The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA's next great observatory, is finally complete

GREENBELT, Md. — On Tuesday (April 21) here at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, I watched as scientists stood proudly around a metal contraption with towering orange solar panels and a sparkling silver base. Gleaming right before me in a sterile white clean room stood the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — at last, complete. "I very much hope, and in fact, expect, that the most exciting science from Roman is going to be the things that we didn't expect, that we couldn't predict, but that will set the new deep questions for future missions to address," Julie McEnery, senior project scientist of Roman said during a press conference on Tuesday. Named for NASA's first chief of astronomy and the first woman to hold an executive position at the agency, this space telescope should turn out to be yet another valuable tool in our species' hunt to understand the true nature of the universe. It'll stand among the ranks of our other powerful robotic eyes on the sky — famed instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), SPHEREx, the Euclid Space Telescope and even the aged but always impressive Hubble . Except, as is the case with each of those landmark observatories, this new one has its own specialty. We'll get into some of those specs soon. …