What Is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope? (Grades 5-8)

NASA's newest space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch on August thirtieth aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Per NASA Science, it will orbit nearly a million miles from Earth at a gravitational sweet spot called the L2 Lagrange point, giving it an unobstructed view of the cosmos. The observatory carries a three-hundred-megapixel infrared camera and a coronagraph powerful enough to spot planets nearly a billion times fainter than their star. Roman will hunt for exoplanets, investigate dark energy and dark matter, and look back in time to understand how the universe formed and evolved—work that honors Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer and the pioneering figure who brought the Hubble Space Telescope to life.

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