JOEL ROSE, HOST:
Humanity has a new window to the stars.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #1: Falcon Heavy has cleared the tower. It's on its way to space.
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ROSE: Today, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Telescope sailed through Earth's atmosphere, separated from its rocket and started flying on its own.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #1: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope flying free on its way to Lagrange 2, and to open a new eye on the universe.
ROSE: The telescope is meant to discover new details about our universe's behavior, its expansion, what holds galaxies together. Instead of focusing on a single object, Roman is designed to look at and interpret huge swaths of sky to catalog them. Julie McEnery is the telescope's project scientist. She says these catalogs will be available to everyone.
JULIE MCENERY: You can be a teacher in a high school, and your students have the opportunity to see Roman data, new Roman data, new Roman discoveries at the same time as a professor in Princeton.
ROSE: The telescope is named after the late Nancy Grace Roman, one of the most important women in American space science, starting in the late 1950s and '60s.
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NANCY GRACE ROMAN: NASA was a whole six months old, and it was a great place to work at that time. It was - everybody was gung-ho.
ROSE: Roman was the fledgling space agency's first chief of astronomy. She was a visionary founder of the U.S. Civilian Space Program who convinced astronomers that putting telescopes in space, instead of just keeping them here on Earth, was worth the trouble.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #2: And liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope, our window on the universe.
ROSE: And her efforts paid off famously with the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 and the many more that have followed since. Roman's love of astronomy, science and mathematics began early. She told NPR in 2017 that when she got to high school, she met with a guidance counselor to plot out a future as a scientist.
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ROMAN: And she looked down her nose at me and sneered, what lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?
ROSE: Nancy Grace Roman did, and now the world's astronomers will reap even more from her vision. The telescope that bears her name is now cruising to its planned observing location about a million miles from Earth.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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