NASA Roman Telescope carries 1.35 million names to deep space

Technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida installed a memory card carrying 1,350,144 names onto the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on July 27, 2026. The names, submitted by people worldwide, including astronauts from the Artemis II and Artemis III missions, are part of a commemorative plaque that will travel with the observatory to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2), a stable gravitational balance point about one million miles from Earth.

The telescope is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, who championed space-based observatories and made data broadly available. The inclusion of the names connects the public directly to the mission, symbolizing a shared human presence in deep space.

NASA and SpaceX are targeting launch no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30, 2026, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.

The Roman telescope is designed to investigate dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics. The memory card installation marks a milestone in the mission’s preparation, following a tradition of sending names into space on NASA spacecraft.

Once at L2, the observatory will begin its primary science mission.