NASA's Trailblazer Gets a Name in the Sky with a New Exoplanet Hunter

NASA is launching the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Aug 30, 2026, from Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The 300-megapixel infrared observatory has a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble and will survey about 2 billion galaxies to probe dark energy and dark matter while hunting around 100,000 exoplanets (including rogue planets) using a coronagraph to block starlight. It will operate at the Sun–Earth L2 point, stream more than a terabyte of data daily, and cost about $4.3 billion for a five-year mission, continuing NASA’s legacy of space-based astronomy named after its pioneering leader Nancy Grace Roman.