We just took one final look at NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and now? It’s officially ready for launch.
Roman, NASA’s newest flagship space telescope, is set to launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as soon as Aug. 30. After NASA announced that the telescope was complete back in April, engineers completed their final inspection of the telescope’s primary mirror. With this critical assessment now successfully checked off the list, the Roman team is now preparing to ship the telescope to the Florida launch site.
“The Roman engineering team laid eyes on the telescope for the final time before it, in turn, becomes the eyes of humanity, revealing the wonders of the cosmos,” Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Manager J. Scott Smith, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement. “It is a profoundly humbling moment to witness the culmination of hard work from so many dedicated individuals, teams and partner organizations.”
Roman’s 7.9-foot-wide (2.4 meters) primary mirror will collect and focus light from objects across the cosmos. This mirror is absolutely essential to the telescope’s ultimate success.
“In order to gather very sensitive measurements of objects strewn throughout space, all of Roman’s components have to be ultraprecise,” Bente Eegholm, the optics lead for Roman’s Optical Telescope Assembly at NASA Goddard, said in the same statement. “The primary mirror certainly delivers on that precision.”
Engineers took this last look at the mirror to make sure everything was perfect back on May 20. To complete this final check, the team took a number of critical steps to ensure that, not only is everything in its right place, no unexpected changes have sprung up during the testing period.
First, the engineers turned the telescope on its side and unfurled the “hood” that will shield the mirror while in space (though this hood will be stowed for travel to Florida and for launch). In this configuration, they were able to visually check to make sure that no debris of any kind made its way onto the mirror during testing. The team then moved on to confirm that the mirror’s alignment and path remained intact and in the exact right configuration.
Part ofRoman’s completed prelaunch prep work was a “shake test,” which makes sure that the scope can handle not just its time in space but the rocket launch that will take it there. So the team had to ensure that this test didn’t knock anything out of place. To confirm this, they followed the optics along the same path that light will follow from the mirror to the telescope’s Wide Field Instrument, its primary science instrument.
“We developed a method of using a high-resolution camera equipped with a very powerful zoom lens to do a multi-purpose inspection,” Eegholm said. “The mirror passed with flying colors, keeping the mission on track for an early September launch.”
While the telescope has been on track for an early September launch, the telescope could be ready to launch even sooner — as early as Aug. 30, according to SpaceNews’ Jeff Foust.