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Announcing this week of a $255 million contract, the agency said SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy tri-core rocket will launch a new NASA space telescope from Florida in the coming years.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after the first woman to hold an executive position at NASA, is scheduled to fly from the Kennedy Space Center’s Panel 39A no later than October 2026. The roughly $255 million price tag includes launch-related costs; The telescope itself is expected to be in the $3 billion to $4 billion mark.
So far, the Space Coast has hosted three Falcon Heavy launches since the three-core rocket first launched in February 2018. It’s a slower pace than expected for SpaceX’s first heavy-lift vehicle, which typically includes side boosters, landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station , but at least a dozen more are planned until 2026.
With an eight-foot primary mirror, Roman sits on the smaller end of the modern telescope’s spectrum. For example, the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope has a 21-foot primary mirror but it also works on a different kind of mission. Roman will use a much wider field of view to research dark energy, exoplanet and astrophysics research.
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Roman’s wider field of view also means he can observe regions much faster than, say, the Hubble Space Telescope, which could take years to collect images from the same regions due to the “zoom level” of the universe. With all three major telescopes – Hubble, Webb and Roman – operational after 2026, NASA says future observations will be able to take advantage of all three.
“WFIRST surveys do not require that we know exactly where and when to look for exciting discoveries,” Julie McEnery, chief scientist for the Roman Space Telescope, said in a NASA technical document. “The mission will turn on the floodlights so we can explore the universe in a whole new way.”
The telescope was formerly known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, but has been renamed in honor of Roman and her astronomical work at NASA. She played major roles in deploying other space telescopes such as Hubble, for example.
SpaceX’s choice of decade continues to push its manifesto – past and present – far beyond mere communications satellites. The company has been selected for national security missions such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), delivering Artemis program payloads to the Moon for NASA before astronauts reach the surface, and now multibillion-dollar science investigations like the Roman Telescope.
For the latest information, visit floridatoday.com/launchschedule.
Contact Emre Kelly at [email protected] or 321-242-3715. follow him Twitterand Facebook and Instagram at @EmreKelly.
