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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tA SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket climbs into a clear sky over Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket carried NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to begin a mission investigating dark energy, dark matter, and the population of planets beyond our solar system. Credit: NASA\/Joel Kowsky\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The journey of a million miles began with a successful launch Sunday morning. NASA\u2019s next-generation observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Aug. 30 at 7:26 a.m. EDT.<\/p>\n
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy \u2014 the company\u2019s heavy-lift rocket, composed of three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together \u2014 carried the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope for about 31 minutes before the spacecraft separated and struck out on its own toward the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, known as L2, where it will orbit the Sun in sync with Earth. The $4.3-billion telescope will spend three months in transit before settling into orbit, beginning a commissioning period, then scanning the sky for clues to dark energy, dark matter, and thousands of new exoplanets.<\/p>\n
\u201cRoman is on her way,\u201d NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted to X<\/a> Sunday morning. \u201cYears of work, extraordinary engineering, and one incredible launch. Congratulations to the entire NASA team and our partners who made this mission possible. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is about to open an entirely new window into our universe.\u201d<\/p>\n What is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope?\u00a0<\/p>\n Nancy Grace Roman, NASA\u2019s first chief astronomer, spent her career advocating for space-based observatories. Her namesake telescope started out as a project called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, when the 2010 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey named it as one of the field\u2019s highest priorities. In 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office donated a pair of 2.4-meter wide-field mirrors to NASA that were originally intended for use in spy satellites. One of them was set aside for WFIRST, although NASA didn\u2019t formally greenlight the project until 2016.\u00a0<\/p>\n The first Trump administration proposed defunding it in three consecutive budgets, arguing the telescope had grown too expensive. Congress overruled each request and capped the project\u2019s development-phase costs at $3.2 billion to keep it on track. A fourth threat came in 2025, when the administration\u2019s 2026 budget request proposed cuts of roughly 60% to Roman\u2019s budget; Congress again stepped in, appropriating $300 million<\/a> to carry the telescope to launch. NASA finished assembling the observatory<\/a> in April 2026, under budget and ahead of schedule. Roman left the pad a whole nine months before NASA\u2019s anticipated launch date.<\/p>\n RELATED:<\/strong> How Roman will unlock the universe<\/a><\/p>\n Roman is about 42 feet long (13 meters) and 14 feet wide (4.3 meters) and weighs about 18,000 pounds (8,200 kilograms). At its core sits a hexagonal bus built around a central cylinder<\/a>, which houses the observatory\u2019s power, propulsion, and attitude-control systems.\u00a0<\/p>\n Roman has two instruments on board: the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and the Coronagraph. The WFI gives the telescope a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble\u2019s and will allow Roman to take 300-megapixel images of the cosmos in infrared and visible light. The Coronagraph blocks a star\u2019s light, allowing Roman to directly image faint planets and dusty disks hiding near them.<\/p>\n Most of Roman\u2019s five-year mission will go to three core surveys. The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey will map roughly 5,000 square degrees of sky, tracing dark energy based on how its gravity bends light from distant galaxies. The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will hunt thousands of Type Ia supernovae that astronomers use to measure how fast the universe is expanding. And the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will stare at the crowded center of the Milky Way and is expected to turn up more than 100,000 new exoplanets.<\/p>\n The long road to launch<\/p>\n Last year at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center, the spacecraft endured<\/a> vibration tests, an acoustic chamber replicating the noise of launch, and thermal-vacuum testing before being cleared to make the trip to Florida.\u00a0<\/p>\n Roman traveled by semi-trailer truck to port in Baltimore, packed inside the aptly named 16-foot-tall CHARIOT<\/a> (Conditioned Housing for Air, Road, Imaging optics assembly, and Observatory Transport).\u00a0<\/p>\n Then Roman was loaded onto a barge to complete its journey to Florida by boat, arriving at Kennedy nine days later.\u00a0<\/p>\n Once at Kennedy, technicians fueled the spacecraft with hydrazine. Roman is too big to fly with its solar array and aperture cover unfurled, so engineers folded them flat against the spacecraft to fit inside Falcon Heavy\u2019s payload fairing in preparation for launch.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThroughout the process of Roman\u2019s build, the team \u2026 has been making sure that it\u2019ll all fit well within that fairing. It\u2019s definitely a tight fit \u2026 for Roman here today,\u201d remarked a NASA commentator during the launch\u2019s livestream.\u00a0<\/p>\n Everything was nominal for Sunday\u2019s launch, which went off without a hitch. After NASA handed control of the countdown to Falcon Heavy\u2019s onboard computers, the launch director gave a final \u201cgo\u201d with about 45 seconds left on the clock.\u00a0<\/p>\n Falcon Heavy lifted off right on time at 7:26 a.m. EDT, its 27 Merlin engines producing more than 5 million pounds of thrust (2.3 million kg) to push Roman off the pad. Its two side boosters separated about two and a half minutes later, turned around, and landed back at Cape Canaveral.\u00a0<\/p>\n The payload fairing fell away around four minutes after launch, exposing Roman to space once the vehicle had escaped Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then around 31 minutes after liftoff, at an altitude of roughly 740 kilometers, the telescope separated from the rocket\u2019s upper stage.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cNancy Grace Roman Space Telescope flying free on its way to Lagrange 2,\u201d a NASA commentator announced during the livestream, \u201cand to open a new eye on the universe.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Roman unfurled its solar arrays within the hour. \u201cI could never believe that this moment would actually happen,\u201d said Dominic Benford, the mission\u2019s program scientist, watching from Kennedy, \u201cand it is here, far more beautiful than I could have anticipated.\u201d<\/p>\n Before Roman can begin conducting science work, it still has to get to L2. The telescope will spend the next several months in transit, making at least one mid-course correction and deploying its antenna along the way.\u00a0<\/p>\n Once Roman is in position, the team moves into commissioning \u2014 turning on the instruments and confirming everything works before science can begin. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna be checking out Roman for about a month, and then we\u2019re gonna be aligning and focusing the telescope, making sure we get all the pointing right,\u201d said Jeremy Perkins, a member of Roman\u2019s science commissioning team, in a NASA broadcast during launch. \u201cThat\u2019s where we\u2019re really just checking out the instruments, pointing them at the sky, getting our first starlight on the detectors for the first time.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n NASA expects to release Roman\u2019s first public images in early 2027.<\/p>\n A presidential interruption<\/p>\n Despite his administration\u2019s repeated attempts to cut Roman\u2019s budget, President Trump was clearly excited about the launch \u2014 excited enough that he called Isaacman in the middle of the post-launch press conference to offer his congratulations. Isaacman stepped out of the briefing to take the call, then returned and held his phone up to the microphone.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOkay. I just want to thank everybody and congratulate you. Boy, it looked beautiful on television.\u201d Trump told the room. He added, \u201cJared\u2019s doing a fantastic job, you are doing a fantastic job, and I\u2019m supplying you all that money.\u201d Ars Technica\u2019s Eric Berger noted<\/a> that this kind of presidential enthusiasm is rare for NASA and could work in the agency\u2019s favor as it heads into its next budget fight.<\/p>\n Brooks<\/strong> Mendenhall<\/strong> is a staff writer at Astronomy, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, fueled by an unending curiosity about the universe. A former classroom teacher, he has a knack for breaking down complex concepts for a wide audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket climbs into a clear sky over Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":667177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[18,19,17,1024,93766,133,105640],"class_list":["post-667176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-nasa","tag-robotic-spaceflight","tag-science","tag-space-telescopes"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117196690036744876","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/NHQ20260830_admin_0002large.jpg\")
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy is silhouetted against the rising Sun moments after launching NASA\u2019s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center on Aug. 30, 2026. Credit: NASA\/John Kraus<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Screenshot-2026-08-31-at-1.38.19-PM-edited-1.png\")
NASA\u2019s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope separates from the Falcon Heavy\u2019s second stage in this view from an onboard camera, captured 31 minutes and 46 seconds after liftoff at an altitude of 472 miles (760 kilometers). The telescope was traveling at more than 22,369 mph (36,000 km\/h) as it began the solo leg of its three-month journey toward the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point. Credit: NASA<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/STScI-01HV71YQ7BT2YQRCZ3B383AHCJ.png\")
This diagram maps the five Lagrange points, the locations where the gravitational pull of the Sun and Earth balance out enough for a spacecraft to hold a stable position. Roman orbits at L2, roughly 1 million miles beyond Earth, sharing an orbit with the James Webb Space Telescope (pictured here at L2). Credit: NASA, STScI, CSA<\/p>\n