NASA's $4.3B Roman Telescope Launches Sunday
NASA's $4.3B Roman Telescope Launches Sunday
The News
NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday, a $4.3 billion flagship observatory built to survey hundreds of millions of stars and billions of galaxies.
Liftoff is scheduled for 7:26 a.m. ET from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
The mission is launching nine months ahead of schedule — a rarity for a NASA flagship, and one the agency pulled off despite the Covid pandemic and the government shutdowns of this year and last, two of the longest in U.S. history.
Timeline
Nancy Grace Roman is born. She goes on to become NASA's first chief of astronomy in 1959 and a driving force behind putting telescopes in space.
The Hubble Space Telescope launches. Roman's work winning congressional approval for it earns her the nickname "mother of the Hubble Space Telescope."
Roman dies. NASA names its newest flagship telescope after her in 2020.
The James Webb Space Telescope launches to L2, the spot roughly 1 million miles from Earth where Roman will join it.
NASA begins live launch coverage on its website and other platforms.
Scheduled liftoff from Kennedy Space Center.
Reactions
"Some of our longest-standing mysteries in modern astrophysics are: What is the nature of dark matter and the nature of dark energy?" astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History, told NBC News. "We have ideas, but we don't know what they are. This telescope is going to try to give us the best data available to address those questions."
Coverage across the spectrum has treated the launch as a milestone rather than a fight — center, center-left and right-leaning outlets alike are framing Roman as the next step after Hubble and Webb.
What's Next
After launch, Roman spends more than three months traveling to L2, a gravitationally stable point about 1 million miles from Earth where the pull of the sun and Earth balance out.
Then comes a five-year mission built around three primary surveys. The largest, running over a year, will peer through the Milky Way's dense galactic bulge and build a vast catalog of what it finds. The second and third target dark matter and dark energy.
Over the mission, NASA expects Roman to uncover more than 100,000 planets around other stars.
More
Roman is designed to survey more sky than any space telescope before it. It can scan the sky 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and each of its images captures a patch of sky at least 100 times larger than one of Hubble's.
Dark matter is the invisible material thought to make up most of the matter in galaxies, detectable only by the gravity it exerts. Dark energy is the force scientists believe is accelerating the expansion of the universe. Neither has ever been directly observed.
Space-based telescopes get clearer, deeper views than ground-based ones because Earth's atmosphere absorbs certain wavelengths of light and distorts others.
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