Following nearly ten years of work, NASA is close to sending its next major telescope into orbit. Officials have chosen August 30 for liftoff of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The date puts the mission about eight months ahead of the original plan and well under the expected budget.

In a recent blog update NASA noted that with fewer than three months left the team is wrapping up final steps. Engineers are now preparing the spacecraft for shipment from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida later this month.

After arrival the telescope will receive a careful inspection to confirm it suffered no harm in transit. Technicians will then load roughly 290 gallons of hydrazine and run several practice countdowns before launch.

The spacecraft will travel to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point about one million miles from Earth on the opposite side of the sun. This location provides a stable gravitational balance that lets the telescope orbit the sun in tandem with Earth.

Details for the live broadcast will be shared closer to launch day. The feed is expected on the NASA app, YouTube, and Netflix through their existing agreement to carry agency events.

What is the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope looking for?

The observatory honors Nancy Grace Roman, NASA first female executive and a driving force behind the Hubble Space Telescope.

The two instruments share 2.4-meter mirrors that deliver comparable image sharpness. Roman however can photograph at least one hundred times more sky in a single exposure. Hubble records ultraviolet visible and near-infrared light while Roman concentrates on visible and infrared wavelengths.

NASA intends the telescopes to operate together. Roman will sweep wide areas of the sky and identify targets that Hubble can study in finer detail. The combined data should give astronomers a deeper understanding of the universe.

Over its mission Roman is expected to examine more than 100 billion stars and billions of galaxies detect tens of thousands of supernovae and return nearly 1.4 terabytes of science data to Earth each day.