Roman Space Telescope on track for late August launch
NASA's next flagship space telescope is set to launch in late August, nine months ahead of schedule.
At a July 29 briefing, NASA officials said they are working toward a launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Aug. 30. Liftoff of the Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the spacecraft is scheduled for 7:26 a.m. Eastern from the Kennedy Space Center.
"The project is right where we need to be as we approach launch," said Jackie Townsend, project manager for Roman, at the briefing.
Last week, workers completed loading the spacecraft with propellant that will be used to maneuver the spacecraft to the Earth-Sun L-2 Lagrange point and for stationkeeping there. The NASA spacecraft team will soon start joint operations with the SpaceX launch vehicle team, with encapsulation of Roman into the Falcon Heavy payload fairing expected in about three weeks.
Those launch preparations are keeping Roman well ahead of schedule. The mission has a formal launch readiness date of May 2027, but project officials said this spring that careful planning as well as adherence to a cost cap allowed the mission to get well ahead of schedule.
"Complex things are hard to bring in on schedule and on budget, and this team has lived within its resources and is delivering nine months early," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division, calling that work "an amazing feat."
Townsend said the project completed a review in early July confirming its readiness for operations after launch, including commissioning the telescope.
"We've practiced and tuned up the plans and the procedures, and training the staff with 50 mission readiness tests encompassing more than 1,100 hours of operational time, using the exact staff who were going to be on console during launch and commissioning across the first 100 days," she said.
That commissioning will start immediately after launch with the deployment of the spacecraft's solar panels and sunshield, with a maneuver at the end of the first day of operations to put the spacecraft on course to L-2, said Jeremy Perkins, Roman telescope integration and test scientist.
After that maneuver, engineers will continue checking out other spacecraft subsystems and deploy its high-gain antenna, designed to downlink 1 terabyte of data a day. They will also start taking images using the spacecraft's 2.4-meter main mirror to calibrate the telescope.
The commissioning should be complete about 100 days after launch, when Roman reaches L-2. That will allow the spacecraft to begin its main survey mission.
Unlike other telescopes, where astronomers submit proposals to make observations of specific objects, Roman will instead carry out broad surveys. "What we did over the last few years was to work with the scientific community all over the world and ask them for their ideas on how we should use Roman," said Julie McEnery, senior project scientist for Roman.
"Then we put everything together to try and design three really large surveys that address the cosmology, that address the exoplanet studies, but that maximize the science," she said. Those surveys will be carried out during Roman's five-year primary mission.
McEnery added that it will be complementary to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a large telescope in Chile that recently started its own survey of the night sky. Rubin observes at visible wavelengths while Roman can see in the infrared.
"When we got to the point of deciding how we were going to use the observatories, Roman's surveys are optimized to overlap with Rubin's because it is so valuable to combine observations with Roman and Rubin together," she said. "We really are siblings embarking on a life of exploration at the same time."
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