NASA targets a September launch for its next big space telescope

NASA’s next eye into the cosmos is due to leave our planet later this year. The agency says it’s targeting an early September launch for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Roman (for short) has a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble’s.

The September date is the earliest possible launch for Roman. NASA says it will go up (aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket) no later than May 2027.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after NASA’s first chief astronomer and “mother” of Hubble, was introduced in 2016. (Back then, it was known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST.) The telescope’s mirror is roughly the same size as Hubble’s, but it can capture sections of the sky at least 100 times larger than its predecessor.

“Roman will work in tandem with NASA observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, which are designed to zoom in on rare transient objects once they’ve been identified, but seldom if ever discover them,” Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist, …read more