{"podcast":{"title":"Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News","slug":"astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676","podcast_index_feed_id":5658676,"rss_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/show/5648921/episodes/feed","website_url":"https://www.astronomydaily.io","image_url":"https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_rss_itunes_square_1400/images.spreaker.com/original/3ef2bb90b641d3f09a10b0a281912ff3.jpg","author":"bitesz.com","episode_count":901,"summary":"Join hosts Anna and Avery for daily Space & Astronomy news, insights, and discoveries . Give us 20 minutes and we'll give you the Universe! For more visit, our website and sign up for the free daily newsletter and check out our continually updated newsfeed. http://astronomydaily.io . Follow us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, YouTube and TikTok ...just search for AstroDailyPod . Enjoy! Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support .","last_synced_at":"2026-09-19T16:18:05.091830+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676"},"episode":{"title":"The Weekend Wrap, August 29: Roman's Countdown Begins","slug":"the-weekend-wrap-august-29-roman-s-countdown-begins","published_at":"2026-08-29T08:17:29+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676/the-weekend-wrap-august-29-roman-s-countdown-begins","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676","url":"https://www.astronomydaily.io","audio_url":"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","summary":"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…","meta_description":"Today's episode — S05E180, Saturday August 29, 2026, The Weekend Wrap: Main story: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches tomorrow, Sunday August…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1081,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676/episodes/the-weekend-wrap-august-29-roman-s-countdown-begins/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676/the-weekend-wrap-august-29-roman-s-countdown-begins.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}