Beyond the Launch:Why NASA’s Nicky Fox Was So Excited About the Roman Space Telescope
Speaking the day before launch, Fox reflected on Roman’s science, the people who built it, and the decades of persistence that brought it to the launch pad.
The day before NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched, Dr. Nicky Fox was thinking about more than the observatory’s destination. She was thinking about the people who had brought it this far.
“Honestly, I think it is because of the team,” said Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, when asked why she was so enthusiastic about Roman. After moving into her current role in early 2023, following years focused on heliophysics, she came to know a team she described as high-performing, calm, welcoming, and eager to share what it had built.
Each visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center gave her another chance to see the telescope and learn from the people closest to it. Their welcome helped make the science approachable, even when the mission’s goals sounded almost audacious: investigating dark energy, dark matter, exoplanets, and the structure of the universe on an enormous scale.
“When they first said, ‘We’re going to measure dark energy and dark matter,’ I was like, ‘We’re going to do what? How are we going to do that?’” Fox recalled. “It’s such an inspirational, mind-blowing mission when you think about what it’s going to do.”
Roman’s name added another layer to that sense of purpose. Nancy Grace Roman was NASA’s first chief of astronomy and a central force in establishing space-based astronomy at the agency. Fox connected her legacy with that of physicist Eugene Parker, whose prediction of the solar wind eventually inspired NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. Both scientists advanced ideas decades before technology caught up with them.
“You’re looking at a 60- or 70-year journey to get us to where we are, to be standing watching this launch,” Fox said on the eve of liftoff.
Asked what Nancy Grace Roman might think if she could see the observatory launch, Fox borrowed a line she had heard earlier that day: Roman would be delighted to be proved wrong about what once seemed beyond reach. The larger lesson, Fox suggested, is that scientific limits are temporary. A telescope like Roman makes measurements and discoveries that earlier generations could not yet imagine.
Roman’s wide-field infrared view is designed to survey vast regions of the sky with Hubble-like sharpness but on a much larger scale. It will study how the universe has expanded over time, helping researchers test and refine models of dark energy and dark matter. It will also search for planets beyond our solar system and create a more detailed picture of the crowded center of the Milky Way.
That view of our own galactic neighborhood was among the results Fox most eagerly anticipated. Dust obscures large portions of the Milky Way in visible and ultraviolet light, but infrared observations can reveal what lies behind it. Fox said one of Roman’s surveys was expected to uncover roughly 20 billion stars in our galaxy, producing a map on a scale that would have required an extraordinary amount of time with Hubble.
She compared the prospect to seeing one’s own home appear on a digital map for the first time. “Oh my God, that’s our neighborhood,” she said. “That’s where we live.” Roman is also designed as a community observatory. Fox emphasized that its data would become publicly available without a proprietary period and that the mission was developing computing resources and collaborative tools to help researchers work with the enormous volume of information. That approach creates opportunities for professional astronomers, students, citizen scientists, and teams around the world.
The mission’s central questions reach well beyond astronomy: How does the universe work? What is our place within it? Are we alone? “We’re answering questions that people ask,” Fox said, “not just detailed cosmological questions, but big questions.”
Roman’s influence may also extend beyond the discoveries it makes in space. Astrophysics missions demand advances in precision optics, infrared sensors, detector technology, and exceptionally stable spacecraft. Once industry develops those capabilities, they can find uses elsewhere. Fox pointed to applications of infrared sensing in agriculture and Earth observation, as well as the broader connection between advances in imaging technology and medicine.
Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument offers one of the clearest examples of that technical ambition. The technology demonstration is designed to suppress the overwhelming glare of a nearby star so scientists can directly image planets and disks that would otherwise disappear in its light. Deformable mirrors, controlled by about 1,600 actuators, can make extremely small adjustments to the optical system. Fox likened the process to creating a precision eyeglass prescription: the correction must be tailored closely enough to the target to block the star without also erasing the faint planet beside it.
The coronagraph will demonstrate technologies that could help future observatories search for smaller, potentially Earth-like worlds. For Fox, it also represents a recurring pattern in space science: today’s difficult engineering problem becomes tomorrow’s new capability.
When invited to imagine what might be possible another 50 or 60 years from now, Fox did not choose a modest goal. She envisioned an in-situ astrophysics mission beyond our solar system, perhaps a fast probe sent toward Alpha Centauri to study another star and its neighborhood directly. “That is clearly not possible right now,” she said. “But in 1959, it was not possible to put a telescope into space. So let’s see what happens.”
The Coronagraph Instrument on Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Fact Sheet Below
When we spoke, Roman was still waiting on the launch pad. The next day’s launch marked the start of a new phase: commissioning the observatory before it could begin making the measurements Fox was so eager to see. It also continued a much older story of scientists asking questions before the tools exist to answer them, and teams patiently building those tools.
Reporting note
This article is based on Sharife Gacel’s interview with Dr. Nicky Fox, conducted the day before the Roman Space Telescope’s launch, and NASA mission information available in August 2026. Interview quotations were lightly edited for clarity and length without changing their meaning.
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