NASA's newest telescope has a top secret past

You're listening to Shortwave. From NPR. Hey short waivers, Regina Barber here. Get ready because we're about to get an entirely new window into the universe. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, called Roman by its friends, is scheduled to launch at the end of August. So he called up an old friend of Shortwave, former NPR science correspondent Joe Palka, to talk about it.

Hey Joe. Hey Gina. So I hear that astronomers are stoked about this thing. I mean I am. Yeah, stoked is a pretty good way to put it. If it delivers on what we think. It will be the best thing ever. Yeah, that's a version of Stoked. That's Daniel Skolnick of Duke University, one of the scientists who'll be using Roman data to unlock the mysteries of the universe.

Okay, so Joe, what have you been learning about the Roman telescope? Oh lots of stuff. Um to start off, it was named after a woman you maybe never heard of. I hadn't. Uh she was NASA's chief astronomer back in the sixties and seventies, Nancy Grace Roman. And she gets credit for getting the Hubble Space Telescope from an idea to a reality. But one of the most unusual things I learned is that this Roman telescope wasn't originally built to look at the heavens. It was designed to be a spy satellite.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (14 minutes, 2,493 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.