Eyes on the Infinite: The Next Generation of Space Telescopes Set to Rewrite the Cosmos
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is planned to launch in late 2026 (latest commitment by May 2027) aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy to a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L2, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Roman uses a 2.4-meter primary mirror repurposed from Hubble and a 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument that covers about 0.28 square degrees, enabling sky surveys roughly 1,000 times faster than Hubble. Its Coronagraph Instrument aims to directly image exoplanets and disks by suppressing starlight with deformable mirrors, potentially detecting planets a billion times fainter than their stars. Roman’s microlensing survey is expected to find over