Roman Space Telescope sets course for L2 to unlock exoplanets and dark-energy mysteries

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on Aug. 30 aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and will travel to the sun–Earth L2 point, where its instruments will be commissioned before science begins in early 2027. After a roughly 30‑day transit, Roman will settle into a large looping orbit at L2, enabling the Wide Field Instrument to map the cosmos and the Coronagraph Instrument to directly image exoplanets. The five-year primary mission aims to discover thousands of exoplanets and probe dark energy and dark matter, with the potential for extensions and collaboration alongside JWST’s work, rather than overlap.