Roman's Dual Fields of View and Area of Best Image Quality

  • Released Thursday, September 10, 2026
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Roman has outstanding stability and image quality. Roman's two instruments, the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph, share the light coming into the telescope and each observes an adjacent portion of the sky at the same time. The wide field detectors are arranged in an arch to match the area of best image quality provided by the optics.

Due to this design, Roman can observe an area larger than the full moon with its Wide Field Instrument while the Coronagraph focuses on individual stars and their planets.

Background image is the Fornax galaxy cluster imaged by WISE. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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This page was originally published on Thursday, September 10, 2026.
This page was last updated on Thursday, September 10, 2026 at 8:23 AM EDT.