On September 21, NASA successfully powered up the Roman Space Telescope’s (RST) massive 300-megapixel infrared camera, the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), reported Science Daily. The Coronagraph Instrument has also been ‘woken up’ and all systems are operating perfectly.
The Wide Field Instrument spent ten days drying out and decontaminating, its detectors held at a comparatively warm –85°F (–65°C). Then came the thrilling part: on September 11, engineers shut off the heater and let the WFI plunge to –225°F (–143°C), the temperature at which its 18 infrared detectors can finally come alive. At that frigid point, the team activated the full detector array—an exquisitely sensitive surface roughly the size of a laptop screen. That evening, they powered up the calibration system, preparing the instrument for its first tests. By the next morning, engineers were already sending data through the WFI and receiving it back on Earth, marking the moment Roman’s giant camera truly began to wake up.
Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument is packed with some of the most advanced planet imaging technology ever sent into space, and the latest tests show it’s waking up beautifully. The system’s optics, masks, self flexing mirrors, and sensors are all designed to crush starlight so we can finally see the faint glow of planets orbiting nearby stars. Engineers at Caltech/IPAC have now confirmed they can talk to every major subsystem—software, thermal controls, mechanisms, cameras, and avionics. Even better, ground teams successfully commanded the instrument’s movable parts, including the mechanisms that position its masks, filters, lenses, and prisms. In short, the coronagraph is responding exactly as it should, and we can now control its precision components from hundreds of thousands of miles away. This is a huge milestone on the path to directly imaging distant worlds.
On September 25, NASA announced that all ground stations supporting the RST are prepared and awaiting the mission’s extremely high volume of data—up to 500 megabits per second—once science operations begin in early 2027. The ground stations span the globe, and include NASA’s Near Space Network in New Mexico, the ESA (European Space Agency) in Australia, and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) in Japan.
“Recent testing ensured that these stations will be able to receive approximately 1.4 terabytes of data that Roman will downlink each day, the highest rate of any NASA astrophysics mission so far, from Roman’s final location a million miles away in space, noted NASA.
“To confirm this capacity, scientists began drawing down ‘housekeeping’ information.”
Bob Kalogerakos, a radio frequency engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland noted that this is real, operational data—everything from instrument temperatures and power levels to the very first preliminary images. It’s the moment we know the hardware is alive, talking to us, and behaving exactly as it should—not bad for a spacecraft that is currently more than 850,000 miles (or 1,371,487 km) away from Earth.
