Space Telescope Science Institute

08/05/2026

Curious about what’s next for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope? The Roman blog is NASA's hub for the mission's launch updates, where all are invited for behind-the-scenes looks on Roman's road to launch and operations.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope blog is NASA's hub for the mission's launch updates, where all are invited for behind-the-scenes looks on Roman's road to launch and beyond. This flagship mission’s vast, deep surveys will help astronomers explore dark matter, dark energy, exoplanets, and almo...

08/04/2026

On July 27, technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida installed a memory card containing 1,350,144 names as part of a commemorative plaque on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

08/04/2026

A conveyor belt of processes lead to the different colors we see in this Hubble Space Telescope image of the Whirlpool Galaxy. First, its two curving arms compress hydrogen gas into dark brown and black dust lanes. New stars form within these regions of gas and dust and become visible as numerous pink clouds. As the number of stars grow and they clear the excess gas that give the pockets their pink hue, brilliant blue star clusters gather along the outer edge.

These well-defined spiral arms make the Whirlpool a perfect example of a grand design spiral galaxy.

Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), the Hubble Heritage Team.

08/03/2026

Astronomers gathered at the Space Telescope Science Institute spring symposium in Baltimore to discuss how the James Webb Space Telescope is changing our understanding of the universe’s history and how it went from hydrogen and helium to … everything.

07/31/2026

🎊 We are officially fewer than 30 days from the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope! Roman is set to launch on August 30, 2026, at 07:26 am EDT on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The telescope was assembled and tested at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Once that work was finished, Roman had to travel to Kennedy for its launch. The transport process was long, delicate, and painstaking.

Watch the telescope's journey from inside Goddard’s largest clean room to the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy on NASA’s special transport barge, called Pegasus.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Music credit: “Unity for Liberty,” Lucas Napoleone and François Rousselot [SACEM], Universal Production Music.

07/30/2026

On National Intern Day, we want to celebrate our 2026 Space Astronomy Summer Program students who spent their summer working with STScI researchers and staff! 🎉

Today they provided short presentations of their efforts at the SASP Symposium.

07/30/2026

The countdown is on for the debut of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is named for NASA’s first chief astronomer.

The Roman telescope is slated to launch on Aug. 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, per NASA.

The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is expected to launch Aug. 30 and help unlock mysteries around dark matter, exoplanets and more.

07/30/2026

The Pistol Star is one of the brightest stars in our galaxy, but it can only be seen in infrared light. Two large magenta shells of gas are expanding from the star, which unleashes as much energy in six seconds as our sun does in one year.

Scientists used the Hubble Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) in 1997 to observe the star and surrounding nebula. The nebula is so big (it’s four light-years across) that it would nearly span the distance from our sun to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system.

The Pistol Star is not visible to the human eye, but it is located 25,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, hidden behind the great dust clouds along the Milky Way.

Credit: Don F. Figer (UCLA), and NASA/ESA.

07/29/2026

Now you see it, and now you don’t! To learn more about the intriguing population of cosmic objects found in the distant universe known as little red dots (LRDs), a team of astronomers sorted through James Webb Space Telescope archival data and identified a nearby spiral galaxy with an LRD-like center.

Nicknamed the Saguaro for its prominent arms, this galaxy has a redshift of 2, which corresponds to approximately 3.3 billion years after the big bang. The team used computer models to shift the Saguaro to a higher redshift—farther away from us—to find out how it would appear to observers if located in the early universe.

In their simulation, the team discovered that the Saguaro’s surrounding galactic structure faded so that only the bright, LRD-like source at its center was visible. This finding supports the theory that LRDs are not just compact sources, they are a part of something larger—a temporary phase of highly active supermassive black holes, during which they are interacting with their nearby surroundings: https://news.stsci.edu/4h40rYo

07/28/2026

Technicians completed fueling the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, bringing it an important step closer to launch. 🚀

On July 25, the team completed operations that carefully loaded 290 gallons of hydrazine fuel into the observatory at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Technicians have completed fueling NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, bringing it an important step closer to launch.