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Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

19 hours ago
2 min read
Smiling elderly woman in blue points at a Hubble telescope display in a museum, with a space exhibit behind her.
Dr. Nancy Grace Roman with a replica of the Hubble Space Telescope

The Telescope

The Hubble Telescope is one of the most well known of Earth’s satellites and for good reason. It’s taken some of the most iconic pictures of space and galaxies located thousands of light-years away.

In the 1960s, Dr. Nancy G. Roman championed Orbiting Astronomical Observatories (satellite telescopes) and pushed for NASA astronomers and engineers to develop a “super telescope” to better map the cosmos. Years later, in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24th by the Space Shuttle Discovery to fulfill her dream.


Now, as the Hubble’s capacity isn’t exactly at the height of technology, NASA is sending the next generation telescope. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after the “mother of the Hubble” herself, will have a field view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s, and have the ability to block starlight to have a clear view of exoplanets. These traits will allow a planetary “census” that counts any nearby planet systems and hopefully answer questions about dark matter and infrared astrophysics.



The Rocket

The SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is not only a powerhouse (with 27 engines!) but also mostly reusable. As a whole, the rocket produced over 5 million pounds of thrust and reached Max Q (moment of maximum mechanical stress on the rocket) only a minute and eight seconds into the flight.

NASA rocket on launch pad beside a dark service tower under blue sky, framed by trees, ready for liftoff.
SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket

The rocket launched at 7:26AM on Sunday, August 30th. At 2:27 minutes, the side boosters separated from the main rocket in order to return back to Earth to be reused. 5 minutes and 13 seconds later, both boosters landed vertically back on Landing Zones 2 and 40.


Second stage engine cutoff (SECO-2) happened at 26:32, and the NGRST was released into orbit 31:31 after liftoff. At the time of writing this article, the satellite is 1,354,704 km from Earth on it’s journey to explore deep space.


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