Technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida installed a memory card containing 1,350,144 names onto the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on July 27. NASA announced that the digital memory card was integrated as part of a physical commemorative plaque mounted directly on the deep space observatory.
Individuals from around the world submitted the names stored on the card. NASA noted that the list includes crew members from the Artemis II and Artemis III missions. The hardware will travel alongside the observatory to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, commonly known as L2, situated approximately one million miles from Earth. At this specific location in space, the gravitational forces of the Sun and the Earth balance each other out, providing a unique orbital point for space-based research.
NASA named the observatory after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, the agency's first chief astronomer and a foundational architect of its modern science program. Dr. Roman spent her career championing space-based observatories that could examine the universe clearly without the interference of Earth’s hazy atmosphere. A core principle of her advocacy was ensuring that observational data gathered by such missions was made broadly available to the global scientific community.
NASA and SpaceX have set the target launch time for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 30. The spacecraft will launch from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will carry the Roman telescope on its journey into deep space.
