The Roman Coronagraph Instrument on NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will test new tools that block starlight, revealing planets hidden by the glare of their parent stars. The technology demonstration instrument is shown here – inside a shipping container – on May 17, 2024, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where it was designed and built. Mission team members said farewell to the instrument by signing their names to a flag (featuring the mission logo) on the outside of the container, which carried the instrument from JPL to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. There, it will join the rest of the space observatory in preparation for launch by May 2027.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed by Goddard Space Flight Center, with participation by JPL and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Space and Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.

The Roman Coronagraph Instrument is managed by JPL for NASA and has contributions from ESA (the European Space Agency), JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency), the French space agency CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales), and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. Caltech, in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA. The Roman Science Support Center at Caltech/IPAC partners with JPL on data management for the Coronagraph and generating the instrument's commands.

For more information about the Roman telescope, visit: https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/