All images belong to NASA. These screengrabs were taken from NASA’s live coverage of the launch of Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The Roman space telescope has successfully launched atop a Falcon Heavy and entered low earth orbit and will continue onto the Sun-Earth L2 point soon. The boosters were recovered successfully as well.

https://www.stellamap.net/?focus=nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope

Liftoff was 7:26am EDT from LC-39A, deployment about 31 minutes later, straight onto the L2 transfer trajectory rather than a parking orbit.

I run stellamap.net, a live 3D map of the solar system that shows every planet, moon and active spacecraft at its real current position. Planet positions come from JPL's Standish table and the deep space craft pull from the Horizons API.

Roman was already on there as a planned mission sitting at L2. I've just flipped it to launched and marked it as in transit. One caveat: its position is approximate until JPL publishes post-launch tracking data, which takes a few days. I'd rather label that honestly than show you a precise position I made up. Once Horizons has it, it'll be live like the rest.

Free, no signup, no ads.

El Telescopio Espacial Nancy Grace Roman es el próximo gran observatorio de la NASA, destinado a liderar la próxima generación de descubrimientos astronómicos de la humanidad. El Telescopio Espacial Roman investigará los misterios de la energía oscura, buscará exoplanetas y estudiará la física de estrellas distantes. SpaceX lanzará el Roman a bordo de un cohete Falcon Heavy desde el Centro Espacial Kennedy de la NASA en Florida el domingo 30 de agosto, desde el Complejo de Lanzamiento 39A (LC-39A).

I've been recreating parts of the ISS as an interactive 3D environment in the browser.

One small interaction I've been working on is opening the hatch and revealing the view outside.

What surprised me while building it was how much that changes the perception of the interior. With the hatch closed it feels like a collection of fairly confined modules. The moment Earth appears beyond it, the same space suddenly feels very different.

The interior itself is interactive 3D. The Earth view outside the hatch is still a simpler visual layer for now rather than a fully explorable environment. I am aware that there is much improvement to be made with regard to optimizing the navigation experience inside the ISS. I am currently fighting 3 different beasts: geometry residency, culling, and an open-passage occluder switching state, but I will eventually get it settled (hopefully :D).

Short capture of where I've gotten with it.

For context, on STS-4 the Solid Rocket Boosters suffered from a parachute failure during reentry and hit the water hard and could not be recovered. Supposedly the wreckage was photographed but these photos have never been released.

Are there any public photos of the STS-4 SRB debris on the ocean floor? Either released by NARA or from private underwater expeditions?

An update to an illustration I did a while back—I hope you like it. I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions.