In the not-too-distant future, NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket.

The next-generation telescope will be sent nearly a million miles from Earth, roughly four times farther than the moon’s orbit.

Once it’s in position, the truck-sized observatory will help scientists study dark matter, exoplanets and infrared astrophysics. It will have a field of view 100 times that of the Hubble, which was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990.

On the heels of the successful Artemis II mission that sent a four-person crew around the moon, and the worldwide enthusiasm it inspired, the planned September launch of the Roman Space Telescope is NASA’s next headline-grabbing mission.

Today, though, the telescope is in a warehouse-like building between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Though the telescope’s parts were designed and constructed all over, its final assembly was completed December in a “clean room” at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

“The images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them. Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe,“ NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said.

Isaacman said the telescope mission is ahead of schedule and below budget.

Roman’s Maryland ties

The Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt has employed thousands of people in Maryland since it was established in 1959. Statewide, NASA says it supports more than 33,000 jobs in Maryland between civil servants, contractors and other indirect businesses.

Jackie Townsend is a deputy project manager at Goddard, working on the Roman project. She grew up in Maryland and lives in Silver Spring.

At its peak, Townsend said, the Roman project probably had about 1,000 people working on it, split between government employees and contractors. As the project wound closer to completion, that number has come down.

“At first, it feels like a marching army,” she said.

The NASA Greenbelt campus also will be home to the mission operations center for Roman. Any time NASA needs to be in contact with the telescope, it will go through Greenbelt.

Townsend is optimistic that Roman’s launch later this year, and the images it returns to Earth, will capture some of the same new enthusiasm for space exploration that was generated by the Artemis II mission.

“There’s some momentum to build on there, that humans are doing these things,” she said. “And Roman will provide these enormous vistas, these beautiful images, and the great science backdrop to power what we’re doing with the human side of exploration.”

NASA, like many federal organizations, navigated stormy waters during the first months of the second Trump administration. Makenzie Lystrup, Goddard’s first female director, abruptly resigned. Earlier this year, NASA closed a large research library at Goddard, prompting concerns about the center’s future.

Since his swearing-in, Trump has proposed budget cuts to NASA’s science programs but supported funding for human space exploration. The Planetary Society called the budget proposal an “extinction-level event” for American space science.

Isaacman said earlier this month that he supported the president’s budget proposals. He’ll soon be testifying before Congress about the NASA budget, he said.

“Nancy Grace Roman is not the last flagship mission for us,” he said, meaning NASA still would have the budget to tackle ambitious projects.

Space science is a big industry in Maryland.

Goddard, in addition to research and the Roman project, handles operation of the Hubble Space Telescope and manages communications with the International Space Station.

In Baltimore, the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University runs operations for the James Webb Space Telescope — and will plan observations and science work for Roman. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Howard County is a technical resource for large parts of government, including NASA.

U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks in December called the work at Maryland’s space facilities, including Goddard, “central to America’s leadership in space” and “unmatched.”

Roman’s science

Roman follows the lineage of Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, both of which have captured imaginations with stunning space photography and helped scientists better understand the universe.

The observatory is named after NASA’s first female executive — Nancy Grace Roman — who’s been called the “Mother of Hubble.” She died in 2018.

Once the more than 40-foot telescope is in orbit between Earth and the sun, Roman will take large survey images of the universe. NASA describes the new telescope as Hubble’s “wide-eyed cousin,” and its improved technological capabilities mean a single Roman image will have as much detail as 100 Hubble images.

It is hard to overstate how revolutionary NASA officials say Roman will be once it begins sending data home. Julie McEnery, a Roman telescope senior project scientist at Goddard, said the telescope will “conduct ambitious surveys that will transform and impact every area of astronomy.”

“One month of Roman observations would correspond to a century with Hubble,” she said.

The space telescope will look at how the structures of galaxies have formed and changed, and how the universe has expanded over time.

“These are the keys to unlocking the fundamental nature of dark matter, dark energy, the fabric of the universe itself,” McEnery said.

Scientists who want to use the James Webb Space Telescope to observe parts of the universe had to compete for time. If they’re awarded time on the observatory, they get exclusive use of the returned data for about a year, Townsend said.

The Roman telescope will also democratize space research. As soon as the data is processed, it’s “immediately available” to anyone, Townsend said, whether they’re an astrophysicist or middle school teacher.

“I like to think that in a couple years, the next Dr. Nancy Grace Roman is going to be in middle school, downloading our data and learning how to do astrophysics, and carrying her legacy forward,” Townsend said.