NASA's newest telescope has a top secret past

August 28, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

A Spy Satellite Turned Space Telescope

In a hangar in Rochester, New York, a fully built spy satellite sat unused—a classified asset the National Reconnaissance Office had no mission for. Then NASA got a call. The agency's astronomers had been planning a new telescope to hunt for exploding stars, but the government's spy satellite agency offered something unexpected: instead of pointing this hardware down at Earth, why not point it up at the cosmos? That phone call, made about fifteen years ago, set in motion what is now the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope—a $3.2 billion observatory scheduled to launch at the end of August that was originally designed to be a surveillance satellite.

From Spying to Science

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Episode Intro and Guest Welcome** - Regina Barber introduces the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and former NPR science correspondent Joe Palka.
2 (00:22) **The Spy Satellite Secret** - Joe reveals the Roman telescope was originally built as a spy satellite by the National Reconnaissance Office.
3 (01:28) **The Origin Story: From Spy Satellite to Observatory** - Astronomers wanted a telescope to find Type Ia supernovae (standard candles). NASA got a call from the NRO offering an unused satellite; instead of pointing down at Earth, it would point up at the stars.
4 (03:03) **Mystery of the NRO's Donation** - Details are murky because the NRO was once so secretive the government didn't admit it existed. The satellite was sitting in a hangar in Rochester, New York.
5 (04:00) **Modifications and Key Instruments** - The main mirror was already built. The telescope has two main instruments: a coronagraph (to cancel out star light and see planets) and a 300-megapixel infrared wide-field camera.
6 (05:57) **Roman vs. Hubble: The Speed Advantage** - Roman has the same sensitivity and sharpness as Hubble but a much wider field of view. A survey of the Milky Way that would take Hubble a century would take Roman one month.
7 (06:49) **A New Model for Astronomy** - The telescope is designed for surveys, not individual proposals. Anybody—from a high school teacher in Kentucky to a Princeton professor—can access the data at the same time.

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Guests on this episode

Julie McEnery

Show Notes

The new Nancy Grace Roman space telescope is slated to launch this weekend. It was originally built for the National Reconnaissance Office as a spy satellite, but was never launched. Instead, NRO gave it to NASA about 15 years ago. After some major modifications, it’s set to begin its five-year mission peering at new supernovas, distant galaxies and planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. It should help scientists get a better understanding of the mysterious force known as dark energy – which will tell us about the fate of the universe.

If you liked this episode, check out Regina’s reporting demystifying the mysterious red dots spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Interested in more space news? Email us your question at [email protected].

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