'It's going to do things that currently are impossible': The Roman Space Telescope, NASA's next great observatory, is ready to launch Aug. 30 - Space

What the report says

Space.com reported that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is being prepared for an Aug. 30 launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, with liftoff scheduled for 7:26 a.m. EDT. In a July 29 status briefing at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, agency officials said the $4 billion observatory is ready and running nine months ahead of schedule.

According to the report, Roman has been loaded with hydrazine fuel and is next set for encapsulation inside the rocket fairing. After launch, the telescope is intended to travel to Lagrange Point 2, about 1 million miles from Earth, where it would operate in a stable orbit also used by the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA officials said Roman is expected to perform course corrections en route and enter its final L2 orbit around day 100, with fuel planned for at least five years of station-keeping and momentum-management maneuvers.

Roman is designed to combine Hubble-like sensitivity and image sharpness with a much wider field of view. Space.com cited NASA scientists saying Roman could gather more than 500 terabytes of data each year, exceeding Hubble’s roughly 400 terabytes over about 35 years. A month-long Roman survey of the Milky Way would take Hubble about a century, the report said.

The observatory’s Wide-Field Instrument is expected to support large surveys of galaxies, dark matter and dark energy, while a coronagraph will help advance direct imaging of exoplanets. Roman is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy and a key advocate for what became Hubble.