It’s built to study dark matter, dark energy and distant galaxies, but NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could also help spot dangerous asteroids heading toward Earth.

NASA is set to launch Roman from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at the end of August. In September, a multi-institutional team of planetary scientists and astronomers will outline how the telescope could scan asteroids and provide information about their trajectories, sizes and compositions.

Roman is named after NASA’s first chief astronomer. It carries a super-wide-angle, 300-megapixel infrared camera that can see a patch of space roughly 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope at any one time.

That wide field of view is central to the asteroid case. While Roman surveys space to find thousands of new planets, tens of thousands of exploding stars and more than one billion galaxies, it will also be looking through our solar system.

Roman was not built for planetary defense, but Bryan Holler, a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, said the idea took on extra weight after the mission again faced possible funding cuts last year.

“My colleague Rick Cosentino [a planetary scientist at NASA] said to me in July 2025 that we need to show what Roman can do for planetary defense as a way to further increase the visibility of the mission with lawmakers and taxpayers,” Holler says.

Holler and colleagues say Roman’s field of view and infrared vision could allow it to spot small asteroids up to 60 feet long. The proposal will be presented at the Europlanet Science Congress in The Hague in The Netherlands.

Roman’s software would need adjustments to help it find those objects. As designed, the telescope is meant to look through and beyond the solar system to gather clear images of the wider universe.

“Streaks, whether caused by cosmic rays or glitches or asteroids, are caught by the software and discarded,” says Andy Rivkin, a planetary scientist and planetary defense researcher at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

Rivkin said astronomers could instead study those streaks and identify the ones caused by asteroids.

Even then, Roman would not replace other asteroid-hunting telescopes. Its role would be to work alongside the James Webb Space Telescope, which can focus closely on a single asteroid and last year helped track 2024 YR4, briefly the most dangerous asteroid ever discovered.

“But Roman’s field of view is much bigger,” says Rivkin.

That means Roman could check multiple suspect asteroids quickly. “Roman can provide infrared observations of more asteroids than JWST could hope to observe in a reasonable amount of observing time,” says Holler.

If Roman flagged a possible impact risk, other telescopes, including JWST, could follow up. Those observations could help experts judge the likely damage from an asteroid strike or decide if a mission should try to deflect one.

“Roman will sample such a large volume of the cosmos that we’ve long known it will offer vast opportunities for a range of additional science,” says Alise Fisher, the astrophysics communications lead at NASA Headquarters in Washington D.C.

NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office and its partners are mainly focused on asteroids 460 feet long and larger. About 25,000 are estimated to have near-Earth orbits, and just over half have not yet been found.

Astronomers also estimate there are about 230,000 asteroids around 165 feet long orbiting close to Earth, and less than 10 percent have been located.

NASA is also preparing a dedicated asteroid-hunting telescope, the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, for launch in 2027. Positioned between Earth and the Sun, it will search for asteroids that ground-based telescopes cannot easily see, and it will observe in infrared.

Roman could fit into that broader system. Holler said that if NEO Surveyor spotted several asteroids with uncertain orbits, Roman could be directed to a part of the sky containing all of them and sharpen those orbital calculations within days.

“Those slightly different viewing angles will also help narrow orbits down more quickly than if all objects were looking from the same place,” says Holler.

If one object still could not be ruled out as a threat, other telescopes including JWST could then be asked to study it more closely.

“Telescope resources, whether in space or on the ground, are typically oversubscribed and will not be available to follow up on all [near-Earth asteroids] with a non-zero impact probability when they are first discovered,” says Holler.

Roman’s infrared capability could also help estimate an asteroid’s size and indicate if it is stony, carbon-rich or metallic.

“This in turn provides strong clues to the composition and thereby the density and mass of the asteroid, which are important when estimating the impact damage or, less ghoulishly, the effort required to nudge it out of its current orbit,” says Holler.

Read more from MIT Technology Review.