NASA’s Dark Universe-Seeking Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Launches

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope on board is seen transiting the sun during launch from Launch Complex 39A, Sunday, Aug. 30, 2026, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA/John Kraus

Now on a three-month, million-mile journey to its final orbit, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will soon reveal the universe’s darkest secrets. The mission launched at 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Roman pairs a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to explore vast swaths of the sky and probe deeply into cosmic history. This flagship mission will help astronomers explore dark matter, dark energy, and worlds outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets. Its surveys will support a broad range of research extending far beyond the mission’s main science goals.

“Roman is exactly the kind of success story we want to see across NASA,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Delivered ahead of schedule and on budget, this mission reflects more than a decade of dedication from the NASA workforce and our industry partners. Now, Roman will give us a new atlas of the universe, push the boundaries of discovery, and demonstrate what is possible when America’s space program pairs bold ambition with disciplined execution.”

The ground control team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, began receiving telemetry data from Roman seven minutes after launch. The Falcon Heavy rocket performed as expected, separating from the observatory 31 minutes into the flight. After separating from the center core, the rocket’s boosters safely returned to the launch site for refurbishment.

“Roman will be a discovery machine that will bring us closer than ever before to answering humanity’s most profound questions about our cosmic history,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “With its large field of view and fast survey speeds, Roman will usher us into a new era of discovery and make the invisible visible, setting the foundation for humanity’s search for life beyond our solar system.”

During launch and early orbit, Roman uses the Near Space Network’s ground stations and relay satellites to exchange tracking, telemetry, and command data with ground controllers. About 70 minutes after launch, the Deep Space Network takes over communications and guides Roman toward the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, about one million miles from Earth. Roman connects to that network through the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex in Australia first. Approximately six hours later it will transfer to the Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex in Spain and then to the Goldstone Deep Space Communication Complex in California, ensuring continuous contact with Roman throughout its journey.

The Roman team also confirmed successful deployment of the observatory’s solar panels and lower instrument sun shade an hour and 23 minutes after launch. Within the upcoming days, Roman’s high-gain antenna and visor-like deployable aperture cover will deploy, ground controllers will initiate the first of two-mid-course corrections, and the Coronagraph Instrument will power on. This instrument will demonstrate the technology that future missions like NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory concept could use to image Earth-like planets in the search for life in the universe. Roman’s Coronagraph will take a giant step in that direction by snapping pictures of Jupiter-like planets.

A few weeks into Roman’s voyage, its primary instrument, the Wide Field Instrument, will activate. This 300-megapixel infrared camera has 18 4K detectors, each about the size of a saltine cracker. These detectors collect photons of light that will be decoded into crisp cosmic panoramas. Thanks to the observatory’s rigid design and stable optical performance, it will rapidly scan the sky without needing substantial time between separate observations. The Roman telescope is designed to survey the universe a thousand times faster than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Throughout the rest of Roman’s three-month commissioning period, scientists will run the instruments through a series of calibrations and tests. NASA anticipates releasing Roman’s first images by early 2027.

Roman will send back 1.4 terabytes of data every day, the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission, so far. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and citizen scientists will help sift through it and flag significant findings, which astronomers can then study.

“We’ve never been able to view the universe with eyes like Roman’s before,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA Goddard. “There’s no telling what more we’ll know and have seen by this time next year.”

Roman is the fourth primary mission NASA has launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Earlier this year, the agency’s Launch Services Program worked with SpaceX to accelerate the launch date to accommodate the space telescope’s early completion.

The telescope is managed at NASA Goddard with participation by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a team of scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc., L3Harris Technologies, and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging. Contributions to Roman also are made by ESA, JAXA, the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.

To learn more about the Roman mission, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/roman 

Source: NASA’s Dark Universe-Seeking Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Launches - NASA

Eye Drops That Restore Sight? Meet the Light-Activated Molecules Giving Blind Mice Their Vision Back

For people living with blinding diseases like age-related macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa, the damage usually starts in one specific place: the photoreceptors, the light-detecting cells lining the retina. Once these cells degenerate, the rest of the visual system, the neurons that carry signals to the brain, is often still intact. It’s just left waiting for a signal that never arrives.

A team led by the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) in Barcelona thinks they’ve found a way to give that signal back, without touching a single gene or implanting any hardware.

The researchers developed a new family of molecules called prosthe6, built using a technique known as photopharmacology, essentially, chemistry that can be switched on and off with light. These photoswitchable compounds are designed to mimic what dying photoreceptors normally do: convert incoming light into a signal the retina’s remaining circuitry can use.

In mice that were completely blind, the results were striking. Healthy mice instinctively avoid brightly lit spaces and prefer the dark, a behavior that depends entirely on being able to see. Blind mice lose this preference completely, wandering indifferently between light and dark. After treatment with prosthe6, that instinct came back on its own, with no training involved, under everyday lighting conditions comparable to an overcast day indoors.

Two compounds in particular, prosthe6-12 and prosthe6-15, stood out, and not just for how well they worked. They restored light-driven behavior whether injected directly into the eye or simply applied as eye drops, hours after treatment, with no signs of pain, distress, or structural changes to the eye.

That detail matters enormously. Gene therapies and retinal implants, the leading experimental approaches to blindness so far, are invasive, expensive, and often limited to very specific genetic causes. A drug you could administer as eye drops would sidestep nearly all of that, at least in principle.

It’s still early-stage work, done in mice, and the compounds now need to prove themselves safe and effective for extended use before anything resembling a human trial is possible. But with an estimated 200 million people worldwide affected by photoreceptor-degenerating diseases, a spin-off company is already forming to push this technology toward the clinic.

Sometimes the most elegant solution to “the wiring still works, the sensor doesn’t” isn’t to rebuild the sensor. It’s to hand the wiring something new to listen to.

Original paper: Sortino et al. (2026), Restoration of saccadic eye movements and visually guided behavior in ambient white light with photoswitchable small molecules, Journal of the American Chemical Society. DOI: 10.1021/jacs.5c18611 

Source: Eye Drops That Restore Sight? Meet the Light-Activated Molecules Giving Blind Mice Their Vision Back  

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NASA’s Pandora Mission Begins Study of Exoplanets, Host Stars - UNIVERSE

Pandora, NASA’s newest exoplanet mission and the first satellite to launch through the agency's Astrophysics Pioneers program, is now making unique observations of worlds beyond our solar system and the stars they orbit. The mission will determine the atmospheric make-up of at least 20 exoplanets, including the presence of hazes, clouds, and water.

“Pandora’s data will help close a major gap in our knowledge about planets and their host stars because, right now, we can’t be entirely sure how the star’s light affects measurements of what makes up exoplanet atmospheres,” said Elisa Quintana, Pandora’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We designed the Pandora spacecraft and its in-depth observing program to better understand this vexing issue.”

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Pandora mission, which will help scientists untangle the signals from exoplanets' atmospheres and their stars.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab

Download high-resolution video and images from NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

The results of the mission will lay a firm foundation for interpreting measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, as well as future observatories focused on finding habitable worlds. In fact, Pandora’s near-infrared detector is a spare originally developed for Webb.

"The spacecraft is healthy and all of the instruments are performing as well as we could have hoped,” said Jordan Karburn, Pandora’s deputy project manager at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “Our team’s hard work throughout the commissioning process has paid off, and we can now confidently start science."

This artist’s concept summarizes NASA’s Pandora mission and its science goals. Pandora will repeatedly observe multiple planets and their host stars in both visible and near-infrared light. These measurements will enable astronomers to separate chemical fingerprints detected in a planet’s atmosphere from potentially misleading signals originating from its host star.

NASA/Sophia Roberts

Download high-resolution video and images from NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Launched into low Earth orbit on Jan. 11, Pandora is an ambitious small satellite (SmallSat) funded by NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program. Pioneers are designed to explore compelling questions about the universe with fast-paced, low-cost missions that require a higher-than-usual tolerance for failure. 

Three factors make Pandora unique. It carries a novel all-aluminum telescope about 18 inches (45 centimeters) in diameter, it will study planets and their host stars simultaneously in both visible and infrared light, and it will observe targets for a much longer time than flagship observatories like Webb are able to.

Telescopes can sample a planet’s atmosphere in systems where the planet passes in front of its star as seen from our perspective. During this event, called a transit, some starlight skims the planet’s atmosphere before making its way to us. As this light interacts with atmospheric molecules, their chemical fingerprints become embedded in it. For each molecule, astronomers see brightness dips at characteristic wavelengths. 

But our instruments also see light from the whole star, not just what grazes the planet. Stellar surfaces aren’t uniform. They sport hotter, brighter areas called faculae and cooler, darker regions similar to sunspots. Both can grow, shrink, and change position as the star rotates.

“Water is one of the most important molecules we can measure to understand the composition and physical conditions of an exoplanet atmosphere,” said Benjamin Rackham, a team member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “But features on the star can distort the water signal we’re searching for. Pandora is designed to disentangle the signals from the planet and the star, helping us to understand the planets more accurately and laying the groundwork for the eventual study of planets that could harbor life.”

Watch to learn more about NASA’s Pandora mission, which will revolutionize the study of exoplanet atmospheres.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Download high-resolution video and images from NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Pandora’s telescope, jointly developed by Livermore and Corning Specialty Materials in Keene, New Hampshire, and its detectors make up the mission’s heart. The detectors will capture the star’s brightness in visible light and its near-infrared spectrum at the same time, while also obtaining a near-infrared spectrum from the planet when it transits the star. Over the course of its year-long primary mission, Pandora will observe at least 20 exoplanets 10 times with a long-duration stare covering 24 hours, with a transit included in each observation.

“Pandora’s advantage is its ability to observe targets for extended periods at multiple wavelengths, something high-demand flagship missions like Webb cannot regularly do,” said Knicole Colón, the mission’s project scientist at NASA Goddard. “Combining Pandora and Webb data will uniquely enable scientists to determine the properties of stellar surfaces and cleanly separate star and planetary signals.”

Pandora is led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides the mission’s project management and engineering. Pandora’s telescope was manufactured by Corning and developed collaboratively with Livermore, which also developed the imaging detector assemblies, the mission’s control electronics, and all supporting thermal and mechanical subsystems. The infrared sensor was provided by NASA Goddard. Blue Canyon Technologies provided the bus, performed spacecraft assembly, integration and environmental testing, and is providing mission operations support. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley performs the mission’s data processing. Pandora’s science data is available at the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by IPAC at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The University of Arizona leads mission operations for Pandora and contributes to its science program. Many additional universities also support the science team.

To learn more about the Pandora mission, please visit: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/pandora/ 

Source: NASA’s Pandora Mission Begins Study of Exoplanets, Host Stars - NASA Science

A Two-in-One Nanoparticle That Lights Up Brain Cancer, Then Destroys What’s Left

Glioblastoma has a grim reputation among brain cancers, and for good reason. It tends to weave itself into surrounding healthy brain tissue, which makes complete surgical removal nearly impossible without risking damage to areas surgeons need to protect. The blood-brain barrier compounds the problem, blocking most drugs and limiting how well radiotherapy can reach the tumor. Put those two obstacles together and it’s easier to understand why the five-year survival rate for glioblastoma sits at only around 7 percent.

A team from the University of Technology Sydney, Harvard Medical School, and Henan University has now developed a nanoparticle platform, published in Science Translational Medicine, that tries to tackle both of glioblastoma’s core problems with a single material, one that does its job in two separate acts.

One Material, Two Jobs

At the heart of the system is an ultra-thin two-dimensional sheet, precisely decorated with individual atoms using a fabrication technique borrowed from semiconductor manufacturing. That structure gives the material a kind of dual identity: during surgery, it acts as a highly sensitive imaging agent, and once the visible tumor has been removed, the very same material can be reactivated to mop up what’s left behind.

Both roles are triggered by the same near-infrared light, which is what allows one platform to switch between guiding the surgeon’s hand and finishing the job afterward.

Seeing Tumor Clusters Surgeons Would Otherwise Miss

During the operation, a fluorescent dye engineered into the nanosheet glows under a near-infrared wavelength invisible to the naked eye. According to Dr. Bingyang Shi, who led the work, this allows surgeons to make out individual tumor cell clusters as small as 44 micrometers, a level of resolution beyond what current clinical imaging tools can offer. A targeting molecule attached to the material also helps it cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate specifically in glioma cells, rather than diffusing indiscriminately through healthy tissue.

Then, a Second Act: Cleaning Up What Surgery Couldn’t Reach

Once the visible tumor is out, the same nanomaterial gets a second job. Applied directly into the surgical cavity and reactivated with the same light, it converts the tumor’s own hydrogen peroxide into oxygen, undercutting the low-oxygen environment that glioblastoma cells often rely on to resist treatment. At the same time, the light triggers heat and reactive molecules that go after the microscopic cancer cells surgery physically couldn’t remove.

That second act matters because glioblastoma’s most dangerous trait isn’t the tumor mass itself, but the scattered, invisible cells it leaves behind, the ones responsible for most recurrences.

Encouraging Numbers, With a Big Caveat

In mouse models of glioblastoma, the treatment meaningfully cut down tumor recurrence after surgery. Every treated mouse was still alive 60 days later, compared with a median survival of just 42 days among mice that had surgery alone. Follow-up testing turned up no detectable neurological or motor problems tied to the treatment.

“Professor Shi is careful to frame this as early, animal-only research, encouraging, but still a long way from clinical use, with imaging and therapeutic performance yet to be confirmed at the scale of a human brain.”

If the results hold up through further testing, the long-term hope is fairly intuitive: surgeons could see more of the tumor while operating, and treat more of what’s left behind once they’re done, chipping away at recurrence, which remains one of the toughest problems in glioblastoma care.

Original paper: Shangguan, P. et al. (2026). Spatiotemporal-switchable 2D NIR-II single-atom nanozyme for single-cell–level surgical navigation and glioblastoma phototherapy. Science Translational Medicine, 18(861). 

Source: A Two-in-One Nanoparticle That Lights Up Brain Cancer, Then Destroys What’s Left 

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