NASA unveiled its new Roman space telescope on Tuesday. This latest addition to space technology was designed to scan large portions of the universe in order to search for exoplanets or to answer great physical mysteries such as dark matter and energy.

Published on: 04/22/2026 - 04:07 Modified on: 04/22/2026 - 11:08

A latest generation telescope which “will offer the Earth a new Atlas of the universe”. These were the words of NASA chief Jared Isaacman to qualify, Tuesday April 21, the new telescope of the American space agency. More than 12 meters high, this silver device equipped with immense solar panels – named Roman – will now be transported to Florida with a view to being sent into space aboard a SpaceX rocket, at the beginning of September at the earliest.

Developed for more than a decade at a cost exceeding $4 billion, it was named in honor of one of the greatest American astronomers, Nancy Grace Roman, nicknamed the "mother of Hubble", after the name of another flagship NASA telescope. More than 35 years after the latter was put into service, which notably taught us that our universe was expanding faster than we thought, the Roman Space Telescope will be responsible for answering questions that remained unanswered.

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With its wide field of view, more than 100 times greater than that of Hubble, it will scan large areas of the sky from a privileged vantage point, 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,” points out Mark Melton, Roman’s systems engineer with AFP.

Thanks to this wide-angle lens, NASA will be able to carry out a vast census of the objects making up our universe, explains Nicky Fox, head of NASA's scientific activities, who thus expects to "discover tens of thousands of new planets" or even "thousands of supernovas", that is to say massive stars at the end of their life.

“Study how dark matter is structured over cosmic time”

So much information which will allow NASA to determine areas of interest which can then be analyzed by complementary telescopes like the famous James Webb. But Roman also aims to study the invisible: dark matter and energy, the origins of which we do not know but which we think represent 95% of our universe.

Thanks to his infrared vision, he will be able to observe the light emitted by celestial objects billions of years ago and thus go back in time to better understand these two mysterious phenomena. The first is perceived as a kind of gravitational glue and the second as a repulsive force involved in the famous expansion of our universe.

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Complementing the work of the Rubin Observatory in Chile and the Euclid probe of the European Space Agency (ESA), it will allow us to "study how dark matter is structured over cosmic time", but also to calculate "the speed" at which certain "galaxies move away from us", explains to AFP Darryl Seligman, teacher-researcher in astronomy at the University of Michigan, who does not hide his enthusiasm for this new telescope.

These observations could indeed revolutionize our current understanding of the structure of the universe, says Julie McEnery, astrophysicist responsible for the Roman telescope. “Current observations suggest that our standard model of the universe is incorrect. Roman will be able to confirm this and put us on the path to understanding what is right,” she analyzes.

The greatest value of this new telescope thus lies in this part of the unknown, insist the experts: what it will allow us to discover and which today is not even imaginable. “If Roman ever wins the Nobel Prize, it will probably be for something we haven't even thought of yet,” smiles Mark Melton.

With AFP

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