\u201cWe don\u2019t have moments of terror for the deployment,\u201d Townsend said. \u201cObviously, launch is always a risk, the tip-off rates that you have when you separate from the launch vehicle\u2026 Then, obviously, getting the aperture door open so that it\u2019s deployed is another one. But these feel like normal aerospace risks, not unusual, harrowing moments for Roman.\u201d<\/p>\n
It also helps that Roman will use a primary mirror gifted to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government\u2019s spy satellite agency. The NRO originally ordered the mirror for a telescope that would peer down on the Earth, but the spy agency no longer needed it. Before NASA got its hands on the surplus mirror in 2012, scientists working on the preliminary design for what became Roman were thinking of a smaller telescope.<\/p>\n
The larger telescope will make Roman a more powerful tool for science, and the NRO\u2019s donation eliminated the risk of a problem or delay manufacturing a new mirror. But the upside meant NASA had to build a more massive spacecraft and use a bigger rocket to accommodate it, adding to the observatory\u2019s cost.<\/p>\n
Tests of Roman\u2019s components have gone well this year. Work on Roman continued at Goddard through the government shutdown in the fall. On Webb, engineers uncovered one problem after another as they tried to verify the observatory would perform as intended in space. There were leaky valves, tears in the Webb\u2019s sunshield, a damaged transducer, and loose screws<\/a>. With Roman, engineers so far have found no \u201csignificant surprises\u201d during ground testing, Townsend said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we always hope when you\u2019re doing this final round of environmental tests is that you\u2019ve wrung out the hardware at lower levels of assembly, and it looks like, in Roman\u2019s case, we did a spectacular job at the lower level,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n With Roman now fully assembled, attention at Goddard will turn to an end-to-end functional test of the observatory early next year, followed by electromagnetic interference testing, and another round of acoustic and vibration tests. Then, perhaps around June of next year, NASA will ship the observatory to Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to prepare for launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re really down to the last stretch of environmental testing for the system,\u201d Townsend said. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely already seen the worst environment until we get to launch.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe don\u2019t have moments of terror for the deployment,\u201d Townsend said. \u201cObviously, launch is always a risk, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352954,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[79,193],"class_list":["post-352953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}