Today at 7:26 a.m. EDT (11:26 UTC), the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope was lifted aloft by a SpaceX Falcon Heavy at Launch Complex 39A, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. About a half hour later, the telescope successfully separated from the second stage of the rocket and made the connection via its antenna to NASA tracking stations on Earth.
The coverage leading up to and after the launch included short interviews with the scientists and engineers involved in the mission, including Dr. Nicky Fox, Science Mission Directorate at NASA, serving as the agency’s head of science, who is currently overseeing about 100 current and future NASA projects. As the interview concluded, she was literally bouncing with excitement.
And, there’s a lot to be excited about—the Roman Telescope will give us a view of our Universe never before seen—it covers approximately 100 times the view that Hubble sees, and with the same fine definition. It was designed to discover if our current theories about the Universe are wrong (i.e., the Big Bang, etc.). Whereas we can detect about 6000 exoplanets currently, Roman will be able to detect over 100,000; each image taken by Roman equals about 300 megapixels (by contrast, an average cell phone camera image contains about 12 megapixels). You can “adopt” a pixel at nasa.gov/adoptapixel; the image will be sent to your email when available.
