Falcon Heavy • RST

Falcon Heavy • RST

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, formerly known as WFIRST (Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope). Built on the basis of a gifted NRO optics assembly the 10150kg Roman Space Telescope (RST) will conduct a wide field optical survey of the night sky and complement the HST and JWST. The Wide Field instrument onboard is 100 times more powerful than the one on the Hubble Space Telescope, even though the 2.4-meter primary mirror on the telescope is the same size as Hubble's. Roman is designed to potentially answer what dark energy is and to use a microlensing technique in the Inner Milky Way galaxy to discover more than 2600 new exoplanets. In addition to the primary Wide Field instrument, Roman features a Coronagraph instrument that will perform high-contrast imaging and spectroscopy of nearby exoplanets. This flight will feature side boosters B1072.3 and B1104, which will return for a RTLS landing at LZ-2 and LZ-40, plus center core B1105, which will fly in expendable mode without recovery hardware. - Delayed from 2024 and Q4 2026. Moved forward from May 2027, October, late and early September. Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/live/9wq3VHsL_bE https://plus.nasa.gov/scheduled-video/nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launch/ https://www.youtube.com/live/vj19LFKSaFw

📍 SpaceX LC-39A, Florida, Vereinigte Staaten

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