When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches as early as the end of next month, it will carry the first space‑bound “active” coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography. This will allow astronomers to take the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars that are similar to those in our solar system, paving the way for a future mission that could snap the first photos of Earth‑like worlds. “I hope it’s remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for … finding Earth 2.0,” says Brandon Creager, the instrument’s lead mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The telescope will also carry a roughly 300‑megapixel wide‑field camera that will capture images about 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s widest exposures at a similar resolution, helping astronomers unpack the mysterious identities of dark matter and dark energy—and to detect around 100,000 new exoplanets, whose presence can be inferred from the way they distort starlight. Javier Viaña, a research scientist at Harvard, compares the leap to moving from “interviewing a handful of people” to “conducting a global census.”

Roman’s coronagraph will attempt something unseen until this year: before each observation, it will measure leftover light and try to suppress it, a technique known as active wavefront control. The telescope contains two deformable mirrors, each with a 48‑by‑48 checkerboard of actuators that can deform by up to 0.5 micrometers, or about one‑quarter the size of an E. coli bacterium, and in increments as small as approximately 10 picometers. This creates an “active wavefront” that cancels unwanted light, producing a doughnut‑shaped region around the star where we hope to see exoplanets. Compared with current space‑based coronagraphs, the system is expected to improve sensitivity to exoplanets against the glare of their host stars­differently by a factor of 1,000.

The elaborate optics could open a new chapter in direct imaging of exoplanets. Roman could directly image a true Jupiter analogue—a planet similar to Jupiter in mass and circling a sunlike star a few times farther out than Earth is from our sun. Meredith Mac Gregor, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins, says, “We are actually looking at the planet, and that is super powerful.”