NASA Launches Roman Space Telescope to Map Universe

NASA successfully launched its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday, August 30, 2026, beginning a years-long mission to map the cosmos and investigate fundamental questions about the universe. The observatory lifted off at 7:26 a.m. ET from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, marking the start of a three-month journey to its operational orbit. The telescope, named after NASA's first chief astronomer, is now traveling to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, a gravitationally stable location about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.