NASA and SpaceX Set 30 August Launch for Roman Space Telescope
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is to launch aboard a Falcon Heavy from Florida and be stationed at the L2 point, where it will survey wide areas of sky.
NASA and SpaceX are preparing to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday 30 August aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, an event MysteryPlanet describes as one of the most ambitious astronomical missions of the decade. MysteryPlanet reports that both agencies have everything ready and gives the lift-off time as 7:26 a.m. EDT, or 11:26 GMT. GreWi, a German-language outlet, reports the same launch at 13:26 Central European Summer Time on 30 August 2026. The year appears in GreWi's account, while the extract available from MysteryPlanet refers to this Sunday, 30 August, without giving a year.
Roman is to be stationed roughly 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, at the so-called Lagrange point L2. According to GreWi, this is the point at which the gravitational attraction of the Sun and Earth balance in such a way that a spacecraft can orbit the Sun relatively stably alongside Earth. GreWi also reports a primary mirror 2.4 metres in diameter and characterises the instrument as a Hubble mirror with a significantly larger field of view.
The scientific emphasis differs between the two accounts. MysteryPlanet headlines the mission as a hunt for thousands of exoplanets, a figure that appears in the headline rather than in the portion of the article available. GreWi reports that the telescope is intended to scan large areas of the sky and, among other tasks, to permit the direct imaging of notably cooler and smaller planets.
On public access, MysteryPlanet states that the launch will be broadcast live from one hour before lift-off through NASA's official channels; the extract available ends before naming the full set of platforms, so no complete list can be given. MysteryPlanet's headline also promises information on when the first photographs will arrive, but the text available contains no such date and none is reported here. Across the two accounts in hand, the launch date, vehicle and site are consistent, while the schedule for the mission's first images remains unspecified in the available material.