NASA 发射罗曼望远镜，探索宇宙奥秘

While we're standing by, we wanna bring in Ross Hamilton. He's the cofounder and COO of Space Network and the author of Everything is Flying. Ross, it looks like this thing is gonna go flying, as we wait for this, launch here. Why is this important? Why did we need another telescope? Well, good morning. Thank you for having me on. This is very exciting. This is a little bit different than what you're seeing from some of the the SpaceX flights we've seen recently.

This is very much about research and looking out into space, and NASA's positioning us getting back to its kind of research roots again, rather than, you know, the the commercial space things that we've been hearing about over the last few years from SpaceX. So this is novel. This is new. This is replacing, what was Hubble, the very famous telescope, and very much complements the James Webb telescope that's out there giving scientists something that they've really never been able to have before.

And, Ross, can you walk us through the duration of this mission? How long it's going to take for this launch to kind of get the telescope in the place it needs to be to bring those data points back to Earth? Yes. What we're gonna see this morning is the launch of this Falcon nine heavy rocket. We'll see the usual things that you see in on television where the rocket will go up, it will separate, and then the two boosters will come back and land themselves.

What really then happen is something that we will see or rather won't see, you know, on camera is where this telescope will be boosted out and way out into space. It's going to be taking about, thirty days to get out to where it's going over a million miles away, from Earth, actually far away from Earth, the other side of Earth, you know, from from the sun. So once that's out there in thirty days, they're gonna take about ninety days, three months to get the telescope all ready.

And then, hopefully, by the end of the year, in January time, we'll start seeing some real, fascinating, you know, results back from that from this telescope. And interestingly Okay, Ross. Hang on just a sec. I'm gonna stop you right there. We are twenty seconds to launch. So we're gonna have you stand by, and we're gonna listen in, to the feed we're getting, from T minus 10. Here we go. 987654321. Ignition and liftoff.

Go Falcon Heavy and go Roman Space Telescope. And liftoff of NASA's Roman Space Telescope on a mission to revolutionize our understanding of these downrange. All m one d chamber pressures are nominal. Falcon Heavy has cleared the tower and is on its way to the space. Looks like a beautiful launch so far, Steve. Great shot there from on top of the the rocket looking down and then now tracking up, looking at those 27 Merlin engines, lifting the Falcon Heavy and Roman space telescope off into space.

Falcon Heavy's soaring. Telemetry nominal. Falcon Heavy's soaring. Ross, it looks like so far so good in my very opinion. Can you kinda talk us through what we've seen so far and kinda narrate what we're seeing on the screen here? Yeah. So what you saw, you see that thing tick off very, very fast. Right? That really took off very quickly. Those are very, very powerful engines from from SpaceX. It's basically launching as normal.

They they use the word nominal, which is, if I just speak for normal. They're about to slow down the engines a little bit just as it kind of fires its way through the atmosphere, a phenomenon called max q. So they didn't shake the the the rocket apart. And then what will happen is that the two side boosters will separate, and they will return back down to earth while the the core engine will keep boosting Roman up through, through the rest of the atmosphere.

And where is this headed? Is this near Earth orbit? Where is this satellite going to eventually settle? The the this is not a satellite, and it's not I'm sorry. It's telescope. Apologies. Yeah. No. No. This is this is this thing. This is punching a way out. It's basically heading a million miles out to a place called La Grange 0.2, which is basically a place where far far away from Earth, the gravity of Earth and the gravity of the sun balances out and allows the the telescope to stay in a very stable point in space without using much fuel.

So it's got long journey and it's gonna be, you know, it seems to be taking thirty days to get out there. Mhmm. And one of the big things with SpaceX had been this notion of Starship obviously getting bigger things into space. Would that be a different rocket to just take a different kind of entity into space entirely, or could that open up an entirely new frontier? Separation. Yes. So so these these are three there's the separation there from the two from the side boosters.

And those boosters will hopefully return now. Right? Yeah. The two side ones will return and land on the legs that you've seen before, not being caught by the the, you know, the Starship one, but they'll land on their legs. The third one, the middle one will burn up because they're they're gonna expand that. So, yeah, that's that's them on their way back down to Earth, and the the telescope has an engine. You can still see an engine firing there, and that's pushing its way out, you know, beyond the Earth's atmosphere.

Back to your question there, the Falcon nine engines are the ones that the SpaceX has historically been using. All the news about Starship and commercial space is is using a different technology. It's using a different rocket. So these are older style rockets from SpaceX. Space the the Starship is really what's gonna be used to do all the the heavy commercial work that everyone's talking about. And, Ross, a dumb question here.

With this telescope being as far away from Earth as it is, what happens if something goes wrong with the telescope itself? I mean, it's a good question, actually, because I think about the Hubble, which was called the rubble for years, right, because it had so many issues. But, yeah, Ross, what does happen if something breaks? Well, the Hubble was much closer to home, so they could actually go up and fix it with some duct tape and, you know, bubble gum.

Space duct tape is the thing, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, don't knock at that and zip ties. That's amazing. No. Seriously, this one is way out there. There's nothing that you can do about it if something goes wrong. But the really cool thing about this is that the technology, the mirror part of this is actually the same as Hubble. So it's proven, you know, technology. Plus, it has brand new, imaging, you know, capability that actually came from US spy satellites.

So the core components of this of this, I use the word satellite. The core components of those this telescope actually are proven technologies. So see the thing that's just flying away there in the TV? That's the fairing. That's the thing that protected the the telescope as it was going up. They're now separated so that the telescope is now exposed to space, and it has a it has the engine. They are still firing on its way.

So all of the fairing, all of the rockets, all the boosters, they're gone. They're all heading back to Earth, and the the telescope's on its way now. Wow. Alright. So how long has this been in the works? I know that these programs typically run over and longer, and NASA's had some budget issues. But talk to us about how long it's been in the works, and has the plan always been to launch it this way with this private public partnership, or was there another plan at some point involved into this?

I mean, this is these things, you know, they're not thrown together overnight. This is I think, believe this has been in the works since sixteen two thousand and ten. It's definitely had a bit of an evolution about the the components and, you know, who's flying the thing, but this is always a always a NASA, you know, you know, project here. Of course, there's many many partners. There's many components that go