Send Your Name 1.5 Million Kilometers from Earth with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope: Deadline July 12

In recent days, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has been transported to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin integration with SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, which will launch no earlier than August 30 from pad LC-39A. This mission has often been cited as an example of efficiency by Jared Isaacman (NASA administrator), demonstrating how the agency can conduct missions that stay within budget and are delivered on time.

The new space telescope, abbreviated as RST, is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman (who passed away in 2018), one of the most important minds in the development of space telescopes and considered the "mother" of the Hubble Space Telescope. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is designed to collect information on dark energy, discover and characterize exoplanets (thanks to microlensing), and more generally observe the universe in the infrared.

Despite these features, it is not a "copy" of the James Webb Space Telescope. Its structure includes a 2.4-meter diameter primary mirror, similar in size to Hubble's. Some of its components derive from U.S. spy satellites that were not launched with the NRO, which transferred the hardware to NASA. The two main integrated instruments are the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and the Coronagraph Instrument (CO). Thanks to hardware modifications, the WFI camera will have a field of view about one hundred times wider than that of HST, significantly reducing observation time for the same observed area.

Send Your Name into Space with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

As with other space missions, such as Perseverance, VIPER, Artemis II, and others, NASA has opened the opportunity to send your name (or a name of your choice) aboard the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The data will be saved on a microSD card that will be placed on the body of the space telescope and taken 1.5 million kilometers from Earth to the second Lagrange point (L2).

As with the James Webb Space Telescope, the reasons for this initiative are numerous. Observing in the infrared, RST must not be "disturbed" by solar emissions (or heat reflected from the Earth) and will be directed away from the Sun. Secondly, the L2 point is a position where the gravitational forces between our star and the Earth are balanced. This means having a sufficiently stable orbit with little fuel expenditure.

The official NASA site for submitting your name to be sent along with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to 1.5 million kilometers from Earth is available without registration and (of course) free of charge. A souvenir ticket will be generated, which can be printed or saved to be kept as a memento of the mission. Users can submit their names until July 12, when this opportunity will end.