NASA launches Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Falcon Heavy

NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday, Aug. 30.

The telescope launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

Liftoff was from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The rocket flew from Launch Complex 39A.

Liftoff was at 7:26 a.m. Eastern.

The mission is a $4.3 billion project.

Roman is NASA’s newest flagship space observatory.

The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman.

Nancy Grace Roman was NASA’s first chief astronomer.

Nancy Grace Roman was known as the Mother of Hubble.

Roman was instrumental in winning congressional approval for the Hubble Space Telescope.

Nancy Grace Roman died in 2018.

Roman uses a Hubble-class mirror originally built for a spy satellite.

The telescope separated from the rocket about 31 minutes after launch.

Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters landed back in Florida.

The rocket’s central booster was expended.

It was the 13th launch of Falcon Heavy.

The telescope began deploying solar panels after separation.

Project manager Jackie Townsend said the ride was magnificent and put the spacecraft where they wanted.

Roman is headed to the Earth-sun L2 Lagrange point.

L2 is about a million miles from Earth.

The L2 perch is meant to keep Earth and moon infrared light from interfering with the cameras.

Roman will join the James Webb Space Telescope at that region of space.

The trip to L2 is expected to take about three months.

Sources put the cruise to L2 at about 100 days.

The James Webb Space Telescope launched in 2021.

The Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990.

Roman’s prime science mission is planned for five years.

The observatory has enough propellant to operate about 10 years.

The observatory is about the size of a bus or tour bus.

The main camera is a 300-megapixel wide-field imager.

Roman’s field of view is about 100 times larger than Hubble’s.

Roman can survey the sky about 1,000 times faster than Hubble.

A month-long Roman survey would take about a century with Hubble.

Three primary surveys are planned, including dark-matter and dark-energy programs.

Surveys are expected to cover about 2 billion galaxies.

Roman is expected to catalog about 20 billion stars.

Astronomers expect Roman to find on the order of 100,000 exoplanets.

The mission is expected to find thousands of supernovae.

About 6,000 exoplanets have already been identified.

Roman is expected to return about 1.4 terabytes of data per day.

The data are to be made public with little or no proprietary delay.

Roman carries a coronagraph to block starlight and image exoplanets.

The coronagraph is meant to detect planets about 100 million times fainter than their stars.

The coronagraph is expected to detect Jupiter-size planets around nearby stars.

A core science goal is to study dark energy.

A core science goal is to study dark matter.

Dark matter and dark energy together are thought to make up about 95% of the universe.

Dark energy is the force thought to be accelerating the universe’s expansion.

President Trump called into NASA’s post-launch news conference.

Trump told the team they were the hottest in space.

Trump said the launch looked beautiful on television.

The Trump administration had proposed canceling or cutting Roman, and Congress kept funding it.

NASA officials said a goal is answering whether humans are alone in the universe.

Nicky Fox said the coronagraph would be a leap toward resolving exoplanet atmospheres and habitability.

One possibility is that dark energy’s properties change as the universe expands.

Roman may help address the Hubble-tension discrepancy in expansion measurements.

Engineers will commission the spacecraft and instruments on the way to L2.