 2028 is a milestone when NASA will “step back and look and say is this mission possible.” If so, they will “sprint” to do it.
Quelle: SpacePolicyOnline.com
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Update: 24.04.2026
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NASA Targets Early September for Roman Space Telescope Launch
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team now is targeting as soon as early September 2026 for launch, ahead of the agency’s commitment to flight no later than May 2027.
“Roman’s accelerated development is a true success story of what we can achieve when public investment, institutional expertise, and private enterprise come together to take on the near-impossible missions that change the world,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who announced the update at a news conference on April 21 at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Roman will pair a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to survey deep, vast swaths of sky. While the mission was designed with dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets in mind, Roman’s unprecedented observational capability will offer practically limitless opportunities for astronomers to explore all kinds of cosmic topics.
By the end of its five-year primary mission, Roman is expected to amass a 20,000-terabyte data archive. Scientists can draw on it to identify and study 100,000 exoplanets, hundreds of millions of galaxies, billions of stars, and rare objects and phenomena — including some that astronomers have never witnessed before.
Roman will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA and SpaceX will share more information about a specific launch date, and the agency will continue to share updates concerning prelaunch preparations as new information becomes available.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, and scientists from various research institutions.
Quelle: NASA
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Update: 3.05.2026
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Key Support Equipment Arrives at Kennedy for Roman Space Telescope
Technicians at NASA’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHSF) at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida offloaded eight high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) wall modules and other ground support equipment on April 27. The equipment will support launch processing of the agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Each 1,800-pound module enhances the PHSF’s clean room systems, helping meet the telescope’s stringent cleanliness requirements during its time in the facility, where the observatory will undergo key tasks such as spacecraft fueling prior to liftoff.
Roman will observe the universe in infrared light using its Wide Field Instrument and a Coronagraph Instrument technology demonstration. Its wide field of view will produce panoramic images that help astronomers investigate some of the greatest mysteries in the cosmos, including why the universe’s expansion appears to be accelerating.
By using multiple complementary techniques, Roman will chart how the universe has evolved over cosmic time and provide new insights into the nature of dark energy. Roman also will advance the study of exoplanets and map the structure and distribution of normal matter and dark matter across space and time.
Teams are targeting launch as soon as early September aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA Kennedy.
Quelle: NASA