'The possibilities are truly breathtaking': NASA's Roman Space Telescope will take better images and last longer than experts predicted

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will take better images and last longer than experts predicted, Live Science reported on November 11, 2026, describing the possibilities as "truly breathtaking." The telescope is a NASA-led mission to which ESA contributes as a Mission of Opportunity. It was previously named WFIRST and was renamed in 2020 to honor Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief of astronomy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, known as the "Mother of the Hubble Space Telescope." ESA's factsheet states the mission theme is to conduct a survey of the sky in near-infrared light to understand dark matter and dark energy and find new exoplanets. Roman has a primary mirror of 2.4 meters and two instruments: the Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel multi-band visible and near-infrared camera, and a Coronagraph Instrument technology demonstration. The mission has a nominal lifetime of five years with a potential five-year extension. UA.NEWS reported the Roman telescope could gain 12 extra years of operation. Roman will operate on an orbit around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system and launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The telescope's wide field of view will let it capture more gravitational lenses than Hubble, which views the cosmos primarily in visible and ultraviolet light with some infrared coverage. Hubble recently offered a cosmic sampler of gravitational lens targets for Roman, showcasing arc-counterarc configurations, Einstein rings, and quadruply lensed galaxies. Researchers plan to use Hubble lens images to build an AI tool to efficiently search for similar arcs in Roman's larger sample. Roman will also study dark matter through weak gravitational lensing by mapping tiny changes in the shapes of millions of galaxies, and will study dark energy by mapping galaxy clustering and observing thousands of distant type Ia supernovas. ESA will provide detectors for the Coronagraph Instrument, star trackers, batteries, and downlinking time via a new 35-meter antenna in New Norcia, Australia. Roman complements ESA's Euclid mission, with Euclid mapping vast regions and Roman revealing fainter objects and finer detail over a smaller survey area. The mission was put forward in 2010 as the top priority for the next decade in astronomy by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey Committee.