US spy satellite to become scientific

NASA has selected SpaceX to launch the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, which will explore

dark matter. In October 2026, he will fly to the L2 Lagrange point on a Falcon Heavy rocket. At the same time, the United States used a spy satellite to create this telescope. Discuss

NASA on July 19 announced a contract withby SpaceX to launch the Nancy Grace Roman telescope on a Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2026 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The contract value is $255 million.

Telescope “Nancy Grace Roman” – Thisthe next flagship astrophysics mission after the James Webb Space Telescope. The spacecraft is equipped with a 2.4-meter primary mirror donated to NASA by the US National Reconnaissance Office, a wide-angle instrument and a coronagraph to conduct research in the fields of cosmology, exoplanets and general astrophysics. In the 2010s, a secret telescope with this mirror was supposed to become something like Hubble, but with the only difference that its gaze would be turned not to space, but to Earth.

"The fact is that 2.4-meter mirrorswere made for the purposes of the Ministry of Defense", – David DeVorkin, curator emeritus of astronomy and space sciences at the National Air and Space Museum, told Inverse. "All I can say is that it was an attempt to create very powerful but wide-angle cameras in space that looked down."