NASA's Roman Space Telescope Hardware Highlights: Summer/Fall 2025

This video, covering the second half of 2025, opens with a person entering NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s largest clean room, the Spacecraft Systems Development and Integration Facility. The room is a class 10,000 clean room with over one million cubic feet of space. The outside half of Roman, called OSD, contains the solar panels & protective layers. The Deployable Aperture Cover protects the mirrors during launch and then unfolds to help shield them from sunlight does a test deployment. During this test, lines connect to it & pull upward to negate Earth’s gravitational forces, which Roman will not experience in space. Then the Solar Array Sun Shield panels deploy. There are four panels that move. They fold against the spacecraft to fit in the rocket fairing & deploy in space to make a large flat plane that both collects light to generate electricity and helps keep the rest of Roman cool. In preparation for additional testing, technicians put a clean tent over OSD and transport it out of the clean room. They push it into the acoustic test chamber where a six-foot-tall horn projects up to 150-decibel sound at varying frequencies. The other tests are on two vibration tables that shake Roman along all three axes: up/down, left/right & forward/backward. Engineers attach hundreds of sensors and run tests of increasing intensity. During and after each test, they carefully study the data to make sure that Roman is behaving as they anticipated. While these tests occur, Roman’s inside half, containing the mirrors, instruments & support equipment, move into Goddard’s largest thermal vacuum chamber, the SES (Space Environment Simulator). This 40-foot-tall chamber can simulate the vacuum of space & the wide temperature range that Roman will experience there: from -310° F (-190° C) to 302° F (150° C). The move to the chamber happens without a clean tent, so the entire path was cleaned, and all the workers dress in full clean-room garb to ensure that no dirt contaminates the sensitive parts of the spacecraft. Once the two layers of doors are sealed, Roman spends 72 days inside running through tests at various temperatures and with equipment turned on to ensure that it works at low temperature in a vacuum. A special array installed above the mirror projects light that engineers use to test the optics and sensors. After leaving the SES chamber and returning to the SSDIF, Roman’s primary and secondary mirrors are carefully cleaned and inspected. It is a balance to get the mirrors as clean as possible while not cleaning too aggressively and damaging the delicate surfaces. The mirrors are cleaned both horizontally with a gentle vacuum cleaner and vertically with brushes. After this cleaning, every inch is visually inspected and photographed to record the exact optical characteristics. This was the last time the primary mirror would be accessible. Finally, in late November, Roman’s two halves are joined together to form the complete observatory. The process takes the better part of a day. Two guide poles are installed on the inside half to help direct OSD down onto it. At various times, the clearances between the two halves are only a few inches. With the observatory complete, it begins preparing for another round of deployments and testing. On track to launch in the fall of 2026, Roman is NASA’s next flagship astrophysics mission. An infrared survey telescope with the same resolution as Hubble but at least 100 times the field of view, Roman is being built and tested at NASA Goddard. Partners from around the globe are contributing to this effort. Music credit: “Our Journey Begins,” Dan Thiessen [BMI], Universal Production Music Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Producer: Scott Wiessinger (eMITS) Videographers: Sophia Roberts (eMITS) Scott Wiessinger (eMITS) Rob Andreoli (eMITS) John Philyaw (eMITS) Public affairs officer: Claire Andreoli (NASA/GSFC) Editor: Scott Wiessinger (eMITS) Science Writer: Ashley Balzer (eMITS) 0:00 - Roman in the Clean Room 0:14 - Deployment Tests 0:33 - Acoustic and Vibration Tests 1:05 - Thermal Vacuum Testing 1:40 - Mirror Cleaning 1:56 - Joining the Halves This video can be freely shared and downloaded at https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14491. While the video in its entirety can be shared without permission, the music and some individual imagery may have been obtained through permission and may not be excised or remixed in other products. Specific details on such imagery may be found here: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14491. For more information on NASA’s media guidelines, visit https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/. If you liked this video, subscribe to the NASA Goddard YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/NASAGoddard Follow NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center · Instagram http://www.instagram.com/nasagoddard · X http://twitter.com/NASAGoddard · Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/NASAGoddard · Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc