NASA brings the two instruments of its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into alignment in orbit

13 November 2026

NASA has reported that the team running the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has brought the observatory's instruments into precise alignment, a step that takes the mission closer to science operations. The optics and the instruments had been aligned on the ground before launch, but the shaking of lift-off, the change in temperature and the move to microgravity shifted them slightly, and those shifts were measured in test observations. The Wide Field Instrument, which carries eighteen detectors, is both the primary instrument and the guider that tracks stars so the telescope can point and hold steady. On the Coronagraph Instrument the team adjusted the secondary mirror and a smaller connecting mirror, and the next step is to exercise more than three thousand moving parts in its deformable mirrors. Roman has to be at least ten times more stable than Hubble or Webb. The Space Telescope Science Institute at Baltimore and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are among the teams on the work, with Dominic Benford as program scientist at NASA Headquarters.