SpaceX confirms Falcon Heavy has begun engine chill, flowing a small amount of supercold propellant through its engines to condition them for ignition.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is named for Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and one of the architects of NASA’s modern science program. She championed space-based observatories that could study the universe above Earth’s hazy atmosphere while making their data broadly available to the scientific community.

While she’s known as the “mother” of the Hubble Space Telescope, Dr. Roman played an even broader role as the driving force behind NASA’s entire Great Observatories program, which included Hubble along with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the retired Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope. Together, these observatories transformed astronomy by allowing scientists to study the universe across much of the electromagnetic spectrum, from infrared to gamma rays.

Engineers built and assembled the telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Managed at Goddard, the observatory combines components built across the country to study dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets. It is the only NASA flagship mission entirely integrated and tested at Goddard.

Launching nine months ahead of schedule, the observatory was shipped from Goddard on a barge to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in June. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at NASA Kennedy, is responsible for managing Roman’s launch service.

In the next few minutes, NASA’s launch manager will give the agency’s “go/no-go” for a 7:26 a.m. EDT liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.

Our live broadcast is currently streaming on NASA+ and a variety of platforms. Watch live at: www.nasa.gov/live.

Source: NASA