NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope set to launch, promising fastest scans of the cosmos ever

After it launches in August, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is expected to survey more of the sky than any space telescope before, at a pace hundreds of times faster.

GREENBELT, Md. — It’s go time for NASA’s next-generation space telescope.

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After nearly two decades of development, $4.3 billion and the labor of hundreds of scientists and engineers, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is less than three months from launch.

From a point roughly 1 million miles from Earth, the telescope is expected to survey the cosmos, capturing panoramas of hundreds of millions of stars and billions of galaxies. With this observatory, NASA hopes to unravel the secrets of dark matter and dark energy and discover thousands of planets beyond our solar system.