Artwork showing the Nancy Roman Space Telescope, formerly the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. Credit: NASA
This telescope is in the early stages now, with engineering models being built to test out the design. Scheduled for launch in the mid-2020s (which seems aspirational, but shouldn t be too long after that) and costing about $4 billion (including the first five years of mission costs), it s based on what NASA calls legacy hardware and concepts, ideas and tech developed for previous missions that have been shown to work.
Roman is very similar to the Hubble Space Telescope: It will sport a 2.4-meter primary mirror, the same size as Hubble s. But it will have a far, far wider field of view, meaning it will see larger chunks of the sky. How much bigger? In a single image it will see