NASA's Roman Telescope To Carry 1.35 Million Names To Deep Space

NASA has placed a commemorative plaque containing 1,350,144 names onto its upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Recently, technicians at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida installed a tiny memory card holding the names onto the observatory. The names were submitted by space enthusiasts from all over the world, including the astronauts from Artemis II and Artemis III Moon missions. The space agency recently shared details of the project on Instagram, asking, "Is your name part of our legacy of exploration and discovery?"

"Ahead of its launch later this month, we installed a plaque on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope holding an SD card with over one million submitted names, continuing our tradition of leaving humanity's mark on the cosmos," it wrote in the caption.

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NASA revealed that the memory card will travel with the Roman observatory to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, or L2, which is about one million miles from Earth, where the Sun's and Earth's gravity balance out.

The special plaque honours Dr Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer, who is often called the "mother" of the Hubble Space Telescope.

She was a pioneering leader who championed placing observatories in orbit to view the universe without Earth's atmosphere blocking the vision.

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The Roman Space Telescope will head to an orbit around the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2), located approximately one million miles (1.5 million kilometres) from Earth, the same region where the James Webb Space Telescope operates.

Once in position, the Roman telescope will conduct wide-area surveys of the night sky. Equipped with a camera that offers a view 100 times larger than Hubble's, it will search for thousands of distant exoplanets, map billions of galaxies, and help scientists uncover the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter.

When will it launch?

Roman is set to launch August 30, 2026, at 07:26 am EDT on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA's Launch Services Program at Kennedy is responsible for launch vehicle programme management of the SpaceX launch service. The Roman Space Telescope project is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.