NASA has renamed the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope mission after one of the agency’s trailblazing women.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — which will search for planets outside our solar system — is named after the first chief of astronomy in NASA’s Office of Space Science, She was also the first woman to hold an executive position at NASA.
Roman worked at NASA for 21 years and helped to plan the Hubble telescope, including establishing the Hubble program’s structure. She is known as “the mother of Hubble” because of her advocacy and extensive work with the telescope.
“She believed she could be an astronomer during a time when there were so many barriers for women in science,” said Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist at NASA, during a NASA livestream announcing the telescope’s new name. “She believed in investing in missions that would be useful for future generations.”
Roman began working at NASA in 1959. She died in 2018.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch in the mid-2020s to help astronomers try to understand dark energy, which makes up about two-thirds of the entire universe but is a mystery to astronomers.
The telescope will also search for exoplanets by measuring light from a billion galaxies throughout the mission’s lifetime. It has the technology to capture a sky area over 100 times larger than the Hubble telescope, which will allow it to discover more exoplanets than we ever have before.
This tool could be used to identify not only small, distant planets, but also other cosmic bodies like brown dwarfs and black holes.
The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope joins other space telescopes and instruments named after women, including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the Annie Maunder Astrographic Telescope, and the Scope telescope named after Henrietta Scope. NASA’s GRAIL lunar impact site is named after Sally Ride, America’s first woman in space.
NASA plans to send the first woman to the moon by 2024 as part of its Artemis mission.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.