Overview
- Mission managers certified Roman ready to proceed after a Flight Readiness Review on Friday, Aug. 21, following a full launch‑day dress rehearsal that tested end-to-end countdown procedures.
- Technicians loaded 290 gallons of hydrazine into Roman’s tanks on July 25 to power trajectory burns, orbit insertion and attitude control during the planned five‑year primary mission.
- Engineers attached the observatory to its payload adapter and strut fitting and then encapsulated it inside Falcon Heavy’s dual fairings ahead of transport to SpaceX’s LC‑39A hangar for rocket mating.
- NASA and SpaceX are targeting a 7:26 a.m. EDT launch on Aug. 30 from LC‑39A on an easterly trajectory to L2 with the two side boosters planned to return to land and the center core to be expended.
- Roman combines a 2.4‑meter Hubble‑class mirror with a ~300‑megapixel Wide Field instrument and a coronagraph to map dark energy, survey exoplanets and produce large public data sets that will require expanded ground and archive capacity.