Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Where it stands

Roman's fine-guidance system passed its tests from 15 to 21 September 2026, and on 22 September the Coronagraph Instrument made its first observation of cosmic light; a second observation on 27 September, with the detectors cooled, confirmed the pointing on a star field in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The mission

NASA activated the Wide Field Instrument, the 300-megapixel primary camera, on 11 September 2026. On 30 September NASA reported that the fine-guidance tests showed the observatory holding steadier than 1/100,000 of a degree for half an hour at a time for Wide Field Instrument observations, and for eight hours at a time for the Coronagraph. NASA reported on 14 September that the first trajectory correction used about 18 kg of fuel against a 200 kg allocation, which with savings expected at the next correction and orbital insertion allows at least 22 years of potential science operations. On 25 September NASA reported that Roman's three ground stations, NASA's Near Space Network at White Sands, an ESA station near New Norcia in Western Australia and JAXA's Misasa station in Japan, received its test data between 7 and 17 September at up to 500 megabits per second. Roman is expected to downlink about 1.4 terabytes a day, the highest rate of any NASA astrophysics mission so far.

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