Technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida installed a memory card containing 1,350,144 names as part of a commemorative plaque on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on July 27. [claim:1]
Total names submitted globally for the commemorative memory card.
The names on the memory card were submitted by people globally, including astronauts from the Artemis II and Artemis III missions. [claim:3]
Mission destination and launch details
The memory card is scheduled to travel with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2), a location approximately one million miles from Earth where the gravity of the Sun and Earth balance out. [claim:4, claim:5]
NASA and SpaceX are targeting a launch for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 30. [claim:8] The launch is planned to take place aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center. [claim:9]
The telescope is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, who served as NASA’s first chief astronomer and was an architect of the agency’s modern science program. [claim:6]
Dr. Roman championed space-based observatories designed to study the universe from above Earth’s atmosphere while ensuring data remains broadly available to the scientific community. [claim:7]