NASA's new $4.3 billion space telescope to launch in August

[00:00:00]There is a new telescope from NASA that can capture images larger than any telescope before and does it hundreds of times faster. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a $4.3 billion project from NASA that is designed to spend at least 5 years surveying the cosmos after it launches in August. NBC News got rare access to see the telescope before it gets packed up and taken to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this summer. NBC News space and science reporter Denise Chow got to see the new telescope and this was like a career highlight I'm pretty sure. The details of this new telescope are really awesome. Tell us about it and what you saw.

[00:00:36]>> Yeah, well you all you'll hear a lot of comparisons between this new telescope and two of NASA's other flagship telescope missions. So Hubble of course the very iconic space telescope that was launched in 1990, but they're designed to do very different things. So Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope kind of take a narrow view and they stare off into the distant universe and they try to find distant galaxies early in the universe's history. What Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be doing is basically taking in huge swaths of the sky and capturing these panoramas of hundreds of millions of stars and billions of galaxies. And um there's a really cool example where NASA released this image in 2015 of the Andromeda galaxy.

[00:01:16]It was stitched together from over 400 Hubble observations and Nancy Grace Roman will be able to do that same panorama in only two observations.

[00:01:25]>> That's amazing and there's this really strict protocol to follow to see this telescope. Tell us about that.

[00:01:32]>> Yeah, so we were able to enter the clean room which was so cool. We were able to get up close and personal with this telescope, but it's very important for anything that launches into space to keep it really you know, avoid any kind of earthly contamination and especially for something like this telescope that has very precise and sensitive instruments. So we had to put on the full white bunny suit.

[00:01:52]We had to go through these different rooms that basically blew dust and dirt off of our shoes, off of our clothing, off of our skin. The only thing that was really visible was our eyes.

[00:02:03]And that was what we had to do to get into this clean room, but it was so cool to see it up close before it gets shipped down to Florida.

[00:02:09]>> How long will it take to get the telescope to space? And how long before we we can see these pictures?

[00:02:14]>> Yeah, so it's supposed to launch on August 30th. After that, it'll take 3 months to get out to this point in space, about a million miles away from us, where it's going to be in a stable orbit. And then they have to do some checkouts of all the instruments.

[00:02:25]That'll take a little bit of time, but we could see the first images later this year, maybe around Christmas time.

[00:02:30]>> Amazing. What a gift. All right, Denise Chow, thank you so much.

[00:02:34]>> Thank you.

[00:02:35]>> We thank you for watching, and remember, stay updated on breaking news and top stories on the NBC News app or watch live on our YouTube channel.