NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Telescope will launch in May 2027 to solve the mystery of dark matter and honor Roman's legacy in astronomy.

NASA Goddard team members pose with part of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.

Image credit: NASA/Flickr

As the new space race intensifies and humanity sets its sights on deep space and potential interstellar life, NASA is preparing to launch a new high-performance lens into deep space called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

NASA hopes to use the new telescope to further study dark matter and dark energy phenomena, which are crucial to understanding the evolution of the universe.

The Rome mission is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first female executive and the organization's first director of astronomy.

Dr. Nancy Grace Roman. Image: NASA

"In the late 1960s, we started sending telescopes into space, and she was the one who made it happen," Dr. Dominic Benford, project scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman mission, told reporters. "So she was known as the 'Mother of Hubble' because the last big project she started was the Hubble Space Telescope."

Planning for the Nancy Grace Roman mission began in 2009, and after a lengthy process of investigation and development, it is scheduled to launch in May 2027. The Roman mission is expected to collect 20 petabytes (or 20,000 terabytes) of data, consisting of trillions of individual measurements of stars and galaxies over its five-year mission.

Nancy Grace Roman Visualization of the telescope. Image: NASA

NASA components of the Rome mission include Goddard Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and scientists from various research institutions. Companies involved in the mission include Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation, L3Harris Technologies and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging.

Last week, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory deployed a new deep space optical communications project aboard NASA's Psyche Mission, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Psyche's goal is to explore a metal-rich asteroid during its six-year mission.

The Nancy Grace Roman mission will also use SpaceX to get to space, Benford said.

“In general, NASA contracts to provide launch services for all of our space missions, not necessarily human missions, but all science missions, and we did the same thing," he said. "We also awarded a contract to SpaceX to procure a Falcon Heavy rocket, so we have almost the same launch vehicle that Psyche just used last Friday.”

To prepare for the massive amounts of data NASA hopes to acquire, the space agency turned to artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, Benford said.

“All of this interesting technical development has to be done by people on the back end to figure out what you do when you collect data so quickly,” Benford said. “It’s a ‘big data’ problem.”

Benford explained that NASA wants to look at how to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to do things that humans don't have enough time or bandwidth to do. In addition to using artificial intelligence, Benford said NASA also wants to utilize more digital tools that allow humans to easily access data.

Earlier this month, a team of astronomers and scientists used generative artificial intelligence technology to monitor the universe for signs of supernovae. The BTSbot project aims to eliminate the human middlemen required to transmit large amounts of data and determine whether a space event is a supernova, allowing scientists to focus on more critical research.

Benford said he is optimistic that artificial intelligence and the ROME mission will open the door to new discoveries and data.

"One of the things Roman will show us is new ways to try to think about the universe," Benford said. "They have to be new because the tools we have to develop to deal with this data are not the tools we have had in the past."