Ready to Roman: Caltech Teams Celebrate Telescope Launch, Look Ahead to Future

After over a decade of development with mission partners, Caltech, IPAC, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are excited to support and pursue new areas of research and discovery following Sunday's launch of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

The next generation of exoplanet imaging technology, designed and built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for the agency, has launched aboard NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The flagship observatory lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 4:26 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Sunday, August 30, 2026, and will observe the universe from a vantage point about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth in the direction opposite the Sun.

"Roman is an extraordinary telescope that will open up a new era of discovery for researchers around the world," Caltech President Ray Jayawardhana said from the launch. "It's a privilege to be here, along with so many colleagues from Caltech and JPL, who have contributed to the development of instrumentation and the planning for science on Roman and who will support its operation and use its data to make discoveries. We are eagerly anticipating Roman's first observations." 

A successor to NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide exceptional images of exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars, as well as discover an estimated 100,000 new ones. It will also peer across vast stretches of space and time to survey the universe. Named for NASA's first chief astronomer, Nancy Grace Roman, the mission aims to make progress on two of the most fundamental questions facing humanity: What is the universe made of? And are we alone?

The telescope carries two instruments: the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph Instrument technology demonstration. The Wide Field Instrument is a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will allow scientists to look very far back in time to see the universe in its early stages, and to take a demographic census of exoplanets in different regions of the galaxy.

The Coronagraph Instrument technology demonstration, called the Coronagraph Instrument, is designed with new technologies for directly imaging exoplanets. It is the most powerful coronagraph ever flown in space. It can image planets that are about 10 million times dimmer than their host star, and possibly fainter.

Core Science

Caltech leads two of five project infrastructure teams for Roman. Yun Wang, an astrophysicist at IPAC, a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary sciences at Caltech, leads a program to investigate the nature of dark energy, a mysterious force or substance pushing our universe apart at ever-increasing speeds, via measurements of galaxy clustering. (Two of the other project infrastructure teams, one of which is led by JPL, will probe dark energy through different measurement techniques.)

Caltech Professor of Astronomy Mansi Kasliwal (PhD '11) is the principal investigator of a team responsible for creating an alert system that tells astronomers where they might find interesting transient, or quickly changing, phenomena to observe, such as supernovae. The team, called RAPID (Roman Alerts Promptly from Image Differencing), is essentially surveying the sky, looking for "cosmic fireworks," as Kasliwal describes them. "It's amazing that Roman has launched," she said from the launch site. "People are intensely excited, sharing their dreams of the science Roman will unleash."

Kasliwal is also the director of Caltech's Palomar Observatory and a leader of one of the instruments housed there, called the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), which observes the dynamic skies much like RAPID, finding objects that explode, burst, and otherwise change in brightness.

"The big thing is ZTF was not just a pathfinder but a trailblazer for Roman," she says. "Many of the things that we have developed in terms of the software infrastructure, the real-time science, and the time-domain astronomy have really paved the way for Roman RAPID."

Imaging Worlds Far, Far Away

For more than a decade, researchers and engineers at Caltech, JPL, and IPAC have been designing and building the Coronagraph Instrument and preparing to support its functions.

Roman's Wide Field Instrument is designed to measure light from billions of sources in its mission lifetime, while its Coronagraph Instrument is specifically designed to block out starlight in order to capture the faint light of planets orbiting around those stars.

Taking images of exoplanets is akin to taking a picture of a firefly next to a lighthouse from miles away. The star's overwhelmingly bright light must be masked so that the planet's light can be seen. In the way that one raises a baseball mitt to block out the sun when looking upward to catch a fly ball, coronagraphs block out a star's bright light such that its planets' light can be captured.

Eventually, astronomers want to be able to image Earth-like worlds and to look for the chemical signatures of life. Roman's Coronagraph Instrument is a critical stepping stone in being able to do this. Though it is not the first coronagraph to be flown into space (Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in 2021, are among the missions that carry one) it is by far the most powerful.

Patrick Lowrance, the Science Support Center co-lead at IPAC, has worked on the Coronagraph Instrument for six years and says he feels bittersweet at seeing the telescope launch.

"It's exciting, but, in a way, you almost don't want to see it go—it's like a child leaving home," he says. "But there is so much out there to explore. I'm looking forward to understanding more about planet demographics; how they are different from each other and from our solar system. There are planets with two suns, or even three suns. It's so much fun to remember why we do it and think about what we're exploring every day in the universe."

Coronagraph Mission Control

Following Roman's launch will be approximately three months of commissioning efforts to get the observatory up and running. The mission's science operations will be run out of two science centers: the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and Caltech's IPAC. The operations of the Roman Coronagraph Instrument will be run by a team of experts at IPAC and JPL, which will process its raw data that is sent down to Earth.

Originally founded in 1985 as the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, IPAC has a long history of supporting operations for observatories both in space and on the ground, including NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

As the Coronagraph Instrument undergoes commissioning, the IPAC team will run iterative algorithms to adjust its mirrors to find the best configurations for blocking out starlight, a process they call "digging a dark hole." Once the instrument is fully functional, IPAC will turn observation requests into working plans for the spacecraft.

"Scientists come up with big ideas, and it's up to the engineers and developers to implement those ideas and stay within a budget," says Alex Greenbaum, the Coronagraph Instrument data management system lead at IPAC. "At IPAC, we work hard to make sure that all of these different teams are integrated and have strong communication. IPAC is a unique place where we have a direct link to JPL and to the scientific community, and we can serve them seamlessly."

Even More Science

In addition to commanding the Coronagraph Instrument, IPAC has been preparing for more than a decade for a number of mission support functions.

The Roman Science Support Center (SSC) at IPAC is responsible for science data processing and community outreach for exoplanet microlensing, for all spectroscopic data, and for general community outreach for Roman science. The SSC is also responsible for managing the calls for Roman science investigation proposals, and for microlensing operations from the Wide Field Instrument.

For the Future

Amelia Nash, a developer and Roman Coronagraph Instrument operator at IPAC, says she is excited to watch the launch with her daughter. "I feel fortunate that my daughter is old enough now—she's in middle school—that she can actually appreciate what she's looking at. It'll be a great memory for her."

"Being involved in space technology, being privy to conversations with different scientists, and learning about what they are hoping to discover feels very impactful," Nash says. "As humans, we're very curious about what's out there beyond our world. It's exciting to be part of a team making history."