The 43-foot-tall observatory traveled inside a protective transport case nicknamed the “Chariot,” disembarking from the barge shortly after 7 p.m. EDT (2300 UTC) following thunderstorms that delayed its departure by about an hour. The spacecraft is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy. “She was a key person in our exploration of space. She understood that in order to better understand the universe, you have to go in space,” said Lucas Paganini, the program executive for Roman. “That’s why she’s called the ‘Mother of Hubble’ because she made Hubble possible.”<\/p>\n
The observatory will travel to the south end of the KSC campus to the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where it will undergo checkouts, fueling, and encapsulation inside the payload fairing of the Falcon Heavy. The August 30 launch date was moved up from an original September target. “A lot of credit to this great team. They’ve been able to accommodate schedules, to accelerate to be able to launch earlier,” Paganini said.<\/p>\n
The journey from Massachusetts was not without difficulty. Roman mechanical engineer Neil Patel, who traveled with the observatory, said the spacecraft must stay below 74 degrees and that its two cooling units, a primary and a redundant one, struggled to hold the tolerance. “They just weren’t getting the job done down here, so we had to make a stop, add additional rental units,” Patel said. He credited an emergency team that came down to install additional units that maintained the temperature.<\/p>\n
Roman is designed to operate near Lagrange Point 2, about 1.5 million km from Earth on the side opposite the Sun, for a minimum of five years. Paganini said the onboard propellant will likely allow it to last for 10 years or more. The telescope carries a 300 megapixel camera called the Wide Field Instrument, featuring 18 detectors, developed by BAE Systems, formerly Ball Aerospace. It also features a coronagraph instrument developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to observe the faint light of exoplanets near their stars.<\/p>\n
According to Paganini, the Wide Field Instrument will allow observations at least 100 times wider than Hubble at the same resolution and 1,000 times faster. “What takes Roman a year to observe, it would take Hubble thousands of years,” he said. He added that Roman will help scientists better understand dark matter and dark energy, which he calls the “dark universe,” including whether the universe’s accelerating expansion is changing. “We’re trying to understand a very human question, which is where do we come from and where are we heading in this universe that is our neighborhood?” Paganini said.<\/p>\n
The observatory now enters its roughly 70-day prelaunch campaign, culminating in fueling and encapsulation before launch from Launch Complex 39A no earlier than August 30. This marked the Pegasus barge’s second trip to Florida this year, following its delivery of the propellant tank section of the Artemis 3 Space Launch System core stage in late April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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