WASHINGTON - In a stunning display of punctuality that will surely confuse the aerospace industry, NASA's next flagship space telescope is set to launch in late August, a full nine months ahead of schedule. Because apparently, some projects can actually finish early and under budget.
At a July 29 briefing, NASA officials confirmed they are targeting an Aug. 30 launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to lift off at 7:26 a.m. Eastern from the Kennedy Space Center. That's early, but not as early as the telescope itself.
“The project is right where we need to be as we approach launch,” said Jackie Townsend, project manager for Roman, with the calm confidence of someone who hasn't been up all night fixing a fuel leak.
Last week, workers finished loading the spacecraft with propellant - the fancy juice that will push it to the Earth-Sun L-2 Lagrange point and keep it there. The NASA team will soon start joint ops with the SpaceX team, with encapsulation into the Falcon Heavy payload fairing expected in about three weeks. Encapsulation: when you gently wrap a billion-dollar telescope in a giant clamshell, essentially.
These preparations have kept Roman well ahead of its formal launch readiness date of May 2027. Project officials credit careful planning and adherence to a cost cap. Yes, a cost cap. In a government project. We're as shocked as you are.
“Complex things are hard to bring in on schedule and on budget, and this team has lived within its resources and is delivering nine months early,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, calling it “an amazing feat.” We'd call it a miracle, but we'll take it.
Townsend said a review in early July confirmed readiness for post-launch operations, including commissioning. “We’ve practiced and tuned up the plans and the procedures, and training the staff with 50 mission readiness tests encompassing more than 1,100 hours of operational time, using the exact staff who were going to be on console during launch and commissioning across the first 100 days,” she said. That's a lot of rehearsal for a show that's mostly automated.
Once launched, commissioning begins with deployment of solar panels and sunshield, followed by a maneuver at the end of day one to set course for L-2, said Jeremy Perkins, Roman telescope integration and test scientist. Then, engineers will check out other subsystems, deploy the high-gain antenna (designed to downlink 1 terabyte of data a day - yes, that's a lot of space selfies), and start snapping images with the 2.4-meter main mirror to calibrate the telescope.
Commissioning should wrap up about 100 days after launch, when Roman reaches L-2 and can start its main survey mission. Unlike other telescopes where astronomers beg for observation time, Roman will conduct broad surveys. “What we did over the last few years was to work with the scientific community all over the world and ask them for their ideas on how we should use Roman,” said Julie McEnery, senior project scientist for Roman.
“Then we put everything together to try and design three really large surveys that address the cosmology, that address the exoplanet studies, but that maximize the science,” she said. Those surveys will run during Roman’s five-year primary mission.
McEnery also noted that Roman will complement the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which recently started its own sky survey. Rubin sees visible light; Roman sees infrared. “When we got to the point of deciding how we were going to use the observatories, Roman’s surveys are optimized to overlap with Rubin’s because it is so valuable to combine observations with Roman and Rubin together,” she said. “We really are siblings embarking on a life of exploration at the same time.” Siblings who are definitely going to share their toys, we hope.