After nearly a decade of development, NASA’s next big telescope is almost ready to travel into space. The agency has set August 30 as the launch date for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. That puts the project about eight months ahead of its original schedule and, according to NASA management, significantly under budget.
“With less than three months to go, the Roman team is now completing its tasks,” NASA said in a blog post. “Engineers are currently preparing Roman for a trip from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida later this month.”
Once at the launch site, the telescope will undergo a detailed inspection to verify that it has not suffered any damage during transport. Engineers will then fuel it with about 290 gallons of hydrazine and perform several dress rehearsals before launching it into space.
The destination of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, located about 1 million kilometers from Earth, on the far side of the Sun. The region is a gravitational sweet spot that allows spacecraft to maintain a relatively stable position while orbiting the sun alongside Earth.
Livestream details are expected to be released closer to the launch date. The broadcast will likely be available on the NASA app, YouTube and Netflix, which has an agreement with NASA to carry launches, spacewalks and other live programming.
With its wider field of view, the Roman telescope promises to see a large part of the universe.
NASAWhat is the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope looking for?
The telescope is named for astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first female leader and an instrumental voice in the telescope’s planning and construction. Hubble Space Telescope.
The two telescopes share more than just a connection with Roman. Both use 2.4 meter mirrors and can produce images with similar sharpness. But Roman is designed to see a much larger part of the sky at once, capturing images at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s. Observatories also specialize in different wavelengths of light: Hubble observes ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared light, while Roman focuses on visible and infrared wavelengths.
The Roman telescope can see as much space in just two images as Hubble can in over 400.
NASANASA envisions Roman and Hubble working hand in hand. Roman will scan huge swathes of the sky, discovering objects and phenomena that can then be examined in more detail by Hubble. By combining Roman’s panoramic surveys with Hubble’s more focused observations, astronomers hope to build a richer picture of the cosmos.
During his mission, Roman is expected to observe more than 100 billion stars and billions of galaxies, detect tens of thousands of supernovae and transmit nearly 1.4 terabytes of scientific data to Earth every day.
