NASA's Roman Telescope: How James Webb's successor will map universe with colossal amounts of data

The James Webb Space Telescope is continuing to unravel the beauty and mystery of the cosmos since delivering its first images in July last year - but the mission to deploy the next big space telescope is already well underway.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be the next big space telescope to launch following the deployment of the latest NASA telescope, which itself was the successor to the still-active Hubble telescope.

Roman’s launch will usher in "a new age for astronomy," one of the European Space Agency (ESA) scientists working on the project told Euronews Next; it will gather more data than any other NASA mission launched before, and attempt to answer some of the biggest questions in astrophysics.

Scheduled to launch by 2027 at the latest, it will be able to capture "a more panoramic view of the universe and to allow more statistical studies," explained Marco Sirianni, ESA’s Science Operations Development Manager who is working on the project with NASA.

While a NASA-led mission, ESA is contributing some of the technology and expertise to the mission, in return for access to the unprecedented amount of data that it will deliver.

Here’s a look at what to expect from the next big NASA space telescope.

While Hubble and Webb are extremely good at zooming in to get a detailed look at small parts of the sky, Roman is going to have a much wider field of view.

It will be able to create infrared images that are 200 times larger than Hubble while providing the same rich level of detail with its similarly sized 2.4-metre diameter mirror.

So while it will be able to produce "exquisite" images, the likes of which we have gotten used to from Hubble and Webb, it is mainly "going to be a telescope dedicated for surveys," said