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By NASA
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team shared Thursday the designs for the three core surveys the mission will conduct after launch. These observation programs are designed to investigate some of the most profound mysteries in astrophysics while enabling expansive cosmic exploration that will revolutionize our understanding of the universe.
“Roman’s setting out to do wide, deep surveys of the universe in a way that will help us answer questions about how dark energy and dark matter govern cosmic evolution, and the demographics of worlds beyond our solar system,” said Gail Zasowski, an associate professor at the University of Utah and co-chair of the ROTAC (Roman Observations Time Allocation Committee). “But the overarching goal is that the surveys have broad appeal and numerous science applications. They were designed by and for the astronomical community to maximize the science they’ll enable.”
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s three main observing programs, highlighted in this infographic, can enable astronomers to view the universe as never before, revealing billions of cosmic objects strewn across enormous swaths of space-time.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Roman’s crisp, panoramic view of space and fast survey speeds provide the opportunity for astronomers to study the universe as never before. The Roman team asked the science community to detail the topics they’d like to study through each of Roman’s surveys and selected committees of scientists across many organizations to evaluate the range of possibilities and formulate three compelling options for each.
In April, the Roman team received the recommendations and has now determined the survey designs. These observations account for no more than 75 percent of Roman’s surveys during its five-year primary mission, with the remainder allocated to additional observations that will be proposed and developed by the science community in later opportunities.
“These survey designs are the culmination of two years of input from more than 1,000 scientists from over 350 institutions across the globe,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA Goddard. “We’re thrilled that we’ve been able to hear from so many of the people who’ll use the data after launch to investigate everything from objects in our outer solar system, planets across our galaxy, dark matter and dark energy, to exploding stars, growing black holes, galaxies by the billions, and so much more.”
With all major hardware now delivered, Roman has entered its final phase of preparation for launch, undergoing integration and key environmental testing at NASA Goddard. Roman is targeted to launch by May 2027, with the team working toward a potential launch window that opens in October 2026.
This infographic describes the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey that will be conducted by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This observation program has three components, covering more than 5,000 square degrees (about 12 percent of the sky) altogether in just under a year and a half. The main part covers about 2,500 square degrees, doing both spectroscopy (splitting light into individual colors to study patterns that reveal detailed information) and imaging in multiple filters (which allow astronomers to select specific wavelengths of light) to provide the rich dataset needed for precise studies of our universe. A wider component spans more than twice the area using a single filter, specifically covering a large area that can be viewed by ground-based telescopes located in both the northern and southern hemispheres. The final component focuses on a smaller region to provide a deeper view that will help astronomers study faint, distant galaxies.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey
Roman’s largest survey, the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey, combines the powers of imaging and spectroscopy to unveil more than a billion galaxies strewn across a wide swath of cosmic time. Roman can look far from the dusty plane of our Milky Way galaxy (that’s what the “high-latitude” part of the survey name means), looking up and out of the galaxy rather than through it to get the clearest view of the distant cosmos.
The distribution and shapes of galaxies in Roman’s enormous, deep images can help us understand the nature of dark energy — a pressure that seems to be speeding up the universe’s expansion — and how invisible dark matter, which Roman will detect by its gravitational effects, influences the evolution of structure in our universe.
For the last two years, researchers have been discussing ways to expand the range of scientific topics that can be studied using the same dataset. That includes studying galaxy evolution, star formation, cosmic voids, the matter between galaxies, and much more.
This infographic describes the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey that will be conducted by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The survey’s main component covers over 18 square degrees — a region of sky as large as 90 full moons — and sees supernovae that occurred up to about 8 billion years ago. Smaller areas within the survey can pierce even farther, potentially back to when the universe was around a billion years old. The survey is split between the northern and southern hemispheres, located in regions of the sky that will be continuously visible to Roman. The bulk of the survey consists of 30-hour observations every five days for two years in the middle of Roman’s five-year primary mission.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey
Roman’s High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey can probe our dynamic universe by observing the same region of the cosmos repeatedly. Stitching these observations together to create movies can allow scientists to study how celestial objects and phenomena change over time periods of days to years.
This survey can probe dark energy by finding and studying many thousands of a special type of exploding star called type Ia supernovae. These stellar cataclysms allow scientists to measure cosmic distances and trace the universe’s expansion.
“Staring at a large volume of the sky for so long will also reveal black holes being born as neutron stars merge, and tidal disruption events –– flares released by stars falling into black holes,” said Saurabh Jha, a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and ROTAC co-chair. “It will also allow astronomers to explore variable objects, like active galaxies and binary systems. And it enables more open-ended cosmic exploration than most other space telescopes can do, offering a chance to answer questions we haven’t yet thought to ask.”
This infographic describes the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey that will be conducted by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The smallest of Roman’s core surveys, this observation program consists of repeat visits to six fields covering 1.7 square degrees total. One field pierces the very center of the galaxy, and the others are nearby — all in a region of the sky that will be visible to Roman for two 72-day stretches each spring and fall. The survey mainly consists of six seasons (three early on, and three toward the end of Roman’s primary mission), during which Roman views each field every 12 minutes. Roman also views the six fields with less intensity at other times throughout the mission, allowing astronomers to detect microlensing events that can last for years, signaling the presence of isolated, stellar-mass black holes.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey
Unlike the high-latitude surveys, Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will look inward to provide one of the deepest views ever of the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. Roman’s crisp resolution and infrared view can allow astronomers to watch hundreds of millions of stars in search of microlensing signals — gravitational boosts of a background star’s light that occur when an intervening object passes nearly in front of it. While astronomers have mainly discovered star-hugging worlds, Roman’s microlensing observations can find planets in the habitable zone of their star and farther out, including analogs of every planet in our solar system except Mercury.
The same set of observations can reveal “rogue” planets that drift through the galaxy unbound to any star, brown dwarfs (“failed stars” too lightweight to power themselves by fusion the way stars do), and stellar corpses like neutron stars and white dwarfs. And scientists could discover 100,000 new worlds by seeing stars periodically get dimmer as an orbiting planet passes in front of them, events called transits. Scientists can also study the stars themselves, detecting “starquakes” on a million giant stars, the result of sound waves reverberating through their interiors that can reveal information about their structures, ages, and other properties.
Data from all of Roman’s surveys will be made public as soon as it is processed, with no periods of exclusive access.
“Roman’s unprecedented data will offer practically limitless opportunities for astronomers to explore all kinds of cosmic topics,” McEnery said. “We stand to learn a tremendous amount of new information about the universe very rapidly after the mission launches.”
Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940
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Last Updated Apr 24, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.govLocationNASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Black Holes Dark Energy Dark Matter Earth-like Exoplanets Exoplanets Galaxies Gas Giant Exoplanets Neptune-Like Exoplanets Neutron Stars Stars Stellar-mass Black Holes Super-Earth Exoplanets Supernovae Terrestrial Exoplanets The Milky Way The Solar System The Universe Explore More
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Article 2 years ago View the full article
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By European Space Agency
ESA's Biomass mission is on the launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Don’t miss the live coverage of liftoff on Tuesday 29 April, on ESA WebTV. Coverage will start at 10:55 CEST with commentary live from Kourou and ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Germany. The Vega-C rocket carrying Biomass is scheduled for liftoff at 11:15.
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By NASA
The asteroid Donaldjohanson as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI). This is one of the most detailed images returned by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its flyby. This image was taken at 1:51 p.m. EDT (17:51 UTC), April 20, 2025, near closest approach, from a range of approximately 660 miles (1,100 km). The spacecraft’s closest approach distance was 600 miles (960 km), but the image shown was taken approximately 40 seconds beforehand. The image has been sharpened and processed to enhance contrast.NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab NASA’s Lucy spacecraft took this image of the main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson during its flyby on April 20, 2025, showing the elongated contact binary (an object formed when two smaller bodies collide). This was Lucy’s second flyby in the spacecraft’s 12-year mission.
Launched on Oct. 16, 2021, Lucy is the first space mission sent to explore a diverse population of small bodies known as the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. These remnants of our early solar system are trapped on stable orbits associated with – but not close to – the giant planet Jupiter. Lucy will explore a record-breaking number of asteroids, flying by three asteroids in the solar system’s main asteroid belt, and by eight Trojan asteroids that share an orbit around the Sun with Jupiter. April 20, 2025 marked Lucy’s second flyby. The spacecraft’s next target is Trojan asteroid Eurybates and its satellite Queta in Aug. 2027.
Lucy is named for a fossilized skeleton of a prehuman ancestor. This flyby marked the first time NASA sent a spacecraft to a planetary body named after a living person. Asteroid Donaldjohanson was unnamed before becoming a target. The name Donaldjohanson was chosen in honor of the paleoanthropologist who discovered the Lucy fossil, Dr. Donald Johanson.
Learn more about Lucy’s flyby of asteroid Donaldjohanson.
Image credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab
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By NASA
4 min read
NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Images Asteroid Donaldjohanson
In its second asteroid encounter, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft obtained a close look at a uniquely shaped fragment of an asteroid that formed about 150 million years ago. The spacecraft has begun returning images that were collected as it flew approximately 600 miles (960 km) from the asteroid Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025.
The asteroid Donaldjohanson as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) on NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its flyby. This timelapse shows images captured approximately every 2 seconds beginning at 1:50 p.m. EDT (17:50 UTC), April 20, 2025. The asteroid rotates very slowly; its apparent rotation here is due to the spacecraft’s motion as it flies by Donaldjohanson at a distance of 1,000 to 660 miles (1,600 to 1,100 km). The spacecraft’s closest approach distance was 600 miles (960 km), but the images shown were taken approximately 40 seconds beforehand, the nearest ones at a distance of 660 miles (1100 km). NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL The asteroid was previously observed to have large brightness variations over a 10-day period, so some of Lucy team members’ expectations were confirmed when the first images showed what appeared to be an elongated contact binary (an object formed when two smaller bodies collide). However, the team was surprised by the odd shape of the narrow neck connecting the two lobes, which looks like two nested ice cream cones.
“Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly complicated geology,” says Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy at Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. “As we study the complex structures in detail, they will reveal important information about the building blocks and collisional processes that formed the planets in our Solar System.”
From a preliminary analysis of the first available images collected by the spacecraft’s L’LORRI imager, the asteroid appears to be larger than originally estimated, about 5 miles (8 km) long and 2 miles (3.5 km) wide at the widest point. In this first set of high-resolution images returned from the spacecraft, the full asteroid is not visible as the asteroid is larger than the imager’s field of view. It will take up to a week for the team to downlink the remainder of the encounter data from the spacecraft; this dataset will give a more complete picture of the asteroid’s overall shape.
Like Lucy’s first asteroid flyby target, Dinkinesh, Donaldjohanson is not a primary science target of the Lucy mission. As planned, the Dinkinesh flyby was a system’s test for the mission, while this encounter was a full dress rehearsal, in which the team conducted a series of dense observations to maximize data collection. Data collected by Lucy’s other scientific instruments, the L’Ralph color imager and infrared spectrometer and the L’TES thermal infrared spectrometer, will be retrieved and analyzed over the next few weeks.
The Lucy spacecraft will spend most of the remainder of 2025 travelling through the main asteroid belt. Lucy will encounter the mission’s first main target, the Jupiter Trojan asteroid Eurybates, in August 2027.
“These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,” said Tom Statler, program scientist for the Lucy mission at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense.”
The asteroid Donaldjohanson as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI). This is one of the most detailed images returned by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its flyby. This image was taken at 1:51 p.m. EDT (17:51 UTC), April 20, 2025, near closest approach, from a range of approximately 660 miles (1,100 km). The spacecraft’s closest approach distance was 600 miles (960 km), but the image shown was taken approximately 40 seconds beforehand. The image has been sharpened and processed to enhance contrast. NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering and the safety and mission assurance for Lucy, as well as the designing and building the L’Ralph instrument. Hal Levison of the Boulder, Colorado, office of SwRI is the principal investigator. SwRI is headquartered in San Antonio and also leads the mission’s science team, science observation planning, and data processing. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and the safety and mission assurance for Lucy, as well as the L’Ralph instrument. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft, designed the orbital trajectory, and provides flight operations. Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are responsible for navigating the Lucy spacecraft. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed and built the L’LORRI (Lucy Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) instrument. Arizona State University designed and built the L’TES (Lucy Thermal Emission Spectrometer). Lucy is the thirteenth mission in NASA’s Discovery Program, which is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
By Katherine Kretke
Southwest Research Institute
Media Contact:
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Nancy N. Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Apr 21, 2025 Editor Jamie Adkins Contact Molly Wasser molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov Related Terms
Lucy Asteroids Goddard Space Flight Center View the full article
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By NASA
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon spacecraft lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 4:15 a.m. EDT on April 21 2025, on the company’s 32nd commercial resupply services mission for the agency to the International Space Station.Credit: NASA Following the successful launch of NASA’s SpaceX 32nd Commercial Resupply Services mission, new scientific experiments and supplies are bound for the International Space Station.
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, carrying approximately 6,700 pounds of cargo to the orbiting laboratory for NASA, lifted off at 4:15 a.m. EDT Monday, on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Live coverage of the spacecraft’s arrival will begin at 6:45 a.m., Tuesday, April 22, on NASA+. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms.
The spacecraft is scheduled to autonomously dock at approximately 8:20 a.m. to the zenith, or space-facing, port of the space station’s Harmony module.
The resupply mission will support dozens of research experiments during Expedition 73. Along with food and essential equipment for the crew, Dragon is delivering a variety of science experiments, including a demonstration of refined maneuvers for free-floating robots. Dragon also carries an enhanced air quality monitoring system that could help protect crew members on exploration missions to the Moon and Mars, and two atomic clocks to examine fundamental physics concepts, such as relativity, and test global synchronization of precision timepieces.
These are just a sample of the hundreds of investigations conducted aboard the orbiting laboratory each year in the areas of biology and biotechnology, physical sciences, and Earth and space science. Such research benefits humanity and helps lay the groundwork for future human exploration through the agency’s Artemis campaign, which will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future missions to Mars.
The Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to remain at the orbiting laboratory until May, when it will depart and return to Earth with time-sensitive research and cargo, splashing down off the coast of California.
Learn more about the commercial resupply mission at:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission/nasas-spacex-crs-32/
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Julian Coltre / Josh Finch
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
julian.n.coltre@nasa.gov / joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov
Stephanie Plucinsky / Steven Siceloff
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
321-876-2468
stephanie.n.plucinsky@nasa.gov / steven.p.siceloff@nasa.gov
Sandra Jones
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Apr 21, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
International Space Station (ISS) Commercial Resupply ISS Research Johnson Space Center Kennedy Space Center SpaceX Commercial Resupply View the full article
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