More than a thousand technicians and engineers assembled Roman from millions of individual components. Many parts were built and tested simultaneously to save time. Now that the observatory is assembled, it will undergo a spate of testing prior to shipping to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in summer 2026.
Learn more at Building Roman.
Music credit: “Unseen,” by David Husband [PRS], Universal Production Music
Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.
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It starts with the spacecraft bus and then adds the instrument carrier. Then the Coronagraph Instrument joins, followed by the mirror assembly and the Wide Field Instrument, completing the main half of the observatory. The outer portion, which contains the outer barrel assembly, solar array Sun shield, and deployable aperture cover, slides over the exposed mirror to complete the full observatory. This animation includes a version with a transparent alpha channel. || Roman_Assembly_Still.jpg (3840x2160) [377.3 KB] || Roman_Assembly_Still_searchweb.png (320x180) [18.8 KB] || Roman_Assembly_Still_thm.png (80x40) [2.3 KB] || Roman_Asssembly_1080.mp4 (1920x1080) [61.6 MB] || Roman_Asssembly_4k.mp4 (3840x2160) [308.1 MB] || Roman_Asssembly_ProRes_3840x2160_60.mov (3840x2160) [3.7 GB] || Roman_Asssembly_ProRes4444Alpha_3840x2160_60.mov (3840x2160) [7.1 GB] || ", "release_date": "2026-02-20T12:00:00-05:00", "update_date": "2026-02-19T21:19:23-05:00", "main_image": { "id": 1201936, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a014900/a014970/Roman_Assembly_Still_searchweb.png", "filename": "Roman_Assembly_Still_searchweb.png", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "This animation shows key systems assembling to form NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It starts with the spacecraft bus and then adds the instrument carrier. 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