NASA is set to launch a new space telescope Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that will help scientists probe the nature of dark matter, dark energy, and other mysteries of the universe.The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is about the size of a tour bus, is set to lift off at 7:26 a.m.ET on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket.
A weather forecast for the launch shows a 50% chance of favorable weather conditions.A backup window on Monday at 7:22 ET has better odds, with only a 30% risk of weather interfering with the launch.The new telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer who was known as the 'Mother of Hubble' for her championing of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope.
Her namesake observatory will have the sharpness of Hubble but a field of view that is at least 100 times larger, allowing it to image huge swaths of the sky at once.Before it can do that, the Roman Space Telescope will have to get to its new home in the sky about a million miles away.Roman will live at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point known as L2.
There, the competing gravitational pulls of the Earth and the Sun help the telescope keep a steady orbit while using minimal fuel.The James Webb Space Telescope orbits at this point, which gives the spacecraft an unobstructed view of the sky."It takes us a good three-plus months to get out there, and we're spending that time checking everything out and doing a whole bunch of calibrations and making sure everything is working the way we know it can," said NASA's Jeremy Perkins, an integration and test scientist on the mission.
"It's basically like our time to kick the tires and just make sure that the focus is right, the pointing is right."Roman is on a kind of ghost hunt, searching for more evidence of dark matter — mysterious, invisible stuff whose gravitational influence appears to hold galaxies together and define the overarching structure of the cosmos.Roman will study how gravity subtly affects the ...