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What is the Status of the Roman Space Telescope?

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, formerly known as NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), pays tribute to NASA's inaugural Chief of Astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman. Credit: NASA

Aug 23, 2023 - The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), formerly known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), is a NASA infrared space telescope in development and scheduled to launch by May 2027. It is named after Nancy Grace Roman, who was a pioneer in space science.

The Roman Space Telescope is designed to study a wide range of astronomical objects and phenomena, including:

Dark energy and dark matter
Exoplanets
The evolution of galaxies
The formation of stars and planets
The structure of the Milky Way galaxy

The Roman Space Telescope has a 2.4-meter primary mirror, the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope's, but with a field of view that is 100 times larger. This will allow it to image large areas of the sky and survey millions of objects.

The Roman Space Telescope is currently in the final design and fabrication phase. It is scheduled to launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Florida.

Here are some of the key milestones that have been achieved in the development of the Roman Space Telescope:

In 2020, the mission passed a major programmatic and technical milestone, giving the mission the official green light to begin hardware development and testing.
In 2021, the Roman Space Telescope completed its critical design review. This means that all of the design and engineering work for the telescope is now complete.
In 2022, the Roman Space Telescope was awarded a contract for launch services from SpaceX. The telescope is scheduled to launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2026.

The Roman Space Telescope is a powerful new tool for exploring the universe. It is expected to make major discoveries in a wide range of areas of astronomy.

Here are some of the potential discoveries that the Roman Space Telescope could make:

It could help to solve the mystery of dark energy and dark matter.
It could find new exoplanets, including Earth-like planets that could be habitable.
It could study the formation of galaxies and stars.
It could learn more about the structure of the Milky Way galaxy.

The Roman Space Telescope is a truly groundbreaking mission that has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the universe. We are excited to see what it will discover.

The Roman Space Telescope is being built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The telescope's instruments include a wide-field imager, a coronagraph, and a near-infrared spectrograph.

The Roman Space Telescope will be placed in a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, which is about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

The telescope's mission is expected to last for five years.