NASA Successfully Integrates Roman Mission’s Telescope, Instruments

 Hey, Space Placers!

Technicians install the primary instrument for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, called the Wide Field Instrument (at left), in the biggest clean room at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. This marked the final step to complete the Roman payload, which also includes a Coronagraph instrument and the Optical Telescope Assembly.

NASA/Chris Gunn

NASA's next space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is moving along smartly. The telescope optical element and instrument package were successfully joined to form the total payload.

Next up will be the joining of the payload to the spacecraft bus which carries the telescope and supports its operation. This will take place at NASA Goddard.

This top-down view shows NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s spacecraft bus from another angle. It rests atop an aluminum ring that will not be part of the observatory and is surrounded by an enclosure used in testing to ensure electromagnetic interference will not affect the bus’s sensitive electronics. The bus is covered in gray bagging material to prevent contamination –– even tiny stray particles could affect its performance.

NASA/Chris Gunn

Roman is scheduled to launch no later than May 2027.

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