The giant, 40-ft. space telescope resting in the airtight, climate-controlled clean-room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., wants nothing to do with the microscopic dust particles clinging to your clothing. So before you enter the room, you first must stand in a chamber that blows high-powered, compressed air at you from head to toe, sweeping you clean. Next you dress up in surgical scrubs—booties, head covering, mask, blouse, and pants—and pass through a series of doors that take you into successively more-sterile ante rooms. Only then, when your dust can pose no danger to the delicate machine in the center of the room, can you join the Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope on the factory floor. There, technicians are busy completing its assembly in preparation for its launch in May 2027 to a spot in space close to 1 million miles from Earth. From there it may transform our understanding of the cosmos.

“The vast discovery power of this telescope is going to expand our window of knowledge by orders of magnitude,” says Jamie Dunn, the Roman telescope’s project manager. “You’re going to have a tremendous amount of data available to tens of thousands of scientists. It’s just mind-boggling.”

“We [will be able to] move quickly and map out very large areas of the sky,” adds Josh Schlieder, the telescope’s wide-field instrument scientist. “We [will] detect hundreds of millions of galaxies to very high accuracy with very deep imaging.”

Roman will indeed do all that and more. The telescope will be able to look at a patch of sky 100 times larger than both the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope can. It will be able to peer up to 13.2 billion light years away, collecting images of the 13.8-billion year old universe when it was just 600 million years old. The 18 detectors in its wide-field infrared imaging camera are equipped with 16 million pixels each, providing exquisite image resolution. And its 5.6 ft. (1.7 m) high-gain antenna will be able to send a firehose of pictures and data back to Earth at unprecedented speed. What’s more, all of this data will be open-source—available to the world.

“Roman will deliver one terabyte of data a day,” says Rob Zellem, deputy project scientist for communications. “That’s the equivalent of one gaming computer a day.”

That gusher of findings will include new observations of exoplanets—or planets orbiting other stars; new surveys of the structure of the Milky Way; and new studies of dark energy, the mysterious, invisible force that causes the universe to expand continuously at an ever-accelerating rate.

“Part of our core science for Roman is to do surveys that allow us to measure the properties of very large numbers of galaxies throughout cosmic history,” says Schlieder, standing just feet from the Roman telescope on the clean-room floor as bunny-suited technicians tend to it. “By measuring their positions, their velocity, how fast they're moving toward or away from us and their shapes, we'll be able to place new constraints on the properties of dark energy.”

The telescope has a lot of assembly and other work ahead of it before it finally takes to space atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket two years down the line and begins to perform that work. It may be getting pampered today but it will be punished before long as it goes through testing—set to begin late this spring—to ensure that it can tolerate the harsh conditions of deep space and the violent, high-energy shaking that the Falcon will subject it to as its 27 engines light, putting out 5 million pounds of thrust.

“The testing includes electrical testing; vibration testing; acoustical testing, to simulate the sound of a launch; and a thermal vacuum test, [in which] we take it in a big chamber, pump out all the air, and go through warm to cold temperatures, to test out all of its components in a real space-like operating environment,” says Schlieder.

Only if the $4 billion telescope survives that pounding will it get its chance to leave the planet. In keeping with the potentially epochal science Roman will perform once it’s in space, NASA has decided to fling its findings and discoveries open to the world. Typically, the data returned and the discoveries made by space observatories like Hubble and the Webb have a period of 6 to 12 months during which they are available only to the astronomers who did the work. Roman’s findings will be made immediately available to the public—lay people and scientists alike—on a universally accessible website. That’s because Roman’s huge field of view will allow many astronomers—and non-astronomers—at once to gather data from uncounted regions of the sky, with no single principal investigator directing the observation.

“We will not have individual teams that get proprietary access to the data,” says Schlieder. “The data will be obtained, it'll be downloaded to the Earth, it'll be processed, and it will be posted in an archive for anyone to go grab and do what they want.”

“Every single Roman observation will have huge and broad science return,” adds Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist. “The Roman surveys are defined collaboratively by the science community and collectively owned by the science community.”