Roman Opens Its Eye

First starlight from Roman, a shorter fuse on the Solar System, weapons in orbit, and a globular cluster hiding behind the dust Roman opens its eye — and finds it has twice as long to look NASA has activated the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera built around eighteen detectors, with a field of view at least a hundred times larger than Hubble's infrared field — a patch of sky bigger than the full Moon in a single exposure, at Hubble-comparable sharpness. The instrument reached its operating temperature of −143 °C on 11 September; detectors and the calibration system came up across the 11th and 12th; the element wheel turned in microgravity for the first time on the 12th; the focus mechanism was verified on the 13th. Roman then took its first starlight image — deliberately out of focus, and exactly as intended: a baseline diagnostic that proves the optical path is clear and every detector is live. Sharp science images are expected by early 2027. The Coronagraph Instrument has completed initial communications checkout from Caltech/IPAC and is running 30-day decontamination cycles at room temperature. Separately, NASA published the numbers from Roman's first mid-course correction: better than 99% accurate, using about 18 kg of a 200 kg propellant budget, on a spacecraft that launched lighter than its allowance. Jamie Dunn (Goddard): Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations, against a design life of ten. Caveat kept on air: that is a fuel figure, not a funding or hardware figure. Why it matters: Roman's High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey measures cosmic expansion with Type Ia supernovae, and its High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey probes cosmic acceleration across more than 5,000 square degrees through weak lensing and galaxy clustering — two independent handles on the dark energy question that Monday's Australian-led supernova compilation sharpened but could not settle. A doubled mission means a longer lever arm in time, which in this measurement is everything. Caltech: the Solar System's dynamical fuse is far shorter than we thought Konstantin Batygin, Jim Fuller and Fred Adams (Caltech), 'Terminal instability of the Solar System triggered by stochastic solar mass loss', arXiv:2609.12494, posted 11 September and accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The standard estimate for how long the giant planets hold their architecture — about 10¹⁸ years — assumes the dying Sun sheds