Ground station operators at ESA’s space operations centre are preparing for their next major challenge: transmitting back to Earth the data from NASA's future Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled for the second half of 2026, is expected to downlink an unprecedented amount of data: 500 Mb/s at the highest rate, six times more than ESA's Euclid mission, which currently holds the record at 75 Mb/s for a mission located at the Sun-Earth Lagrange 2 Point.

To tackle the Herculean task of collecting this huge flood of data, NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency are putting together the K-band capabilities of their deep-space antennas. ESA will provide support from the New Norcia 3 antenna, which will be completed in the second half of 2025.

In October 2024, NASA and ESA carried out a series of system trials to test the transmission of such a stream of data to ESA ground stations and its transfer to the cloud service provider selected by NASA.