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NASA’s Roman telescope builds a ‘dark hole’ for planet imaging

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October 2, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

On September 22nd, the Coronagraph Instrument aboard NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope observed cosmic light for the first time, beginning an effort to block starlight and enable direct planet imaging. The Coronagraph Instrument is commanded by IPAC, a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary sciences. “We’re all extremely pleased with how well things are working,” says Alexandra Greenbaum, coronagraph data management system lead at IPAC.

“There’s a lot of collaboration that went into this milestone, so it’s wonderful to see all of us working together and to be a part of the team. I’m really looking forward to supporting the rest of commissioning, both on the operations and the data processing.”

Coronagraph Instrument Achieves First Focused Image

The Coronagraph Instrument aboard the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully produced a focused image on September 22nd, validating a key component of its planet-imaging technology. This achievement confirms the instrument can produce a focused image and initiates a series of increasingly complex tests to prepare for future observations of exoplanetary systems. Scientists adjusted the instrument’s focus after confirming the fine-guidance system held it steady, allowing for this initial assessment of its capabilities.

The instrument underwent a meticulous “wake-up” period starting September 1st, during which engineers checked its systems before turning it toward space. The Coronagraph Instrument, designed and built by NASA, functions by blocking out the intense glare of a star, revealing the much fainter light reflected by orbiting planets.

Vanessa Bailey, a Roman Coronagraph Instrument scientist, adds that this is a limited test that begins a methodical process of increasingly complex tasks to prepare for the instrument’s future observations. Over the next three months, both the Coronagraph Instrument and the Roman Space Telescope’s primary Wide Field Instrument will undergo further calibrations and tests. NASA anticipates releasing Roman’s first images by early 2027.

These first tests build toward digging a dark hole on the sky.

Alexandra Greenbaum, coronagraph data management system lead at IPAC
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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