Roman is now travelling towards the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, a million and a half kilometres from Earth on the side away from the Sun. It will arrive in about three months, with two course corrections along the way.
The primary mirror measures 2.4 metres. Exactly like Hubble. The difference is not size but shape: Roman has a more curved mirror, the secondary sits closer, the camera is larger. The result is a field of view at least a hundred times wider. With the same mirror, every exposure covers a vastly greater patch of sky.

It is not built to see deeper. It is built to see faster, across wide areas. The difference between a telephoto lens and an aerial survey camera. A wide field and a stable observatory together make the speed: the telescope can move quickly from one patch of sky to the next without long waits between observations. According to NASA it will survey the sky up to a thousand times faster than Hubble.
Two instruments are aboard. The Wide Field Instrument is a 300-megapixel camera sensitive to visible and near-infrared light, built from eighteen 4K detectors, each about the size of a cracker. The Coronagraph Instrument blocks the light of a host star to photograph the planets orbiting it

directly, and can reveal objects more than a hundred million times fainter than their star. It is a technology demonstration: it exists to prove the thing can be done.
Three objectives have been declared. The distribution of dark matter and the behaviour of dark energy, reconstructed from the shape and position of an enormous number of galaxies. A statistical census of planetary systems. And the search for distant supernovae, which are used to measure the rate at which the universe expands.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman spoke of a new atlas of the universe and of more than a hundred thousand exoplanets potentially detectable over the course of the observing campaigns. Across the mission the telescope could gather light from a billion galaxies. These are projections, not results. Worth remembering when the first headlines appear.

The real data will not arrive soon. In the coming days the high-gain antenna will be deployed and the coronagraph switched on. Once in orbit around L2 commissioning begins, made of calibrations and checks, with small station-keeping burns needed roughly every twenty-eight days. NASA expects to release the first images by early 2027. The planned mission duration is five years.
At full operation Roman should send back around 1.4 terabytes of data a day. That is the highest rate ever planned for an astrophysics mission by the American agency. The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA first chief astronomer, remembered as the mother of Hubble because she promoted and defended that project when nobody else believed in it.
Julie McEnery, the mission project scientist at Goddard, summed up the wait without promising anything: nobody has ever observed the universe with eyes like Roman, and there is no way to know how much will have been learned a year from now. That is the right tone for a mission that has only just left the ground.

Source file: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/nhq20260830-admin-0001orig.jpg
Note: NASA content is generally not copyrighted and may be used for informational purposes, crediting NASA, without implying endorsement and without reproducing agency logos. A very similar solar-transit photograph credited to Space.com / Josh Dinner is copyrighted and must not be used.
References
NASA, Roman Mission Blog, updates of 30 August 2026: "NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Launches", "NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Flying on Its Own", "NASA Concludes Roman Space Telescope Launch Coverage". https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman/
NASA, "Launch of the Roman Space Telescope", Astronomy Picture of the Day, 31 August 2026.
NASA, image page and caption, 30 August 2026. https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launch-2/
NASA post-launch press conference, 30 August 2026, remarks by administrator Jared Isaacman.
Giuseppe Nucera, "È iniziato il viaggio del Nancy Grace Roman", Global Science, Italian Space Agency, 31 August 2026.

*Board Member, SRSN (Roman Society of Natural Science)
Past Editor-in-Chief Italian Journal of Dermosurgery