Goddard Space Flight Center (United States) (AFP) – NASA presented its new Roman space telescope, designed to explore large areas of the universe in search of exoplanets, but also for answers to the great physical mysteries posed by dark matter and energy.

First modification: 04/22/2026 - 11:51

This next-generation telescope "will offer Earth a new atlas of the universe," NASA director Jared Isaacman congratulated on Tuesday from the US space agency's Goddard Center in Maryland, in the east of the country, where its assembly was completed.

The silver device, more than 12 meters high, will now be transferred to Florida for launch into space in early September aboard a SpaceX rocket.

Developed for more than a decade at a cost of more than $4 billion, it is named in honor of one of the greatest American astronomers, Nancy Grace Roman, nicknamed the "mother of Hubble," in reference to another iconic NASA telescope.

More than 35 years after the commissioning of the latter, which revealed to us, among other things, that our universe is expanding faster than we thought, the Roman Space Telescope will be responsible for answering the questions that still remain unresolved.

With its wide field of view, more than 100 times greater than that of Hubble, it will sweep vast areas of the sky from a privileged point of view, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

"It will send us 11 terabytes of data per day, which means that in the first year alone it will have provided us with more data than the Hubble telescope will have collected in its entire life," Mark Melton, a systems engineer at Roman, told AFP.

Thanks to this wide-angle lens, NASA hopes to "discover tens of thousands of new planets" or even "thousands of supernovae," explains Nicky Fox, head of the agency's scientific activities.

But Roman also aims to study the invisible: dark matter and energy, whose origin is unknown, but which is believed to represent 95% of our universe.

"If Roman ever wins the Nobel Prize, it will probably be for something we haven't even thought about yet," smiles Mark Melton.

© 2026 AFP

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