'The mirror passed with flying colors': NASA just took its last look at the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope before launch

Technicians stow Roman's deployable aperture cover, a large sunshade designed to keep unwanted light out of the telescope (left); and a view down the barrel of the telescope at its primary mirror (right).

(Image credit: NASA/Sydney Rohde)

We just took one final look at NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and now? It's officially ready for launch.Roman, NASA's newest flagship space telescope, is set to launch from the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida as soon as Aug. 30. After NASA announced that the telescope was complete back in April, engineers completed their final inspection of the telescope's primary mirror. With this critical assessment now successfully checked off the list, the Roman team is now preparing to ship the telescope to the Florida launch site."The Roman engineering team laid eyes on the telescope for the final time before it, in turn, becomes the eyes of humanity, revealing the wonders of the cosmos," Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Manager J. Scott Smith, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement. "It is a profoundly humbling moment to witness the culmination of hard work from so many dedicated individuals, teams and partner organizations."Roman's 7.9-foot-wide (2.4 meters) primary mirror will collect and focus light from objects across the cosmos. This mirror is absolutely essential to the telescope's ultimate success."In order to gather very sensitive measurements of objects strewn throughout space, all of Roman's components have to be ultraprecise," Bente Eegholm, the optics lead for Roman's Optical Telescope Assembly at NASA Goddard, said in the same statement. "The primary mirror certainly delivers on that precision."