SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy heavy-lift rocket carrying NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman space telescope on the first attempt, with no delays, Space.com reports. Liftoff took place on August 30 from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It was Falcon Heavy’s 13th flight, and every one of them has succeeded so far. Shortly after launch, the rocket’s two side boosters separated from the core stage and returned to Earth, landing at U.S. Space Force facilities at Cape Canaveral. The core stage was not recovered on this mission.
Falcon Heavy’s upper stage, carrying the telescope, reached its initial orbit before the engine reignited to set the spacecraft on its final trajectory. SpaceX confirmed a nominal deployment. Separation of the observatory from the rocket was planned for roughly 31 minutes after liftoff.
Roman is headed for a point near the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), located about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope operates in the same region.
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Nancy Grace Roman is designed for large-scale surveys of the universe, exoplanet searches, and studies of dark energy and the evolution of stars and galaxies. Its key advantage is an exceptionally wide field of view: in a single observation, it can capture a patch of sky about 100 times larger than Hubble can. NASA estimates it will conduct wide-area sky surveys more than 1,000 times faster than Hubble.
As part of its core science program, Roman is expected to collect data on more than 2 billion galaxies. In just one month of observing the Milky Way, the telescope could potentially detect up to 20 billion stars, creating the largest catalog of astronomical objects ever compiled.
The observatory is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, who played a key role in establishing space-based astronomy and earned the nickname “mother of Hubble.”
Roman’s primary mission is planned to run for five years after science operations begin. NASA expects that, if the observatory remains in good condition, its operation could be extended for roughly another five years.
