KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — Early Sunday morning, NASA and SpaceX are intending to launch the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope that will help astronomers look for dark energy and other planets.
What You Need To Know
The telescope mission’s mission is to explore the edge of the observable universe, including other planets and dark energy
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will take off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, the company stated.
The launch window opens at 7:10 a.m. ET and will close at 7:30 a.m. ET. The current liftoff time is set for 7:26 a.m. ET.
If the launch is scrubbed, the next attempt will be for Monday at 7:22 a.m. ET.
A new home, but just a million miles from Earth
The Nancy Grace Roman telescope will have a new home at the Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2). Which is about a mere 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from good, old Earth.
The vehicle for this mission is SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which has three first-stage boosters.
One booster has been used for the GOES-U launch in 2019, while the other was used for the Viasat-3 F3 mission in April of this year.
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Those two boosters will use SpaceX’s Landing Zones 2 and 40 (LZ-2 and LZ-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, so expect to hear some sonic booms.
But the center booster will not be recovered.
Getting to know the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope
An artist rending of the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope. (NASA)
The 42-foot (12.7-meter) long space telescope is about the length of a school bus, and its mission is to explore the edge of the observable universe, including other planets and dark energy, stated NASA.
NASA’s Director of Astrophysics Dr. Shawn Domgal Goldman explained a bit more of the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope’s mission.
 
Goldman also shared how the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope will help unravel what dark energy is.
“Dark energy is astronomers’ way of saying energy that we don’t understand. It is, fudge factor in our equations. You get the best astronomers in the world together, they write down equations that predict how the universe should expand over time. And then they’ll measure how the universe has expanded over time. And those two things are not adding up right now,” he shared with Spectrum News.
 
And while dark energy is very mysterious, many people are interested in how the new space telescope will search for exoplanets; planets that are outside of the universe.
Goldman even shared how the latest telescope will help a new one that is being developed called the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a future space telescope that will search for signs of life on nearby exoplanets.
 
NASA shared some details about what exactly the Nancy Grace Roman telescope will be able to do.
“Roman is an engineering marvel designed to map the universe at unprecedented scales. At its heart is a giant panoramic lens known as the Wide Field Instrument, powered by 18 4k detectors that will deliver huge, razor-sharp images, revealing nearly a billion galaxies. Roman will also investigate closer to home, creating a 3D map of our Milky Way galaxy and compiling the most comprehensive census of the stars and planets crowded around the galaxy’s core. This high-speed telescope will generate a staggering 1.4 terabytes of data daily — all publicly available,” the U.S. space agency explained.
The massive telescope is named in honor of Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first-ever chief astronomer and one of the architects of the U.S. agency’s science program. In fact, she was the first woman to hold an executive position at the U.S. space agency.
She is also known as the “mother” of the Hubble Space Telescope.