# The Weekend Wrap, August 29: Roman's Countdown Begins

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676/the-weekend-wrap-august-29-roman-s-countdown-begins.md
Podcast: [Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News](https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676)
Published: 2026-08-29T08:17:29+00:00
Episode link: https://www.astronomydaily.io
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/mgln.ai/track/op3.dev/e/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/74744742/the_weekend_wrap_august_29_roman_s_countdown_begins_1.mp3
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Duration seconds: 1081

## Resource

Today's episode — S05E180, Saturday August 29, 2026, The Weekend Wrap: Main story: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches tomorrow, Sunday August 30, with a primary window opening 7:26am EDT (11:26 UTC / 9:26pm AEST Sunday night in Sydney) on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center; backup window Monday August 31 at 7:22am EDT. Total ascent to spacecraft deployment is about 31 minutes 31 seconds, with Falcon Heavy's side boosters landing back at Cape Canaveral roughly 7 minutes 40 seconds after liftoff. Named for NASA's first chief astronomer Nancy Grace Roman (the "mother of Hubble"), the telescope shares Hubble's 2.4-metre primary mirror but pairs it with a Wide Field Instrument boasting a field of view roughly 100 times larger at similar resolution. Its major science campaigns: the High Latitude Wide Area Survey, mapping ~2 billion galaxies to probe dark matter and dark energy; a companion supernova time-domain survey; and the Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey, a gravitational-microlensing exoplanet hunt expected to find on the order of 100,000 new worlds, including free-floating rogue planets. A Coronagraph Instrument will demonstrate direct exoplanet imaging technology. After deployment, Roman heads for the Sun-Earth L2 point (~1.5 million km out), a month-long cruise followed by months of commissioning. The mission closes out three threads covered this week: its clearance for launch nine months early (S05E176), its Cold War spy-satellite origin story (S05E178), and its narrow escape from budget cancellation (S05E179). The week in review: ● Chang'e-7's delay, revisited: Monday's episode (S05E175) reported China's Chang'e-7 lunar south pole mission scrubbing on August 24 due to Tropical Storm Narra, with the next window estimated at about a…

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