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Roman Launches Tomorrow: Dark Energy, Exoplanets & Starship's Return
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifts off August 30 on a mission to crack the dark energy crisis and discover thousands of new exoplanets. Plus, SpaceX recovers an intact Starship from the Indian Ocean for the first time.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Tomorrow morning, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifts off, and if it performs as designed, it will change what we know about the universe's most fundamental forces. This is a four-point-three billion dollar mission more than a decade in the making.
Here's the key thing to understand about Roman's scale. Hubble can survey a patch of sky roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length.
On the exoplanet side, Roman uses gravitational microlensing. That's where a foreground star's gravity bends and amplifies light from a background star, and any orbiting planet leaves a detectable signature in that brightened light.
The mission's data policy is deliberately open. Everything Roman collects will be publicly available, not just to institutions with major research budgets.
Separate from Roman but not unrelated, SpaceX has now recovered an intact Starship from the Indian Ocean following its July twenty-fourth test flight. This is the first time a Starship has survived a flight intact and been physically retrieved.
Two metrics matter most in the coming days. First, whether Roman reaches its target orbit cleanly after tomorrow's launch.
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