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Some much needed good space news: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has completed construction!

I haven’t written much about this ‘scope because it’s been under construction for a while, though I did cover it on The Old Blog™ when NASA renamed it from the preliminary “Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope”, changing that to Roman to honor the “mother of Hubble”, Nancy Grace Roman, who led the charge of putting telescopes in space during NASA’s early days.

Roman has a mirror the same size as Hubble’s — 2.4 meters, or about 8 feet — which means it collects as much light as Hubble does. However, the mirror shape is slightly different, allowing it to have a larger field of view: in a single shot it can take an image of the sky with the same resolution (sharpness) as Hubble but over an area one hundred times larger.

That’s phenomenal! It also has better electronics (not surprising, since much of Hubble’s hardware is decades old) so it can record the data more rapidly as well; overall it is hundreds of times more efficient than Hubble. It has two main cameras. One is a 300 megapixel (!!) wide field imager, and the other a coronagraphic imager designed to block the light from stars so that fainter planets can be seen orbiting them (and by faint, I mean faint; planets can be billions of times fainter than their stars).

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Roman is sensitive to visible light (the kind we see) from roughly 0.5 microns (blue-green) out to 2.3 microns (near-infrared). This is a great wavelength range, where all sorts of interesting objects emit light. It will study planets orbiting other stars (and should find hundreds of thousands of them!) to distant galaxies, and in fact should see billions of galaxies over its 5-year nominal operating lifetime, which, hopefully, will be extended.

It’s due to launch in October 2026 on a Falcon Heavy and be sent to the Earth-Sun L2 point, a spot about 1.5 million kilometers on a line directly away from the Sun; this is a region of gravitational stability that keeps the telescope near Earth all the time. Lots of other observatories operate there, including JWST.

But of course first the telescope had to be built, and now that’s completed. A huge step, of course. Very soon it will make its way to Florida to await launch at Kennedy Space Center. I’m very excited about this; the shots we get from it will be incredible. Imagine an image of, say, the Andromeda galaxy big enough to cover a wall which you can stand right in front of and see sharp stars down to your eyesight’s limits. And the science! That will be amazing.

Yeah, this is a big deal. Stay Tuned. I’ll have more as launch nears. 

We as a civilization on a planet floating in space have passed an interesting kilometerstone^*: We now know of more than 40,000 asteroids that approach relatively close to Earth.

Last month (November 2025), 309 were discovered, pushing the total known to 40,157. And that doesn’t include the 124 near-Earth comets. 

What does this mean? A near-Earth object (or NEO) is defined as a body whose minimum distance from the Sun (called perihelion) is less than about 200 million km, or 1.3 times the Earth-Sun distance. A deep-diving comet that dips below Earth’s orbit counts, as does an asteroid with a more circular orbit that brings it less than roughly 50 million km from Earth’s orbit. 

So in reality that’s not necessarily all that close to Earth, but that’s an upper limit. Many of the objects don’t get too near to us, but others could literally impact us. Anything bigger than 140 meters in diameter that can get closer than 7.5 million km is called a potentially hazardous object. This is a small subset of the NEOs.

About 3,000 NEOs are discovered every year now! That’s not because there are more of them, it’s because we’re getting better at spotting them. New telescopes come online, and we have better ways of finding NEOs in images of the sky, and that means more are found. And just you wait: when the Vera Rubin Telescope begins routine observations it will find a lot more. I expect the Roman Space Telescope will as well, though I’m not sure just how many. But it’ll be a lot, too. 

The threat is out there, whether we know much about it or not. I’d rather know more! Then, if needed, we can take steps to do something about it.

This info, by the way, comes from the ESA’s NEO Coordination Centre, which I have plugged many times. They send out a free monthly newsletter that is always interesting. This month’s issue discusses this new record, as well as the interesting topic of how fireballs — exceptionally bright meteors — are distributed over Earth. It’s always worth a read.

^* Look, the metric system is great for measuring stuff, but lousy for metaphors.

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