NASA's Roman telescope sees starlight for the first time
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's 300-megapixel camera has captured its first photons of starlight — a blurry but landmark test image as the flagship observatory wakes up en route to L2.
NASA’s newest flagship space telescope has opened its eyes. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s main camera has captured its first photons of starlight, the agency announced in a 15 September blog post — a milestone known as first light, reached less than two weeks after the telescope launched on 30 August.
The test images are deliberately blurry: the Wide Field Instrument’s detector array is still stowed in its launch position, far from best focus, so each star appears as a broad, donut-like halo rather than a crisp point. Engineers will use the images as a baseline for aligning the optics and tuning the focus. The Wide Field Instrument is a 300-megapixel infrared camera with 18 detectors covering a sensing area about the size of a laptop screen; each of its images will capture a patch of sky larger than the apparent size of the full Moon, with sharpness comparable to Hubble.
On the morning of 11 September, the team switched off the instrument heater and let the camera cool to minus 225°F (minus 143°C) before activating the detectors, which will eventually reach their operating temperature of about minus 300°F (minus 183°C). “After years of effort to build and test the instrument on the ground, we now have confirmation that it is operational in space,” said Josh Schlieder, the Wide Field Instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is a huge milestone for the team at Goddard, our industry teams at BAE Systems, Inc. and Teledyne, and our science centers.”
The mission’s other major instrument, the Coronagraph — designed to block starlight so astronomers can directly image faint exoplanets — has also passed its initial checks, with engineers confirming they can communicate with and command all of its components from the ground.
Roman is still travelling to its operating station a million miles from Earth, the Sun–Earth Lagrange point L2. NASA expects its first science images by early 2027, when the telescope will begin wide surveys to study planets beyond our solar system, probe dark energy and map how matter is distributed across the universe.
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