From a Florida Launch Pad to a Pasadena Control Room: The Universe’s Next Survey Begins at Home

The telescope that lifted off and rose majestically over the Florida coast just after sunrise Sunday belongs to the whole country. A good deal of the work of running, it will happen in Pasadena.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off at 4:26 a.m. Pacific time Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, according to NASA.

Caltech manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that designed and built one of the observatory’s two instruments, and Caltech’s IPAC center will be one of two sites operating the mission’s science — with local researchers leading two of Roman’s five project infrastructure teams.

Roman is now on a roughly three-month, million-mile journey to its final orbit, NASA said — a vantage point about 930,000 miles from Earth, on the far side of the planet from the Sun, according to Caltech. From there it is designed to survey the sky about 1,000 times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope, with a field of view at least 100 times larger, according to NASA.

The observatory carries two instruments. The Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera, will map vast stretches of the universe. The Coronagraph Instrument, built at JPL over more than a decade by researchers and engineers there and at Caltech and IPAC, is a technology demonstration that blocks a star’s light so that the far fainter light of an orbiting planet can be seen. Capturing such a planet, Caltech says, is like photographing a firefly next to a lighthouse from miles away. It is not the first coronagraph in space — Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, carry them too — but Caltech describes it as by far the most powerful ever flown, able to image planets about 10 million times dimmer than their host star.

Caltech leads two of the mission’s five project infrastructure teams. Yun Wang, an astrophysicist at IPAC, leads a program probing dark energy — a mysterious force or substance pushing the universe apart at ever-increasing speed — by measuring how galaxies cluster. Mansi Kasliwal, a Caltech professor of astronomy who also directs the institute’s Palomar Observatory, is principal investigator of a team called RAPID, short for Roman Alerts Promptly from Image Differencing, which will flag fast-changing events such as supernovae for astronomers to chase.

“It’s amazing that Roman has launched,” Kasliwal said from the launch site. “People are intensely excited, sharing their dreams of the science Roman will unleash.”

Kasliwal draws a straight line from Palomar to Roman. The Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar scans the changing sky much as RAPID will. “The big thing is ZTF was not just a pathfinder but a trailblazer for Roman,” she said. “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.”

Ray Jayawardhana, who according to the university became Caltech’s 10th president on July 1, watched the launch. “Roman is an extraordinary telescope that will open up a new era of discovery for researchers around the world,” he said. “We are eagerly anticipating Roman’s first observations.”

For the IPAC team, the launch was also a goodbye. Patrick Lowrance, a Science Support Center co-lead at IPAC who has worked on the Coronagraph for six years, said the moment felt bittersweet. “It’s exciting, but, in a way, you almost don’t want to see it go—it’s like a child leaving home,” he said. He is looking ahead to what the instrument might find: “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.”

Once commissioning ends — a process expected to take about three months — much of the day-to-day work shifts to Pasadena. The mission’s science operations will run from two centers: the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and IPAC, which was founded in 1985 and has supported observatories including NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. IPAC and JPL will jointly operate the Coronagraph and process the data it sends to Earth. Beyond the Coronagraph, IPAC’s Roman Science Support Center will handle data processing for exoplanet microlensing and for all of the mission’s spectroscopic data, along with broader community outreach for Roman science.

“Scientists come up with big ideas, and it’s up to the engineers and developers to implement those ideas and stay within a budget,” said Alex Greenbaum, the Coronagraph Instrument data management system lead at IPAC. “IPAC is a unique place where we have a direct link to JPL and to the scientific community, and we can serve them seamlessly.”

Roman is a successor to Hubble and Spitzer, named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, whom NASA has credited with championing the Hubble Space Telescope. Caltech says the mission is expected to discover an estimated 100,000 exoplanets. Its first images are expected in early 2027, according to NASA.

Amelia Nash, a developer and Coronagraph operator at IPAC, was looking forward to watching Sunday’s launch with her middle-school-age daughter. “As humans, we’re very curious about what’s out there beyond our world,” she said. “It’s exciting to be part of a team making history.”