Follow the Roman Space Telescope's journey with NASA's online tracker
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is currently traveling to its orbit at the L2 Lagrange point. The public can track the spacecraft's progress online as it undergoes a three-month commissioning phase before beginning its five-year mission.
Why it matters
The Roman Space Telescope is expected to revolutionize astronomy by mapping billions of galaxies and providing unprecedented data on the universe.
As the new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope heads for deep space, the public can follow its three‑month trip in near-real time with NASA's online tracker.The spacecraft launched on Sunday, Aug. 30, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It's now cruising on its own toward its final orbit about 1 million miles away from Earth. Roman is flying to a point called the second sun - Earth Lagrange Point, or L2, a gravitational parking spot beyond the moon's orbit that gives the telescope a wide, steady view of the sky without Earth's atmosphere getting in the way.During this long flight, the team runs a checkout phase, called commissioning. (For more detail on the process, read Mashable's telescope commissioning explainer.)
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