NASA's Roman Space Telescope Is Ready to Fly — Nine Months Early

Today's episode — S05E176, Tuesday August 25, 2026:
Feature story: NASA's Roman Space Telescope is fully encapsulated inside its Falcon Heavy fairing and cleared to launch no earlier than 7:26 a.m. ET this Sunday, August 30 — about nine months ahead of its original schedule, a rarity for a NASA flagship mission. Roman is headed to Sun-Earth L2 for a five-year mission mapping dark energy and dark matter and hunting exoplanets with a starlight-cancelling coronagraph. Its wide-field camera surveys roughly a hundred times faster than Hubble at comparable image sharpness. Named for NASA's first chief astronomer, Nancy Grace Roman — the "mother of Hubble" — the mission is a formal ESA partnership; some of its data will come down through a new ESA antenna at New Norcia, Western Australia.
The rest of the news:

• ISS Spacewalk 98: NASA's Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot are outside the station today finishing a Space-to-Ground antenna replacement and, time permitting, installing a new docking retroreflector — their third spacewalk together in under a month.
• Milky Way merger scar: A Hubble-based study (the ARMA project, led by Davide Massari) has found evidence of a ~500-million-solar-mass dwarf galaxy, dubbed Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles, absorbed by the Milky Way roughly 12 billion years ago — the earliest documented merger in our galaxy's history.
• Perseids 2028 watch: Jupiter's gravity may nudge Perseid debris closer to Earth's path in 2028, potentially producing an outburst of 200-300 meteors/hour under favorable dark-sky conditions — though modelers caution the forecast is an "educated guess."
• Tonight's Sky: A 96%-partial lunar eclipse falls the night of August 27-28 — spectacular from the Americas and parts of Europe/Africa, but invisible from Australia and the rest of Asia-Pacific, where it happens in broad daylight. Venus and Saturn remain good evening targets locally in the meantime.

Links & sources:

• NASA Science — Roman Launch Countdown
• NASA Roman Blog — Roman Telescope Enclosed in Falcon Heavy Fairing
• Space.com — The Roman Space Telescope is ready to launch Aug. 30
• JPL — NASA Telescope Named for "Mother of Hubble" Nancy Grace Roman
• ESA — Roman factsheet
• NASA — NASA to Cover Three US Spacewalks
• Space.com — The earliest galaxy "swallowed" by the cannibal Milky Way left a scar at its heart
• Space.com — Could Jupiter supercharge the Perseids in 2028?
• Space.com — Partial lunar eclipse Aug. 27-28: stages and visibility

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