The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30, 2026, at 07:26AM EDT on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman isn’t orbiting Earth. Instead, it’s heading for the second Sun-Earth Lagrange Point, or L2 for short, a gravitationally stable region of space about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope is also stationed at L2. Roman’s in-flight mission objectives are being checked off. So far, the telescope’s antenna and visor-like sunshade have been successfully deployed, and the Coronagraph Instrument has been successfully activated and has begun its monthslong series of calibrations and tests. The telescope is named after the late Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and one of the architects of the agency’s modern science program. It is the first space telescope named for a woman. Dr. Roman championed space-based observatories that could study the universe from above Earth’s hazy atmosphere while making their data broadly available to the scientific community. NASA has planned a five-year mission for Roman with the option of adding another five-year mission after that. The telescope has a multipurpose mission. The Roman Space telescope has been uniquely designed to study and solve two of the biggest questions, biggest mysteries, in physics and astronomy, what is dark matter, the stuff holding galaxies together, and what is dark energy, the invisible force making the universe expand faster and faster over time. 95 percent of the universe is made of stuff we don’t understand at all and can’t see directly. Understanding this 95% will allow us to understand how the universe evolved into what we see today and what its ultimate fate could be. The telescope will also be hunting for exoplanets and rogue planets and testing a new coronograph, which if successful, will image Jupiter-sized planets close to their host stars for the first time ever. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be pumping out data. NASA Senior Project Scientist, Dr. Julie McEnery, has said “To put this in context, one month of Roman observations would correspond to a century with Hubble.” Roman’s primary mirror began its journey sitting in storage as a piece of spare hardware for a scrapped US spy satellite. The 2.4m (96 inch) wide mirror was gifted free to NASA for use in the Roman telescope. This mirror is the same size and has the same resolution as the mirror in the Hubble Space Telescope. The real difference between Hubble and Roman is Roman’s camera, the Wide Field Instrument (WFI). This camera is amazing. It’s a 300mp camera built for visible and near infrared light. It has 18 individual image sensors. Each sensor is about the size of a saltine cracker that combines into one image. There is a gap between the sensors; to compensate for this gap NASA is using an imaging technique called dithering to rotate the telescope slightly so that the image overlaps and fills in the gaps. This camera can capture an area 100 times larger than Hubble’s field of view in a single image. Roman is going to take huge, gigantic images. Images stitched together for just one of Roman’s surveys displayed at full resolution on a 4K TV would require 500,000 TVs to display the full survey. That many TVs would cover the entire face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. It will take about 3 months of traveling, testing, and calibrating its instruments before observations can begin. NASA expects to release the first images from the Roman Space Telescope possibly as early as late December 2026 or January 2027. All the data Roman collects will be publicly available. Images will be available to anyone with an internet connection. The Roman Space telescope is going to survey billions of stars and galaxies and show us things we’ve never seen before. It might even surprise us and answer questions we haven’t even thought to ask. Actually, Roman’s mission isn’t far from what its primary mirror was built for. It will be spying for secrets – secrets of the universe. Dr. Roman would be proud. Written by Robin Gill, TWC Astronomy Education Specialist
Happy #WildlifeWednesday from the star-nosed mole! This bizarre hamster-sized mole with a striking snout is semi-aquatic and lives in wet lowland areas throughout Ohio. Using its large front paws and thick claws, the star-nosed mole excavates extensive underground burrows and tunnels. They also use these paws to swim, turning the palms outwards and moving their appendages in a maneuver resembling the breaststroke. The mole hunts both day and night, consuming earthworms, terrestrial and aquatic insects, mollusks, crustaceans, amphibians, and small fish. Essentially blind due to its tiny eyes and subterranean lifestyle, it uses the remarkable snout for which it is named to process sensory information while hunting. Let’s talk about that nose! The “star” is formed by 22 finger-like tentacles called rays. With tens of thousands of nerve endings and sensory receptors called Eimer’s organs, the snout of the star-nosed mole is the most sensitive touch organ known in the animal kingdom. The rays are constantly in motion and can touch multiple objects in under one second as it searches for food in its dark tunnels. The nose can determine in under 8 milliseconds whether something is edible, the fastest response to a stimulus known in animals, and the star-nosed mole is recognized in the Guiness Book of World Records for being the fastest forager on the planet. That’s not all! The amazing proboscis of the star-nosed mole allows it to smell underwater, which was previously thought to be impossible for mammals. Using the star-like structure of its nose, the mole blows 8-12 small air bubbles per second over objects in the water. The bubbles are quickly drawn back into the nostrils and sniffed to determine if the items are food. The stupendous star-nosed mole will be one of the characters at our upcoming Enchanted Forest event. Come learn even more about this unusual creature and its incredible nose. Smell you later!
