A $4.3 billion space telescope that Donald Trump tried to destroy will lift off from Florida early Sunday, as NASA embarks on the next stage of its quest to unlock the secrets of the universe. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope survived two rounds of proposed budget cuts by the White House and will embark on a million-mile journey into deep space from a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center at 7:26 a.m. ET, barring late technical problems or intervention of Florida’s notoriously capricious summer. time. Primarily searching for exoplanets and clues to planetary formation, it will join the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes in the annals of NASA’s space exploration history. But as a next-generation piece of equipment that has been nearly 10 years in development, the Roman telescope, named after the space agency’s first chief of astronomy, who died in 2018, is many times more powerful than Hubble and will work to improve the output of its companions, all of which continue to operate. Astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer. Photograph: NASA/APAccording to NASA, its 300-megapixel infrared camera will give Roman the same sharpness and resolution as Hubble, but with a field of view at least 100 times larger. The agency says each image will capture a patch of sky about 1.5 times larger than the apparent size of a full moon. Roman also contains a specialized instrument known as a coronagraph that blocks the glare of stars and makes it easier to photograph the planets around them in detail. NASA said it expected the images to reveal “giant worlds that are older, colder and in closer orbits than direct images of young, hot super-Jupiters have revealed so far.” Roman’s destination is Lagrange point 2, a “parking site” in space about a million miles from Earth, where it will operate in the same complex Sun-Earth orbit as Webb, although the two telescopes will remain far apart. It is not entirely a successor to Hubble and Webb, which were launched in 1990 and 2021, respectively, but was designed to support and advance their missions, while making its own discoveries. Technicians connect the inner and outer segments of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Nov. 25, 2025, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Photograph: Jolearra Tshiteya/NASA/APNasa said Roman’s large panoramas would “uncover interesting targets that Hubble could follow up using infrared, visible and ultraviolet light to offer a more complete view”, while Webb “can then use its larger mirror and more powerful vision to offer even more detailed and ultra-sharp observations”. Meanwhile, Roman can see regions around the objects that Hubble or Webb observe “to provide context.” Its images, which NASA expects to arrive for the first time in early 2027 after months of calibration and testing in the telescope’s final orbit, will be made public immediately, allowing the agency, professional researchers and amateur astronomers an unprecedented opportunity for analysis. “From objects in our outer solar system and exploding stars, to billions of black holes and growing galaxies, very little will be out of reach for Roman,” NASA said in an online explanation of the telescope’s initial five-year mission, which could be extended to 10. “Roman will combine a large field of view with sharp infrared vision to scan vast, deep swaths of sky. This flagship mission is designed to help astronomers explore dark matter, energy dark planet and the planets outside our solar system. Julie McEnery, NASA’s lead project scientist for the Roman mission, said the need was conceived at the end of the last century, although it was only in 2016 that NASA began the development stage, and in 2020 before it finally approved everything. project and construction began. “One of Roman’s motivations was the discovery that our universe is not only expanding, but the expansion is accelerating,” he said in an interview Thursday with Sophia Roberts, an astrophysics video producer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “It’s like you throw a ball in the air, and instead of the ball falling back down, it just keeps shooting up. There’s something really fundamental that we don’t understand about the nature of our universe itself, and Roman is specifically designed to address and provide the data we need to address these questions.” If the president of the United States had his way, Roman would never have made it to the launch pad. A White House proposal for 2025, which analysts said would be “extinction-level cuts” to NASA’s science budget, including eliminating the Roman project, was roundly rejected in January by Congress, which restored the agency’s 2026 funding level to $24.4 billion. $18.8 billion, and a 46% cut for scientific projects that, according to the Planetary Society, would lead to the termination of more than 50 missions. Roman’s scheduled launch on Sunday marks the final flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, which Elon Musk’s company is phasing out along with its smaller Falcon 9 rockets to focus on Starship, its versatile new workhorse that is planned to eventually take humans to Mars.
