A ‘Groundbreaking, Earth-Shattering, Universe-Defining’ Mission
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- Published: Wednesday, June 17 2026 01:34
This fall, when all the final system checks are done and the countdown ticks to the final second, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will blast off the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center—and no one will be more geeked than Jackie Townsend (B.S. ’94, physics).
“Nothing matches the pride and terror of the moment of launch,” Townsend explained. “Even for me, who does science missions—it's like watching your kid graduate and worrying they're going to trip as they walk across the stage. I will be crying. It will be a magnificent moment.”
For Townsend, Roman is the latest milestone in a 30-plus-year NASA career that included groundbreaking Hubble missions, countless spaceship materials challenges, complex weather satellite collaborations and a host of discoveries. Recently named project manager for the Roman mission, after spending more than 15 years as deputy project manager, Townsend deliberated over every detail of one of NASA’s most ambitious efforts ever, a scientific adventure that will explore the universe in ways never possible before.
“What most excites me? We’re going to record or image more than 20 billion celestial objects over the life of this mission. And when you record 20 billion of something, you’ll capture 20 thousand, one-in-a-million events—phenomena we’ve never seen before,” Townsend said. “That’s what I love about Roman. We're going to do the science that we were designed to do spectacularly well—and we’re going to find untold new areas to explore.”
Wrong turn, right career
Space wasn’t part of Townsend’s original career plan. 
Jackie Townsend with the Roman Space Telescope at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Photo courtesy of Jackie Townsend.
“When I graduated from high school, I didn’t know that I was any good at math or science, and I first went to college to study psychology,” she said. “But I found I was really bored by psychology. It did not inspire me to try harder, so after my first year, I quit.”
Townsend spent the next three years job-hopping, from farmhand to receptionist to retail, and along the way, she realized she needed a challenge, a career path that would make a difference in the world and inspire her to try so hard that she wouldn’t be afraid to fail. The answer was physics.
“I thought back to high school—what was a class I really enjoyed even though it challenged me? For me, that was physics,” she recalled. “I decided then I was going back to school.”
A few years—and many community college physics courses—later, Townsend transferred to the University of Maryland, building a strong foundation that set the stage for her future.
“At Maryland, I realized that what it was doing was teaching me how to think,” she said. “The physics degree was teaching me to think through how to solve complex problems, and that’s obviously an everyday occurrence in my job at NASA today.”
Townsend connected with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and had the opportunity to conduct research there as a student.
“I didn't even know Goddard existed until I met people at Maryland who worked with Goddard. The physics department worked with me to carve out a program where I was part-time working and part-time going to school,” Townsend explained. “Even as a co-op, I had samples that had flown in space, and we were working at Goddard to characterize what had changed in those materials from their exposure to space. The connection between what was happening in the classroom and the hands-on work that I was doing at Goddard was just magnificent. It was inspirational to me.”
Blankets, cameras and sunshields in space
After graduation, Townsend’s co-op experience landed her a full-time job at Goddard as a materials engineer, where she troubleshot materials NASA was sending into space.
“I had the greatest first boss, who was really a teacher disguised as a materials engineer, and he was one of the people who pioneered how we need to test these materials and understand them if we're going to use them in space applications,” Townsend said. “He had me working on contamination control and broader space environmental effects. I had studied solid-state physics stuff at Maryland, and I learned a bunch more at Goddard, so I was becoming recognized as an up-and-coming expert in the effects of the space environment on materials.”
As her NASA career continued, Townsend’s technical expertise and her knack for solving problems made a lasting impact. She contributed to three Hubble servicing missions, improving designs to prevent cracking in the thermal blankets that protect Hubble’s delicate instruments and fine-tuning Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. She later collaborated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on new weather satellites and contributed to the sunshield design for the James Webb Space Telescope.
“The Webb has this tennis court-sized sunshield, which is made of these very thin film materials—it’s like a mylar balloon or a potato chip bag. And because of my work on Hubble, I got to work with the Webb folks to define how they would test the materials to determine which ones would survive the radiation environment where they were going,” Townsend recalled. “I was able to take what I had learned and use it to help shape the choices they made for Webb.”
Preparing for launch
A contributor to the Roman telescope mission as early as 2010, Townsend became the mission’s deputy project manager in 2020. Now as project manager, she’s charged with ensuring that all of NASA’s plans, people and systems are on track for Roman’s planned launch this fall.
“We plan to launch on August 30th from the Kennedy Space Center,” she said. “All of the observatory is complete and went through environmental testing with excellent performance. The team spent May and early June doing what we call the final closeouts. Team members go through pulling off test articles that don’t fly, like accelerometers and metrology targets. The solar arrays, aperture cover and high-gain antenna were each deployed and stowed for the final time here on the ground. In mid-June, the whole observatory is installed into a big shipping container, put on a NASA barge and tugged down to Kennedy Space Center. After that, we have a little over two months’ work to get it onto the launch vehicle and ready for launch on August 30.”
The Roman mission will offer virtually limitless opportunities to investigate a wide range of astrophysics topics, building a massive data archive that will allow scientists to identify and study 100,000 exoplanets, hundreds of millions of galaxies and billions of stars. Townsend believes that keeping this Roman mission on track and on budget will pave the way for even more ambitious missions in the future.
“I'm not a scientist like the Ph.D.s that will use Roman data to do that groundbreaking science, but I am a world-class technical project manager and space architect. This amazing team not only enabled Roman by charting this path, we enabled what's to come. We will be allowed to tackle new, incredibly ambitious missions in the future because of the way we executed on Roman,” Townsend said. “And, to circle all the way back, that's the same problem-solving I learned in the University of Maryland physics department. That same way of thinking about how to tackle really complex problems in a methodical, logical, systemic way is how Roman delivered.”
And for Townsend, whose career in space has been nothing short of stellar, this mission could be the most memorable ever.
“I feel like all the missions I've worked on have been different—kind of like my path to physics and my path to NASA. It’s been this wild ride I never could have predicted or planned. I got here just hanging on and digging into work the problems and get the job done,” she said. “The Roman observatory is fantastic, and it’s going to do groundbreaking, earth-shattering, universe-defining science, and that is really exciting.”
Original story: https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/news/Jackie-townsend-roman-space-telescope-physics-mission
