Over a Million Virtual Passengers Are Set to Launch Aboard America's Next Great Observatory...

NASA / Jolearra Tshiteya

NASA’s Roman Telescope to Carry 1.35 Million Names to Deep Space (News Release)

On July 27, technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida installed a memory card containing 1,350,144 names as part of a commemorative plaque on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The names were submitted by people globally, including astronauts from Artemis II and Artemis III. The memory card will travel with the Roman observatory to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, or L2, about one million miles from Earth, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity balance out.

Roman is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and one of the architects of the agency’s modern science program. Roman championed space-based observatories that could study the Universe from above Earth’s hazy atmosphere while making their data broadly available to the scientific community.

NASA and SpaceX are targeting launch for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, August 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA / Jolearra Tshiteya