NASA cleared the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope for flight on Friday, completing its Flight Readiness Review one day after a launch dress rehearsal. [1] Liftoff is set for Sunday, Aug. 30, at 7:26 a.m. EDT, when a SpaceX Falcon Heavy lifts the observatory from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. [2]

The rocket carries its own resume. Both side boosters are veterans, flying for the first and third times after earlier missions launched the GOES-U weather satellite and a Viasat communications spacecraft. [2] If the countdown holds, Roman deploys from the upper stage roughly half an hour after liftoff. [2]

The telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer, often called the mother of the Hubble Space Telescope. [3] Its wide-field instrument frames a patch of sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble's, built to collect light from as many as a billion galaxies and to census exoplanets by microlensing. [3]

The schedule is the quiet marvel. The mission was once committed to fly no later than May 2027; it now sits nine days from orbit, months early. [4] Its five-year primary survey is expected to amass a 20,000-terabyte data archive. [4] Between now and Sunday remains the plumbing — propellant loading and closeouts that turn a cleanroom inhabitant into a spacecraft. [1]

Wonder, for once, is on schedule.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo