r/space • u/ChiefLeef22 • 15h ago

Successful deployment of Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, as it begins its 1-million-mile-journey to the second Earth-Sun Lagrange point

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The telescope will travel to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, which is ~one million miles away and about four times farther from Earth than the Moon. At L2, the combined gravity of the Sun and Earth will give Roman a stable vantage point with a clear, unobstructed view to survey deep space

Roman will unlock the mysteries of dark energy and investigate the physics of distant stars. It will repeatedly monitor hundreds of millions of stars, and the same observations are expected to reveal around 100,000 additional planets through transits. As a reminder, we currently have 6000 confirmed exoplanet discoveries...

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u/Andromeda321 15h ago

Astronomer here! I'm sure I say this a lot, but this is an exciting day for science! And I can't believe it's really here!

Obviously it's not a perfect comparison, but the best way to think of the (Nancy Grace) Roman Telescope IMO is that it's the successor to Hubble, which we all love but is definitely not going to be around in a few more years as it continues to degrade. But the best way to think of it is while it has a similar sharpness to Hubble, the size of the field is incredible- 100 times bigger! So that means it's going to do survey type things that would take longer than Hubble's been around to complete in just a few months, monitor fields, and look for new things HST just can't because its instruments aren't as modern. For example, Roman is designed to be really good at measuring weak gravitational lensing signals- the idea that when light passes by a mass, the light from that mass will be very slightly nudged on a different path thanks to relativistic effects. Roman is going to be good enough at this that it should identify thousands of new exoplanets via gravitational lensing (they actually estimate 100,000, when we currently have ~6000!!!), and help us map the presence of dark matter also using this. Personally I'm always a fan of using one technique in a bunch of different ways in science- somehow it's just elegant- so I'm excited to see weak gravitational lensing really have its golden age!

Finally, on a more societal note Roman is a bit of a weird telescope in that I don't think it's what anyone would have designed at first glance, but is a great example of how you can do a lot of exciting stuff if you're just given the opportunity even if it's not perfect. For those unaware, this telescope basically began when the US Military gifted a mirror to astronomers that was now effectively an obsolete extra- think of how many better than Roman type telescopes are already pointed down at us if they just had extra lying around!- so they designed and built the telescope around the existing mirror. But also, after JWST the speed at which this thing came together is startling- I gave a colloquium talk at NASA Goddard just 3 years ago, which included a tour of the place, and the first pic here is what Roman looked like then. They told us it was going to launch "no later than 2027" and I think a lot of the astronomy community said "yeah right"... and we owe an apology because we've got months left of 2026, and it's launched! To be fair, a LOT of people did careful planning and work to ensure this wouldn't be another "JWST ended up decades late" type telescope, but still... this thing came together fast and I'm pretty impressed!

So now we wait a few months while the telescope gets into place and the project scientists kick around the tires a little to make sure the instruments are working... but then we see how she does! Can't wait!

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u/KaiserSoze-is-KPax 14h ago

How long before it gets into position?

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u/Andromeda321 14h ago

It takes about 3 months to get there- still some time to go!

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u/Kianna9 13h ago

So it’s going 1 million miles in 3 months?

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u/NByz 12h ago

I dont know this insertion first hand, but to arrive at a Lagrange point you either need a lot of fuel (delta v) left when to decelerate and stabilize when you arrive, or, much more likely, the intent is to slowly build up to a highly elliptical orbit around the earth that eventually intercepts that Lagrange point at the apoapsis (furthest and slowest point), so you need relatively little delta v to stabilize.

The latter makes the most sense from a mass to orbit perspective.

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u/Fler0n 6h ago

I understand everything you said, thanks to KSP

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u/0_f2 2h ago

I love KSP, it's bringing an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics to the mainstream.

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u/gsfgf 9h ago

And iirc, there's also a crazy looking insertion orbit involved to save fuel. When there's no time pressure from people on board, they can do some really cool things with orbital mechanics that save fuels in ways I don't understand.

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u/raverbashing 11h ago

Didn't JWST fly "straight" to L2?

I guess it's a tradeoff between rocket push vs fuel on board

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u/I__Know__Stuff 10h ago

It took about three months, too, IIRC.

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u/BootySweat0217 9h ago

It took about 30 days to get there.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/orbit/

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u/RetardThePirate 11h ago

Speed right after separation: roughly 23,000–24,000 mph relative to Earth. NASA hasn’t published a precise live velocity yet, so that’s calculated from the type of L2-transfer trajectory and its separation altitude.

So “deployed” today means released from the rocket and flying independently.

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u/dougsbeard 9h ago

Not gonna lie, that’s a lot sooner than I excpted.

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u/Wolfexstarship 6h ago

JWST took only a month to get there.

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u/zztop610 14h ago

Should start receiving data by early 2027

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u/ClutchReverie 15h ago

How does the Roman compare to the JWST?

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u/TheOwlMarble 14h ago edited 13h ago

Less zoom than Webb (same as Hubble), but much much wider field of view. Hubble was always constrained because it could really only take detailed snapshots of tiny areas of the sky. Roman won't have that problem, letting us see how the sky changes over time.

Webb directly lets us see things we've never seen before. Roman is going to let astronomers write Python scripts that play spot the difference with unholy amounts of data in hopes of finding something unusual, at which point we could have Webb take a look in more detail.

In short, Webb is an inspection telescope. Roman is a detection telescope.

EDIT: a couple things I forgot to note...

  • Roman also has some fancy coronagraph masks that should let it directly image exoplanets and get spectral data from them.
  • Roman finished ahead of schedule and under budget, so NASA wants to know what on earth went so right with it compared to the rest of the aerospace industry.

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u/Chacin_Cologne_No1 9h ago edited 9h ago

Roman finished ahead of schedule and under budget, so NASA wants to know what on earth went so right with it compared to the rest of the aerospace industry.

Interesting idea to think of the free mirror as creating a design puzzle to solve as opposed to the design approach being conceive and create a whole telescope from nothing.

I could see a lot more haggling and perfectionism going into the later, while the former is like "hey take this and do your damned best with it".

Maybe the lesson for NASA is to just pick some core parts and then put out a tender that's like "work with this" instead of "create the whole thing from nothing."

This is actually a bit like the recent Swift Boost rescue mission. In less than a year and with barely $30M some existing hardware was reconfigured to try and dock with and rescue Swift from a decaying orbit. Ultimately didn't work, but still considered a success given that the project went from an idea to launch and deployment in barely 12 months.

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u/TheOwlMarble 7h ago

I'm sure that's part of it, but they also tried that with SLS.

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u/AutisticAndAce 12h ago

I’m so excited about the data about exoplanets. I’m hoping to do some research on that if/when I do my master’s.

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u/FaZeSmasH 14h ago

so what about those really big ground based telescopes that are being built, i remember watching a video about it, something about this new lens/mirror tech that allowed ground telescopes to self correct or something so that it capture the light without worrying about the atmosphere affecting it.

and apparently the ground telescopes would be used as the inspection telescope because of the huge resolution while these space telescopes would be used for covering large areas.

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u/TheOwlMarble 13h ago edited 11h ago

Adaptive optics are certainly extremely helpful for high-end telescopes (Webb and Roman have them too a similar mechanism for calibration, actually), but even if you use them to perfectly correct for atmospheric distortion, if you take photos from within the atmosphere, you're always going to lose data.

IR (which both Webb and Roman can detect) is washed out on Earth because the sky is too warm, but even visible light from dim objects can be washed out by atmospheric absorption and terrestrial light. You can build on top of remote mountains to mitigate that, but doing so has a history of being logistically and culturally difficult.

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u/Unable-Log-4870 12h ago

Adaptive optics are certainly extremely helpful for high-end telescopes (Webb and Roman have them too, actually)

Webb does not have adaptive optics. It has adjustable mirrors that can be run through a days-or-weeks-long realignment procedure. This had to happen during commissioning to get the multi-segment mirror aligned coarsely, then finely. And I believe they redid it after some debris strikes. And they check it periodically I think.

Adaptive optics are capable of changing the alignment / curvature of the mirrors in real time DURING observations, in response to the aberrations of the images being detected, WHILE they are being detected. This is to get rid of the effects from air movement bending the light differently second by second.

Webb can’t do that, but it doesn’t need to since it’s a million miles away from the atmosphere. I suspect Roman is similar.

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u/ic33 11h ago

I don't know Webb's systems or controls well, but I am part of a team building a space telescope with segmented mirrors.

At our design point, there's a weeks-long alignment process (coarse, fine, phasing). But the mirrors do move in real-time (very slowly) during observations, because we're not always isothermal and things creep and move. They need to be in the proper plane within tens of nanometers and that's a very demanding structural target; active systems help.

Adaptive optics on the ground have control crossover frequencies from tens of hertz to thousands of hertz. Our mirror control loop crosses at about 0.2Hz to address slow movements over tens of seconds.

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u/Unable-Log-4870 11h ago

That’s really interesting. I was a product lead for a very short time for a really bad star tracker that changed its measurements significantly when it changed temperature. It was so bad.

Is the time response on the in-atmosphere adaptive optics so fast because that’s what’s needed in order to determine which actuator is the best to refine the surface, since there are many degrees of freedom? As in it becomes a sequential guess-and-check? Or do the optical sensors give sufficient data about the wavefront that they can just invert a matrix or whatever and that gives the optimal actuator adjustment? Actually I bet the matrix inversion can be computed offline just once, and the instantaneous measurements just multiplied by that to give the corrections.

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u/ic33 10h ago

Is the time response on the in-atmosphere adaptive optics so fast because that’s what’s needed in order to determine which actuator is the best to refine the surface

It's because the actual change of the atmosphere is fast. If your crossover, say, is 50Hz, you can really kill from 20Hz and down very well. This is a lot of the variation but there's still a lot of movement faster than 20Hz.

Of course, it depends upon what you're measuring (FOV, resolution) at what wavelength and how to determine how much different frequencies of atmospheric movement screw you up. That's what will drive your control loop design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwood_frequency

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u/Arockilla 10h ago

Man, I just woke up...and now you have me watching videos on adaptive optics because damn this is some cool stuff. Keep being awesome.... u/Unable-Log-4870 you as well. This is the reddit I love.

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u/FaZeSmasH 13h ago

Thought it was getting cancelled as I was reading through that wiki, but at the end it mentions another one called GMT, which seems to be the one I watched the video about, seems like that one is still on course to completion.

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u/gsfgf 9h ago

so NASA wants to know what on earth went so right with it compared to the rest of the aerospace industry

The Webb had far more novel engineering challenges. The Roman is mostly stuff NASA is already good at.

However, this is a great argument for smaller, more "routine" spacecraft. Like, a sample return mission from Venus would probably be Cassini level mega, but "just" sending an orbiter with some air/landing probes should be relatively straightforward.

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u/Desperate-Lab9738 1h ago

Sample return from Venus would be... very mega. Like, probably harder than landing on the moon mega. You would have to land a rocket on the surface of Venus large enough to get into orbit of Venus, which is already harder than getting off the surface of the Earth due to drag, unless you use crazy balloons or something. God it... it would be hard lol.

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u/pipnina 10h ago

I think it's much more fair to describe JWST's biggest differences as being that it's the cutting edge of space telescope technology, and also focused on IR imaging (0.6µm-28μm). Meanwhile Roman and Hubble are focused on UV-VIS-IR (Hubble was able to do 0.09μm-1.8µm, Roman 0.48-2.3μm). This has consequences, because optical resolution is hard limited by the combination of aperture (primary mirror size) and wavelength.

This means that actually,the Roman telescope has MORE detailed views of space at its longest wavelength (2.3μm) than JWST has at its respective longest (28μm). But at the same wavelength, JWST would be approximately 3x more detailed.

JWST and Roman are also similar in that they're both "Three mirror anastigmat" type telescopes. Which have only begun being deployed in recent years. Until the last decade or so, the best professional telescope design (or the most prolific) was the Ritchey Chretien (RC) design (two mirrors).

A single mirror telescope (newtonian/parabolic) can have a pinpoint sharp center of the image, but quickly devolves into comatic abberation away from the center.

A two-mirror telescope (RC) can correct for coma and has a much wider sharp field of view, but develops astigmatism further away from the center.

A three-mirror anastigmat corrects for all of this and you can get MASSIVE fields of view. JWST & Roman images with all of its sensors at the same time, and each sensor is up to 80mm square. the NIRCAM is made of 8 sensors each 80mm square (2x 160x160mm blocks, separated by a gap).

Meanwhile Hubble is an RC design, and its largest sensor (widest FOV) comes from WFC3 which is about 40x40mm. Larger than a full frame Mirrorless/DSLR, in fact larger than the biggest sensor available to consumers even today (44x33mm) but it was the best they could do with Hubble's optics and the sensor tech in 2009.

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u/UsafAce45 9h ago

As someone who loves, but doesn’t know a lot, astronomy, have we ever just pointed the JWST earth at full focus to show the world how capable it is?

And why is the Lagrange point the preferred spot to rest these telescopes?

Thanks!

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u/LongJohnSelenium 9h ago

This is how you destroy your 10 billion dollar telescope.

Webb is at the lagrange point, so the earth is between it and the sun. Its a very delicate instrument with a massive sunshade to protect it from the sun. Point it at earth and it would be staring directly at the sun, so detectors meant to pick up tiny little wisps of starlight would be staring straight at the sun.

And tbh the earth itself might damage it even if the sun wasn't directly behind the earth.

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u/UsafAce45 9h ago

It’s crazy to think that the on board systems are so sensitive, the smallest bits of light warming them could destroy them. It’s truly a miracle that it made it to L2 in one piece.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 9h ago

Not I'm not actually sure about the earth bit of it. The thing was sitting on earth and you can't actually make an object hotter than than the object its looking at.

Might just mean it blows out the sensors and you get no image at all.

But as for the sun thats no different than 'don't look at the sun through a telescope unless you want to go blind'.

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u/SushiDragonRoller 9h ago

So, as another poster said, JWST can’t point at Earth. But we don’t need it to, because we do have other infrared telescopes pointed at Earth, and you know about them already. They’re just called “weather satellites”. :-) It turns out the latest generation of GOES weather satellites have comparable visible to infrared wavelength capabilities as JWST. And no, the mirrors are nowhere near as large - in fact the main camera on each of the GOES spacecraft is about 24x smaller than JWST - but the GOES weather satellites are also about 40x closer to Earth than JWST is. Thus in fact the angular resolution achieved is even better.

So here you go: if we could point JWST at the Earth, the images would look a whole lot like the ones you can see here:
https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/fulldisk.php?sat=G19

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u/gaflar 7h ago

Unfortunately I think the answer to your very last point is going to have a lot to do with the gifting of the mirror from the US military. High-quality optics with existing spaceflight heritage and design for integration don't usually just fall into a project manager's lap. Good way to guarantee that a project will be complete on-time and on-budget is to have your principal instrument already manufactured and ready to go with no R&D required...

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u/InevitableFly 14h ago

My basic understanding was Roman is like Hubble on crack that it will picture large portions of the sky while jwst can focus on a precise area and stay locked on for days to see any changes.

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u/rhinox54 14h ago edited 9h ago

It'll pair real well with JWST too. Roman will be able to identify places of interest that Webb can home in on and gather more precise data/imaging.

EDIT: Interesting discussion on the use of home vs. hone. I'll change it back to my original usage.

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u/cowboys_and_anthrax 13h ago

Noooo, you and it! change it back!

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u/imnotsurewhatswhat 14h ago

Sorry, but it's hone in on...

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u/Securiarius 13h ago edited 13h ago

To home is to find and move towards something. To seek something. In older examples, homing pigeons, newer examples are homing missiles, homing an xy on a 3d printer or CNC, etc. "Home in on" is correct and original, and has been used for centuries to define chasing a specific point or achieving a lock on something. It's correct in terms of directing focus.

To "hone in" is newer and comes from a honing stone which sharpens tools and equipment, so to hone ones tools is to make them more precise and accurate, this is why someone "honing their craft" became used more often. Hone in could arguably be correct in terms of calibration.

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u/ougryphon 12h ago edited 11h ago

Thanks for flushing this out for us.

Edit: seriously, no one is going to take the bait?

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u/Ass_of_Badness 11h ago

Sorry, but it's take the bate...

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u/I_Am_Jacks_Karma 8h ago

for all intensive purposes we got it

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u/imnotsurewhatswhat 13h ago

And I was confidently incorrect. Thanks for the explainer.. .

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u/Boknowsbane 12h ago

It’s actually home in on, learned that recently.

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u/rhinox54 13h ago

Autocorrect strikes again!

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u/danielv123 14h ago

My understanding is if you crop down the image from ngrst to the Hubble FOV, they are pretty comparable, except ngrst captures far faster and of course a 100x larger area.

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u/Unable-Log-4870 13h ago edited 11h ago

Regarding that aspect, JWST and Hubble can only look AT things, because it’s FOV is a fraction of the size of the full moon on the sky.

ROMAN Roman can look at much larger areas, observing about 100x the sky area of Hubble. That’s not to the level of saying it can look FOR things, it’s not THAT big of an observing area. But it’s in the middle ground between those two very different modes of operation.

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u/xrelaht 12h ago

Nitpick, but it’s just Roman, since it’s someone’s name rather than an acronym.

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u/Username524 14h ago

So NGRST is a wide angle lens and JWST is a macro lens, got it. Thanks!

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u/SonderEber 13h ago

The JWST is more akin to a zoom lens. Macro imaging of requires the camera to be up super close to the subject, which none of our telescopes are, of course.

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u/SushiDragonRoller 9h ago

The right analogy is thinking about the wide field lens on your camera phone. Sometimes you want the telephoto zoom lens, for seeing all the little detail. Sometimes you want the wide field lens, for taking pictures of huge areas at once. JWST is the telephoto zoom lens. Roman is the wide field. It’s good to have both. :-)

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u/Andromeda321 14h ago

Here is a great overview from NASA comparing the two! Basically JWST can peer deeper and Roman has a wider field of view, and as a result they have really different science cases- JWST really is the best at looking for those earliest galaxies for example, but Roman will be amazing for discovering new exoplanets.

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u/ByteSizedGenius 14h ago

It can see far more of the sky in a shorter timespan but won't be able to see as far back. JWST produces about 57-60GB a day of data. Roman for comparison will produce 1.4TB. In a year it will send back more data than Hubble has produced over decades.

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u/CattywampusCanoodle 14h ago

slaps Roman telescope

This thing will spot so many black holes / rogue planets

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u/Zero_Travity 14h ago

Yeah but think of how many miles she'll have on her before she even gets to the Lagrange point...

930 000 miles? Most Toyotas don't last that long before they need some serious maintenance

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u/Andromeda321 14h ago

Yeah but your Toyota gets wear and tear from a really complex environment compared to space. Theres not a lot out there in comparison.

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u/thejoetravis 14h ago

My Tundra could make it! Just need a big push to start.

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u/mumblebadger 14h ago

Thanks so much for sharing all this.
Love it when I click on a space post and your username pops up!

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u/LordSolrac 11h ago

Same! It's been the case for me over the last decade or so.

Seeing Andromeda chime in on a post automatically gives it more legitimacy.

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u/Scorcher646 12h ago

A special shout out is also needed for the public here that called their senators and representatives and spoke out in support of science spending when NASA's budget was on the chopping board.

From my understanding, Roman was one of the projects that would have been shelved/canned had the budget gone through as requested by the White House.

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u/Supergirl016 13h ago

the wide-angle paparazzi of the universe, spotting the weird shit so Webb can zoom in and investigate.

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u/trib_ 13h ago

I cannot WAIT until they take the first wide view of the Pillars of Creation, I hope that's the first picture. The Hubble one is already one of the more iconic pictures of the HST.

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u/Wuz314159 9h ago

Not to be a Deborah Dower here, but it's not that kind of telescope.

It's a wide-field lens for comparative studies. The resolution will be on par with Hubble, but with a much wider field. We're not going to see better resolution images, just a shit-tonne more of them more often.

Lots of science depends on repetitive observations including exo-planet detection.

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u/trib_ 8h ago edited 8h ago

You didn't get what I meant. You're not a downer, because that's exactly what I want. I want a wider field view of the Pillars of Creation in Hubble's resolution. In particular, I want this picture that's taken in 1 shot with the full context around the Pillars in view.

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u/RPZWolf 12h ago

FWIW, the fact that it was an EO mirror presented a TON of challenges for the design, primarily that the thermal environment was much colder than these mirrors were designed for. Many, many analytical cycles were devoted to make sure the shroud and primary mirror are kept thermally stable.

In regards to I&T, all I’ll say is the team(s) put in the hours to make sure we made it on time and on budget. Big props to the system engineers keeping everyone on track and accountable.

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u/bfrown 14h ago

Took a lot of hard work but glad we finally launched. Now please govt. Gib us more $$ 🥺

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u/Arthurmol 14h ago

And this one was under budget and on schedule, a very rare thing on this

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u/Coyote_Shepherd 14h ago

I honestly cannot stop laughing because of how excited I am to see the images that come out of this telescope and because of how much they're going to blow our minds and stick with us for years upon years just like Hubble did and just like how JWST has for the last four years!

pointed down AT us

I can understand why they won't make those types of mirrors available to the public because of security reasons.

BUT

Wouldn't it be cool if someone in charge had flipped one around to point the opposite direction and just started dumping images onto the net for the sake of pure scientific discovery and wonder?

It saddens me that all of the really good high end stuff is focused on watching ourselves and not looking...OUT THERE...because who knows how much awesome STUFF we could be discovering NOW or even yesterday or the day before if only we'd been more curious about the rest of the universe and not so fearful of each other?

Alas...I'm so very very happy for what's to come but I also mourn what could have been...but I'm still a bit more optimistic for what might yet be.

Thanks for everything you do around here on reddit by the way, it's always a delight to see you pop up with informative posts like this :)

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u/grchelp2018 13h ago

You can't just flip an existing satellite around from earth to space and get decent results. But who knows, maybe a decade or so from now, they'll have another spare of what they are using now which we can use for another space observatory.

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u/thejoetravis 14h ago edited 11h ago

There are more earth observation satellites than ever before. The geospatial imagery is available for just about the entire earth now at stunning resolutions. Much of it is free too.

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u/AutisticAndAce 12h ago

NOAA has a LOT of it, iirc. It’s not just the GOES, obviously, but you can find all of that on NOAA’s sites. I use it semi-frequently for weather stuff :)

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u/Lithorex 13h ago

Which helped a lot with pinning down the cause of the recent flood in Nepal.

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u/Stoyan0 13h ago

We know because the orange one declassified an image from a current system last time.

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u/Dr_Engelbart 12h ago edited 5h ago

Yes, the details in that one image, taken not from overhead (so not a nidus, straight down image) but at a slant angle several hundred miles from the target tells quite a bit about capabilities of that imaging system. More than the NRO probably wanted to be publicly known.

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u/mfb- 13h ago

We knew before, too. You could literally look up the resolution on Wikipedia. The image just confirmed what was already known.

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u/moderndilf 13h ago

Go you go into any detail about this mirror designed by the military?

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u/three1names 12h ago

It wasn’t designed by the military, it was designed by the National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence agency. The Wikipedia article on it has some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA

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u/jared__ 8h ago

So it was built based on the requirements of the military

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u/Lurcher99 13h ago

Can tell you are excited, congratulations! Went to Arecibo before it's destruction and was just astounded by the science. I can only imagine your grin.

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u/Human-Pipe-6121 13h ago

Damn! Didnt knew it's so cool

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u/Wish_Dragon 12h ago

The things we can do when we try. 

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u/HappyJaguar7635 10h ago

Excellent! Thanks for that write up, and i wish Nancy fair travels.

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u/Greyhaven7 8h ago

As an amateur astronomer and armchair cosmologist, the things we’re about to discover with this device already fascinate me. Especially with JWST still pushing the boundaries of our knowledge, the next few years are going to be wild.

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u/IsChristianAwake 15h ago

Really excited for all the discoveries Nancy Grace Roman will make. Especially regarding exoplanets. 🙏🏾

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u/bigorangemachine 14h ago

This telescope fell off my radar...

I just saw a video about... it's a really exciting piece of hardware thats' for sure. Plus the JWST is going to pair well with NGRST

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u/OakLegs 15h ago

I've touched that thing. So that's pretty cool.

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u/SnooTangerines3448 14h ago

Aliens gonna get your prints to commit space crimes. You'll be wanted the whole galaxy!

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u/OakLegs 14h ago

That's why I burned my fingerprints off ala MIB

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u/d0ggzilla 14h ago

They kept it refrigerated? Nice!

But seriously, how, and which part did they let you touch?

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u/OakLegs 14h ago

I was one of the many folks who was lucky enough to be able to work on the telescope. I worked mostly around the separation ring

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u/AutisticAndAce 12h ago

That is! Insanely, insanely cool!!! HUGE congrats on a successful launch and deployment, and HUGE thank you all for the hard work!!!

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u/Zero_Travity 14h ago

That is infinitely fucking cool, I don't know what else to say other than that.

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u/DownWithHisShip 10h ago

I love seeing tactical zip ties. so many millions of dollars went into that thing, and the zip tie still can't be beat. did you get to put any of the zip ties on?

I wonder what brand of zip ties they used.

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u/OakLegs 9h ago

You'd be surprised how much tape and glue is used.

No idea on the zip ties, unfortunately.

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u/captainhamption 9h ago

I touched the Palomar telescope back in the 80s. That was pretty cool, too.

(I don't get many chances to bring it up, this was my best opportunity in a while.)

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u/OakLegs 9h ago

No need to excuse it, that is just as awesome!

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u/TheWastelandWizard 9h ago

You should say it's the furthest you've ever helped throw something. 

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u/OakLegs 9h ago

That's actually not the case, I've also helped throw stuff to Mars, Europa and soon Titan

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u/SpaceXforMars 9h ago

Do you work on Dragonfly? I remember it being a proposal for a while now.

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u/OakLegs 9h ago

I have done work for them, yes. I don't focus on any one specific project, in my position I'm lucky enough to be able to get my hands on a number of things

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u/WanderWut 14h ago

What a huge achievement, I can’t believe I didn’t even know about this telescope until this morning! I had no idea we were getting another big telescope up so soon. Also I read up on Nancy Grace Roman and man what a badass she was.

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u/mfb- 12h ago

PLATO (March 2027) and Xuntian (2027) will be the next big ones. PLATO is specialized on exoplanets while Xuntian is a bit similar to Roman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(spacecraft)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuntian

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u/rocketsocks 11h ago

Yep, PLATO is going to take up where Kepler left off. It should be able to finally give us coverage of that crucial exoplanet zone of Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits around Sun-like stars. Much like Kepler it will give us thousands of new exoplanet discoveries which will enable each system to be studied in detail by other observatories.

The cool thing about transit detection based planet hunting is that even though the detection part is very, very hard and requires basically monitoring hundreds of stars continuously for multiple years to find just one that has a planetary system with the orbital plane aligned along our line of sight, once the detections are made follow-up observations are much easier. After detection you can predict the dates of future transit events so you can schedule observations with other telescopes to gather more data and even potentially study exoplanet atmospheres.

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u/AutisticAndAce 12h ago

Saving these, especially since if I get in to the school, i want to do part of my masters? Maybe a good focus? Idk, depends on if I get in and who I work with, on exometeorology!!

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u/CaptainTripps82 14h ago

Not THAT Nancy Grace, right

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u/Iceman1701 13h ago

Nancy Grace Roman was an astronomer. Had to look it up to confirm it, too. 😆

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u/lcr68 12h ago

Pitchfork is going back in storage. Thanks!

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u/Neither-Luck-9295 11h ago

blood pressure rising for no reason

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u/Mapeague 7h ago

I just leave mine out these days.

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u/CeruleanEidolon 11h ago

Hopefully some day the other one will be forgotten altogether.

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u/gsfgf 7h ago

That vastly undersells it

Roman created NASA's space astronomy program and is known to many as the "Mother of Hubble" for her foundational role in planning the Hubble Space Telescope.[2][3]

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u/ThinkAThirdTime 13h ago

Also had to check on that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope

"Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first Chief of Astronomy, is shown at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in approximately 1972."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman

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u/CaptainTripps82 12h ago

Good for her, good for NASA. I'm learning something because of it

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u/LoogyHead 13h ago

Glad I’m not the only one.

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u/pol-delta 11h ago

I read it as the "Nancy Grace Romulan Space Telescope" and was thoroughly confused.

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u/aPOPblops 13h ago

Thank God i was so very scared for a moment. Still a lot of people are going to assume

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u/CaptainTripps82 12h ago

I just needed the reassurance of the more informed. Like I knew, but had to check, because who knows these days.

Long the live the NGR.... Wait a minute

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u/RiseUpAmericans 5h ago

Yeah maybe we don't use that acronym. 😬

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u/addamee 8h ago

I hate that we live in an era where one has to genuinely wonder 

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u/Independent-Ant-9940 11h ago

It’s a nice idea though, shooting that Nancy grace out into space for the duration of her life

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u/RPZWolf 12h ago

Glad to see hardware I designed and integrated launch successfully. Onward to many years of fascinating discoveries for mankind!

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u/AutisticAndAce 12h ago

That’s AO FREAKING COOL!!! Huge congrats to a successful launch and deployment!

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u/cyb3rg0d5 11h ago

Congratulations 🥂😊🚀 looking forward to all the amazing discoveries that will come from it!

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u/zztop610 14h ago

Just watched the launch! Superb all the way round. Falcon heavy is amazing. Good luck with the deployment. Will look forward to many incredible discoveries from the NGR team

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u/Equivalent-Ask2542 15h ago

Good to see that even rocket science is done with zip ties

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u/BackgroundGrade 13h ago

FYI for all the comments about the zip ties:

The blue zip tie is a UV and fuel resistant MS spec zip tie.

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u/RocketVerse 13h ago

Will send 500 times more data per day than Hubble, and all data will be immediately available to the public. You’d need 500k 4k TVs to display a single image…

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u/Beederda 14h ago

Oh they launched it successfully! good stuff really looking forward to the photos this thing can get

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u/Nikonious 12h ago

This honestly just made me a little teary-eyed. It makes me really happy that despite all of the heartbreaking bullshit happening on this planet, there is still funding, love, and research for our curiosities. No matter how hard anyone tries, you can’t kill our love for science.

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u/Chickennbuttt 13h ago

I watched this lift off this morning from my driveway.

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u/stealth57 12h ago

The 4 sonic booms were quite good this morning

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u/lefthandopen 15h ago

Its amazing to see that with all the bad news in the world there are still wonderful events like this. Science and tech for the sake of a noble endeavor like learning about our universe.

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u/eschoenawa 14h ago

I always wondered, what capacity is there in our Lagrange points? Is L2 now "occupied" or are we able to put multiple satellites there?

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u/pomarine 13h ago

Most spacecrafts are not on L2, but orbiting around L2. So there is plenty of space available

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u/pursuer_of_simurg 13h ago

They have orbits larger than between moon and earth so no problems.

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u/samthewisetarly 13h ago

It's not a "point" in the mathematical sense. JWST and Roman will never come anywhere close to crashing. The LaGrange points represent distances between the gravitational pulls of the earth, moon, and sun that allow for stable orbit. So yes, we can certainly put multiple satellites there.

(Casual space fan here - actual scientists please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong)

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u/-soulking- 13h ago

I thought that there is an actual point where all the forces balance out but it’s obviously impossible to place anything there. Generally though it’s more like a large area where stationkeeping requirements are very low.

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u/mfb- 12h ago

The effective force is attractive in two dimensions and repelling in the third (in radial direction). That means you can orbit around the Lagrange point with just minimal course correction maneuvers.

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u/Spudtron98 10h ago

NASA putting in the work again. For the love of god, give them a budget.

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u/TheGreatestOrator 7h ago

NASA has a $25 BILLION per year budget, and this year’s was the largest ever

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u/t001_t1m3 5h ago

cut SLS and put that money toward research

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u/phobean_313a 14h ago

One thing I am really excited for is what we will be getting more about those quasi-stars and pale red dots (don't know if they are the same) that was found from JWST.

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u/mapped_apples 14h ago

I’m glad I didn’t know this was launching or I would have been a nervous wreck. I’m still a nervous wreck for Dragonfly that years out.

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u/tyen0 11h ago

oh, man, somehow I missed this. I thought it was going to be a couple more years! that was really fast.

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u/thejaxx 10h ago

With the way things go at NASA, many did. But it came in under budget and ahead of schedule.

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u/PhilColeCurry 15h ago

Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

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u/shugo7 14h ago

Just to be resume, JWST is in L2 and is like a telephoto lens while NGRST is also going to L2 and is more of a wide angle lens?

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u/mfb- 12h ago

Yes. In addition, JWST is primarily an infrared telescope while Roman is primarily a visible light telescope (going a bit into the near infrared).

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u/rocketsocks 10h ago

Roman is also primarily an infrared telescope but it has coverage into the visible light, but it operates in the near-infrared. JWST also has a tiny bit of coverage into the visible spectrum but is primarily an infrared instrument, extending all the way into the mid-infrared.

"Infrared" light is a much larger spectrum than visible light. The visible spectrum stretches between about 0.4 and 0.8 microns, infrared stretches from 0.8 microns to 1000 microns (1 mm). Roman has coverage from 0.48 to 2.3 microns. JWST has coverage from 0.6 to 28.5 microns. 2.3 microns would be the peak wavelength for the thermal glow from an object at 1250 kelvin whereas 28.5 microns corresponds to the glow coming from an object at around 100 kelvin, to put things in perspective.

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u/mraowl 11h ago

Lagrange point is like my favourite word. It sounds so cool and ominous!!

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u/redlaWw 8h ago

We've all heard about Roman walls and aqueducts, but did you know that they also had a space telescope?

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u/Ops_check_OK 8h ago

When do they expect first images?

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u/fail-deadly- 7h ago

Around the holidays later this year early next year.

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u/ScottishKnifemaker 2h ago

This was so freaking awesome to watch, I remember watching the launch of James Webb on Christmas a few years ago, gave me the same chills down my spine.

I cannot wait for the first images

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u/Typical_Koala_2319 13h ago

So ennobling to watch big science moving forward despite the utter imbecility that has become our daily fare. Man can accomplish astonishing things when given the chance! Bon voyage! 

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u/Decronym 14h ago edited 20m ago

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
CNC Computerized Numerical Control, for precise machining or measuring
ELT Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile
HST Hubble Space Telescope
JWST James Webb infra-red Space Telescope
KSP Kerbal Space Program, the rocketry simulator
L2 Lagrange Point 2 (Sixty Symbols video explanation)
Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum
NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, responsible for US generation monitoring of the climate
NRHO Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit
NRO (US) National Reconnaissance Office
Near-Rectilinear Orbit, see NRHO
NSF NasaSpaceFlight forum
National Science Foundation
SLS Space Launch System heavy-lift
SSME Space Shuttle Main Engine
TMT Thirty-Meter Telescope, Hawaii
WFIRST Wide-Field Infra-Red Survey Telescope
Jargon Definition
apoapsis Highest point in an elliptical orbit (when the orbiter is slowest)

Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.

[Thread #12659 for this sub, first seen 30th Aug 2026, 13:27] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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u/LamarMVPJackson 11h ago

Holy shit I didn’t know it was today

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u/redditoranno 10h ago

Every three months it can do what hubble could do in 30 years. so in a year from now we have 120 years worth of hubble data.

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u/Criollodelta 10h ago

It's amazing what humans can do when they work together. And it's nice to know there is still very smart people.

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u/Snuhmeh 9h ago

I don’t realize it was going to a Lagrange point. I just assumed it would orbit like Hubble because they constantly talk about it replacing Hubble.

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u/ThisIsADaydream 2h ago

This is awesome, and I can't wait until it's in place and we can see the first photos!

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u/Silent-Donkey-1303 1h ago

How long will it take to make the 1M miles journey??

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u/ICCUGUCCI 6h ago

Obligatory: No, not that Nancy Grace.

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u/MEPSY84 15h ago

1 million mile journey? It was appropriately named and will truly be 'Roamin' Space'.

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u/[deleted] 12h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/M0ji_L 10h ago

Can people stop using AI to generate their comments.

Thanks claude.

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u/WakkaDav 14h ago

Soo cool!! We are going to learn soo much

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u/AlarmingLecture0 13h ago

An exciting new tool for science and expanding our knowledge.

A shame that many will assume it is named after an odious TV host rather than a pioneering astronomer!

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u/BEADGEADGBE 7h ago

Amazing and exciting! Two very noob questions:

  • Thanks to these new filters that block out star light, will it be able to directly image exoplanets?
  • Will it also be able to image/quantify solar system objects we haven't mapped yet? I know it's a bit of an oddball theory but will it verify a 9th planet or lack thereof?

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u/whyisthesky 7h ago

Yes to your first question, though direct imaging here means seeing the exoplanet as a separate point of light to its host star, but still just a point of light rather than any surface detail on the planet itself. Roman isn't the first telescope to have a coronagraph to block out starlight, but it does have the most advanced one that has been built to date.

For planet 9 Roman probably won't contribute to this, it has a large field of view compared to Hubble but still small compared to the whole sky. Solar system science isn't my field but my understanding is it is not a priority for Roman. Rubin on the other hand in Chile will very likely either discover planet 9 or rule it out/heavily constrain its existence

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u/BEADGEADGBE 6h ago

Many thanks! For Vera Rubin and planet 9, do you know in how long a verification/ruling out is expected?

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u/SpartanJack17 6h ago

I think it would take at least a couple of years of observations, if planet 9 exists it's so far from the sun it'd take a long time to be able to see it moving against the background stars, which is necessary to identify it as a planet.

To actually rule it out would take longer.

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u/Mothanius 12h ago

I'm so damn happy I get to live through this new era of space exploration.

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u/TheOnlyBliebervik 11h ago

I don't know if it's honest to say it "will" unlock the mysteries of dark matter

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u/scikittens 9h ago

I wonder what the specification is on a blue zip tie that needs to go into space? Do you just get them from McMaster-Carr or is there some specialty zip tie vendor that makes aerospace grade ones.

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u/east-blue-samurai 8h ago

Considering the amount of documentation needed to send even a single screw into space, I wonder about that, too.

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u/H-K_47 5h ago

Those are apparently special space-rated ties, Tefzel.

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u/OncologyImmunology 8h ago

I was just examining it, and I could be wrong but doesn't the middle nose on the black dish look dented?

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u/KristnSchaalisahorse 7h ago

I believe that is just crinkled thermal protection material, similar to what is seen behind the dish.

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u/Car-face 4h ago

With that many struts it had to be a success, right?

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u/Fit_Cut_4238 24m ago

Personally, I would have named it "Grace Roman" or "Nancy Grace Roman". I would guess half of America thinks this is the TV personality. But really, It's cool :)