More than 13 lakh people are getting a rather unusual space trip, while sitting in their homes, here on Earth. Their names are set to travel aboard Nasa’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope when it launches towards a point nearly 15 lakh km from Earth.
Over one million names will be traveling a million miles away in space in less than a month!
Roman’s Send Your Name campaign wrapped up with over 1.3 million names submitted. Make sure to tune in Aug 30 at 7:26 am ET to watch the observatory launch from @NASAKennedy. pic.twitter.com/hqvV06sspR— Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (@NASARoman) August 3, 2026.
The names have been stored on an SD card attached to the observatory, turning a major scientific mission into a small time capsule of public participation.
Nasa invited people around the world to submit their names through its free “Send Your Name with Roman” campaign. Participants received a digital boarding pass after signing up, giving them a personal connection to a mission designed to explore some of the biggest mysteries of the universe.
The campaign closed on July 12, with the collected names uploaded to the card that will fly with Roman.
The idea follows a long-running Nasa tradition of carrying people’s names and messages aboard spacecraft.
This time the names of millions will accompany Nasa’s next groundbreaking space telescope.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is Nasa’s next major space observatory and is named after Nancy Grace Roman, the space agency’s first chief astronomer and a key figure in making the Hubble Space Telescope possible.
The telescope is designed to survey enormous areas of the sky while looking for answers to two major questions: What is dark energy doing to the expansion of the universe, and how common are planets beyond our solar system? Its Wide Field Instrument will give Roman a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s, allowing it to survey huge stretches of the cosmos far more quickly. Nasa expects the observatory to discover thousands of exoplanets and study billions of galaxies over its mission.
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