Updated July 21, 2026 — NASA has moved the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from an earlier “no earlier than” target to a scheduled launch at 7:20 a.m. EDT on August 30. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy is expected to lift the observatory from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA will hold a virtual mission briefing at 2 p.m. EDT on July 29 and stream it through the agency's public channels. The schedule remains subject to final spacecraft, rocket, range and weather readiness.

Roman will operate near the Sun-Earth L2 point, roughly one million miles from Earth. Its wide-field instrument is designed to survey an area at least 100 times larger than Hubble can capture in one view, supporting studies of dark energy, dark matter, galaxies and planets beyond the solar system. A coronagraph will also test technology for directly imaging planets around nearby stars.

The observatory arrived at Kennedy in June and is undergoing final processing. NASA describes the August date as about eight months ahead of the mission's earlier schedule.

Source: NASA media advisory — nasa.gov source ↗

Source: NASA Roman mission and launch countdown — science.nasa.gov source ↗