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3h ago

NASA’s Roman Telescope Mated to Falcon Heavy, Cleared for Aug. 30 Launch

The observatory will head to the Sun–Earth L2 point where months of deployment and calibration will set the stage for wide, public surveys that could reshape cosmology and exoplanet science.

The 27 Merlin engine nozzles of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket suspended inside a hangar during preparations for NASA's Roman Space Telescope launch
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NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is about to change how we see the universe

Overview

  • Mission teams completed prelaunch briefings and mated the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy at Launch Complex 39A, with liftoff targeted for Aug. 30 at 7:26 a.m. EDT.
  • Weather is the principal near-term risk for the first window with forecasters giving roughly a 50% chance of acceptable conditions for the scheduled launch.
  • If launched, Roman will fly about 1 million miles to Sun–Earth L2, spend roughly a month in transit and about 100 days deploying and commissioning its instruments before routine science begins.
  • Roman’s Wide Field Instrument will capture Hubble-class resolution over a field more than 100 times larger, producing roughly 1 to 1.4 TB of data per day that NASA will make publicly available with cloud-based tools.
  • The mission will map dark matter and probe dark energy with large galaxy and supernova surveys, run a vast exoplanet census using microlensing and transits, and test coronagraph starlight-suppression technology developed from a repurposed NRO satellite design.