The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA's next great observatory, is finally complete

Three large solar panels hang in the back of a cleanroom warehouse room where two workers dressed in white suits stand in the foreground.

GREENBELT, Md. — On Tuesday (April 21) here at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, I watched as scientists stood proudly around a metal contraption with towering orange solar panels and a sparkling silver base. Gleaming right before me in a sterile white clean room stood the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — at last, complete.

"I very much hope, and in fact, expect, that the most exciting science from Roman is going to be the things that we didn't expect, that we couldn't predict, but that will set the new deep questions for future missions to address," Julie McEnery, senior project scientist of Roman said during a press conference on Tuesday.