NASA moves Roman Space Telescope into final launch phase

NASA has completed fueling the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, clearing the way for the observatory’s planned Aug. 30 launch on a mission to investigate dark energy, dark matter and thousands of planets beyond the solar system, the US space agency said Thursday.

The observatory was loaded with hydrazine propellant and compressed gas at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The Roman telescope is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center before traveling to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth.

According to NASA, the telescope will investigate dark energy and dark matter, search for thousands of planets beyond the solar system and study how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years.

NASA said Roman’s field of view will be about 100 times larger than that of the James Webb Space Telescope, enabling it to survey much larger areas of the sky while complementing Webb’s detailed observations.

The mission is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, whose work contributed to the development of the Hubble Space Telescope.