The Florida Roundup - Florida’s primary results, NASA's Roman Space Telescope, and weekly news briefing

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

This week on The Florida Roundup, we broke down the results from Florida’s primary elections with Politico’s Kimberly Leonard (00:00). Then, we were joined by PolitiFact’s Samantha Putterman for some fact-checking (14:14). Plus, NASA scientist Jeremy Perkins spoke with us about a new space telescope that’s set to launch from Kennedy Space Center at the end of the month (19:48). And later, we looked at how the state is investing in speech and debate programs this school year (37:14) and more educational news.

This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Brendan Byrne, live from Central Florida Public Media. Tom Hudson is out this week. Is there life on other planets? We'll be talking with one of NASA's scientists working on the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope mission, launching later this month from Florida. Among the goals of this mission is surveying planets beyond our solar system for questions about the potential for life beyond Earth. What do you hope they'll find?

And backyard astronomers, would you like to see? What would you like to see as we peer deeper into the universe? Email us your thoughts and questions at radio at the Florida roundup.org or give us a call at 305-995-1800. That's coming up in about 20 minutes. But first, we're breaking down Florida's primary results. More than 1.3 million Floridians went to cast their votes in person on Tuesday. In total, nearly 3.4 million votes were cast in the primary. That's out of 13.5 million registered voters in the state.

So that makes a turnout of just over 25% according to numbers posted by the division of elections. There were about 1.2 million vote by mail ballots and just over 818,000 voted early in person ahead of Tuesday. We'll talk about the winners and losers in the state and federal races, major upsets and surprises, and what it all means heading into November's general election. Joining us now from our partner station, W. LR.N. in Miami, is Kimberly Leonard, politics reporter and author of the Florida playbook for Politico. Thanks for joining us, Kimberly. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, great to chat with you about this, especially this week. Kimberly, let's start with the

Republican gubernatorial primary. Byron Donald's won that race. Last night, the Florida GOP kicked off the general election with a rally in Tampa, the top of the tour ticket. What did that rally tell us about the strategy for Republicans and Donald's heading forward? Look, they're definitely leaning into fear factor. They're calling all Democrats socialists. They're warning that Florida will become like other blue states if Democrats were to be elected. And the main kind of villain of the night was the Senate Democratic nominee, Angie Nixon, who had joined the Democratic Socialists of America in June. And so it was very clear that that is going to be their message to really instill fear. the electorate heading into November. Lots to talk about that, that Senate primary. We'll get to that in a minute, but sticking with the gubernatorial primary and this top of the tour ticket.

You wrote this morning in Florida playbook about that rally. What was there? But more importantly, what wasn't there? What was missing from this rally, Kimberly? I didn't hear very much about what their plans are about how to improve Florida. Byron Donald's has definitely talked at length about how he wants to grow the state. really wants to lean into the fact that Florida is growing, that more companies are moving their headquarters here. He wants to have more transportation options and so forth. But his message really

heavily focused, again, on trying to make that contrast with Democrats. And so even though, you know, it was supposed to be about his race, it still ended up leaning into the other parts of the ticket that they're describing as socialist. And as you wrote, there wasn't a lot of talk about improvements to Floridian's lives, right? Cost of living, you know, housing, all of those things. Is that a miss, you think? Well, I don't know. Elections are won on fear.

It happens all the time. But they're also one on anger, right? And from what I've seen, there is a large portion of the electorate that feels very angry about the way things are right now. They feel like they can't afford anything. They feel like they can't advance. They're very frustrated. And a failure to acknowledge that could change the landscape in November.

I don't know yet, but it is a factor. We'll find out in November, right. Well, Democrats have their gubernatorial candidate in David Jolly. Here's a bit of sound from him Tuesday night at his election watch party in Miami Lakes. folks there is a new coalition emerging in american politics tonight and it's starting right here in the state of florida a coalition rooted in the everyday majority that understands the economy should continue to grow but it's got to grow for everybody Kimberly what's at stake for florida democrats in in this gubernatorial race look it's an uphill climb for them they are

outnumbered in the state very significantly by 1.5 million GOP voters compared to Democratic voters. What's interesting about the way that David Jolly is running, you know, I mentioned anger earlier. That's not the tone that he's taking at all. In fact, he's taking more of a, you know, let's get along type of posture. His first ad that came out this week is about how our politics are broken. And he keeps telling me, he wants people to vote understanding that we as a state, can be better than that, that we can be against divisions that keep us apart. And so it's a very different message than you're hearing from other Democrats, whether in Florida or across the country. Could the Democrats take this as an opportunity to hit on those issues that are missing

from the GOP platform, the cost of living, the frustrations that are growing with affordability? That's definitely something that they're doing. You know, they probably have to detail a little bit more of their plans. You know, they've put a couple of things out there. But if you look at some of the other states that have been successful at articulating their plans, whether on the Republican or Democratic side, they've had very concrete, easily digestible ways that they've talked about what they want to do. And for David Jolly, one of those things is actually putting a pause on the building of data centers in Florida. And that, people get that, right? That's concrete. And it is something that I can tell you I hear about all the time from voters, Republicans, Democrats, independents.

They don't like the data center stuff. They don't like AI. They worry that it'll take their jobs. They worry what it'll do to the environment. And so more of these concrete ideas from what I've seen in analyzing different states does help to bring along the electorate and gives them something to vote for. Let's turn to that Senate race that you alluded to earlier. On the Republican side, the appointed incumbent Ashley Moody's sale to victory in her nomination contest, but a bit of surprise on the Democratic side with Angie Nixon's win, despite being outspent by challenger Alex Vindman. Kimberly, how has the Florida Democratic Party responded to Nixon's surprise win here?

Oh my goodness, it was more than a bit of a surprise. No one expected it. I mean, I can tell you there were progressive groups that I literally followed around Florida who knocked on doors on behalf of her and did not expect her to win. So this is a really, really big deal. It's making other Democrats very nervous. As I mentioned earlier, David Jolly is running more of a moderate, both in tone and in policy ideas, type of campaign. Angie Nixon is running a completely different kind of campaign, focused on people's anger, focused on being loud, focused on showing up all over the place, doing protests, bringing a megaphone to the state house floor.

And she is breaking all of the rules that Democrats thought that they had. and she's still handily won the nomination. So it'll be really interesting to see whether they're able to sort of bring their two styles together and maybe bring out a more diverse coalition than they would have otherwise. What's been the response from the National Democratic Party, if any? Oh, not a whole lot. So Bernie Sanders is an independent, but she did get his endorsement, which was a big deal. You know, Democrats have never seen Florida as being in reach for them.

But look, she's tapping into something that's real. They're going to start getting out and organizing and doing things very differently than a lot of other campaigns. And she could bring out voters who otherwise may have not voted at all. And so it's going to be interesting to see, and both positively negatively, right? Because you're going to have some voters who are very afraid of socialism who are going to vote against her. But she is going to bring an energy that perhaps might not have been here if she had not been at the top of the ticket. A university of central Florida political science, Aubrey Jewett was asked about about this. Here's what he had to say.

Even if a majority of the Democratic base wants a progressive Democratic socialist, I haven't seen any evidence that the majority of Floridians won a progressive Democratic socialist, right? I mean, the polling just doesn't show that. So we got David Jolly, once a Republican, now considered moderate Democrat, winning that Democratic gubernatorial primary, then Democratic Center primary, more progressive left-leaning candidate in Nixon. How does this play out in November on the ballot? Well, one thing I do want to clarify, even though a lot of people would consider her views to be far left, she would not identify on the day that she launched her campaign when I interviewed her,

and I asked her if she would define herself as a progressive. She would not. She has said she's not a socialist. She basically has said she doesn't like to use labels. One of the things that will probably see her do is get out and speak for herself about the things that she believes in instead of really just kind of letting people label her and putting her head down. I mean, she's been doing nonstop press and she has been talking about a lot of those cost of living issues. You know, a lot of people have lost health care coverage because of the subsidies under the Affordable Care Act that have expired. That's something she brings up all the time. And so as much as she's able to sort of move away from labels and more about specific issues, you can sort of see her doing that already.

And still that democratic or still that socialist moniker there, this is what David Jolly had to say about running with her on the platform. To the extent she's embracing any of the DSA platform, I reject that. We're not going to agree on that. But I know there are areas where we're going to fight for housing, health care, and education. So lots to watch there, Kimberly. as well. I want to take an email from a listener we have here, Kimberly. You know, what happens, they ask, what happens to Vindman's financial support now that he's lost? He actually said yesterday

that he was going to send $400,000 to the Florida Democratic Party to help them with organizing and door knocking and that kind of thing. He also sent out a fundraising email. He has a very, very robust list. He raised almost $20 million between his political committee and his campaign. That's a lot of money. That's a lot for someone who's never run before and who's not currently in office. I think he was top 10 or 12 or something like that. So he is passing on the goods. He still wants to be involved. He's sent out a fundraising email for Nixon and he said there's going to be more to come. So it's very interesting and pretty unusual to do that. Kimberly, Tuesday's primary was the first election conducted under the state's newly drawn congressional map. Where did you see the biggest impacts from

Florida's redistricting. Oh, goodness. I mean, we saw Debbie Wasserman Schultz, right, when pretty easily she was one of the first people announced that night. She had decided to run in a district that had been, you know, primarily held by a black lawmaker. It's been redrawn a little bit, or a lot, actually, but that had upset a lot of people, so she's going to be in a position to try to mend a lot of relationships in the black community. We saw that Trump's endorsement, in District 19 seemed to not have as much of an impact as expected. But then again, he issued his endorsement after vote by mail and early voting had been well underway. So it was perhaps a little bit late in the game for that.

And then we saw some of the other areas. I don't think are very clear in terms of, you know, there were certainly seats that were targeted to flip for Republicans. In looking at who made it now, I'm not so sure that it is going to be that easy. for Republicans, given the political environment. But those seats are going to be the ones to watch. And here in our neck of the woods in central Florida, incumbent Corey Mills was ousted in his primary by former Fox 35 news anchor Ryan Elijah.

Is that kind of a sign of what we may see moving forward? How does that play into what Republicans may be thinking come to the general election? I think it shows that they were worried that Corey Mills would have been vulnerable in the general. The Democrat that he's going up against is someone who is a longtime Central Florida guy. He worked for Senator Bill Nelson. He's a former NASA chief of staff, military guy, you know, right out of central casting, right, for Democrats. And then Ryan Elijah, interestingly enough, you know, is someone, obviously who'd been in the media

before. But instead of really taking the posture of someone like Carrie Lake who, you know, bash the media and said, oh, it's always been fake news, he actually had, approached it from her perspective of saying, I have a developed trust with the public. And so he ran that kind of campaign that really wasn't focused so much on Mills, but on what he had to offer. And I think that that really helped push him over the edge, as well as backing that he had from other Republican House members. Kimberly, lightning around in the last 30 seconds we got here, biggest takeaways from Tuesday. I would say that people are angrier than I even realized. That is a very good observation. Kimberly, thanks again for joining us today. Kimberly Leonard covers Florida Politics for Politico. Thank you, Kimberly.

Thank you. Now we'll continue our focus on this election cycle and bring in some fact-checking. We have Samantha Putterman with our partner, Politifact, joining us now. Welcome back to the program, Sam. Do we have Sam? Yes, can you hear me? I can hear you loud and clear now. All right.

ahead of his win in the Republican gubernatorial primary congressman, Byron Donald's launched an attack ad against David Jolly, now the Democratic nominee. Here's a snippet of that. How radical is David Jolly on the trans agenda? If a local community wants to paint a mural for the LGBTQ plus community, I'll buy you a can of paint. The text that appears in this ad reads,

Jolly supports gender-changing surgeries on kids and plays clips of Jolly saying we embrace it. the medical pathways, the gender affirming care. Sam, how do you and your team rate this claim? Right. So we rated this false. The clip used in the ad was deceptively edited to make it look like Jolly was saying he embraced kids receiving gender affirming surgery. But the full video shows that Jolly was actually quoting another person talking about their family being open to medical care for a transgender adolescent. And he doesn't specifically mention surgery. What is Jolly's stance on gender affirming care? Yeah, so gender affirming care is a broad term, you know, and it can include a range of approaches to support a person's gender identity, including, you know, using a different name or a person's preferred pronouns, and treatments are typically available to adolescents and older, and those include puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and in rare cases, surgeries for older teens.

And of course, any medical intervention for minors requires parental consent. But Jolly has said he supports families having the ability to make medical decisions with their doctors. His campaign hasn't clarified whether this includes gender-affirming surgeries for minors, but again, these surgeries are not performed on young children, which is something that Donald's, you know, has said Jolly supports. Switching gears a bit here. Roughly one-third of Floridians voted by mail in this primary. That includes President Donald Trump, who cast a mail ballot in Palm Beach County, where he is a resident.

But Trump has been a vocal critic of the vote-by-mail process, and he's pushed lawmakers to add more restrictions to mail-in ballots. Sam, what evidence is there to support his claims that voting by mail has led to widespread fraud? Yeah, so there's not much. Each election, you know, tens of millions of Americans vote by mail, and evidence from court records and studies show that only a tiny fraction of those ballots are fraudulent. The president is pushing lawmakers to pass the Save America Act. What changes would be made to vote by mail under this legislation? And where does that currently stand? Right. So the Save America Act would require, you know, documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and government issued voter ID to cast a ballot.

The president wanted the legislation to limit voting by mail, but many Republicans who have won elections with support from absentee voters are very reluctant to scrap that system, which is set by state laws. And the House passed that bill in February, but it does remain stalled in the Senate. And Sam, as we heard earlier, this is going to be a campaign for the general election run on fear, run on frustration. That means that there could be a lot of misinformation out there.

what advice do you have for voters who are just going to be inundated by all of these ads and materials and in campaign stuff as we move closer to November? Yeah, I would just say to take everything with a grain of salt, especially with these ads. As we said, you know, there's a lot of ads that can edit people's remarks, can kind of take their words out of context. It would be good if there was anything that you're concerned with that you might see is to do some research on your own. look up what that candidate has said about any particular subject you're interested in, read, you know, very credible news sources about those topics and kind of almost do your own fact checking on your own in that process because a lot of these ads, a lot of this stuff moves at a very fast pace and a lot of it can be confusing or, you know, as you said, misinformation.

So I would just say to kind of do your due diligence just to make sure that those things are accurate. Great advice. As always, Sam, thanks for helping us check the truthfulness throughout this election cycle. with our partner Politifact. Want fact checks that cut through the campaign noise this election season? You can subscribe to the Florida fact-focused newsletter. That's a joint newsletter with Politifact and our partner station, WLRN and Miami,

where you'll find clear breakdowns on Florida's key midterms. To subscribe, visit politifact.com backslash sign up. And coming up, a very, very exciting mission that is launching just miles away from where I am here in Orlando. NASA plans to uncover space mysteries with a new telescope, and we have one of the scientists that is working on that mission and anxiously awaiting launch later this month. You're listening to The Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio Station. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Brendan Byrne live from Central Florida Public Media. Tom Hudson is out this week.

Next week on our program, youth sports has entered a new era. Florida now allows high schoolers to earn money through endorsements and sponsors. and it's already changing the landscape of student athletics across the state. Are you a former or current student athlete? What do you think about high school student athletes being able to get paid for advertisements? We'll email us your thoughts and questions at Radio at the Florida Roundup.org. But now we're turning to space and a new telescope that is set to launch from Kennedy Space Center at the end of the month. It's the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Its mission is ambitious. It's on the hunt for exoplanets. These are planets that exist outside our own solar system, and it's searching for evidence of galactic glue, elusive dark matter that holds our universe together and dark energy, the unknown something that is causing the universe to expand. It will peer into our cosmos with a view of at least 100 times larger than what Hubble is capable of.

As we peer deeper into our universe, what do you hope we uncover? Are there cosmic curiosities you want the answer to? Will you be coming out to Florida Space Coast, bright and early, to watch Roman take flight, on a Falcon Heavy Rocket. We'll email us your thoughts and questions at the Florida Roundup.org or give us a call at 305-995-1800. Scientists are eager to get their hands on the terabytes of data

that will beaming back from Roman once it's operational. Scientists like NASA's Jeremy Perkins, he's the observation integration and test scientists for the Nancy Gray's Roman Space Telescope. He joins us live now here at the Central Florida Public Media Studios in Orlando. Jeremy, welcome. Thank you. excited to be here.

I'm sure you are, because just a few miles to our east here is the Roman Space Telescope, right? That's where it is eagerly anticipating launch. Jeremy, what's going on in these final days before liftoff? Right. So we are about to encapsulate Roman, which is putting the two SpaceX fairings around Roman and it's going to keep it safe as we go up through the atmosphere. And then in a few days, we're going to be driving the whole thing down to where it's going to get integrated with the rocket, right? before launch. And we're looking to launch here on just a few days away. And it's early too, right?

Yeah, like 725 in the morning, something like that. So you've got to get up bright and early to be able to go catch it. Yeah, it's going to be worth it. Yeah, not fun for us to space reporters there. Jeremy, earlier I mentioned Roman's ambitious mission objectives. But before it can even start to collect science, it has to get to space. So let's talk about that Falcon heavy, roaring to life, lofting Roman off the planet. What happens next? Right. So we launch off the platform and then within hours of it getting up into space, the farings, which we're getting put on here soon, pop off. And Roman starts to talk to the ground right away, even when we're still attached to the rocket so that we can actually just check out its health and safety and make sure everything is working right. And then once we deploy from the spacecraft, so SpaceX is going to get us pointed towards where we're going to.

which is a million miles from Earth. And they're going to make sure that we get our solar panels pointed towards the sun. So we get power right away. And those solar panels also protect us from the heat and the light of the sun. So our instruments are on the other side. We've got a few deployables. So our solar panels deploy. And then Roman starts controlling itself to make sure that we're pointed at the sun and getting power.

And then we have a few more to deployments. We've got a big antenna, which is, so I'm about six foot tall. It's about as wide as I am tall. Wow. Because we've got to get all of that data you talk about to get back to Earth. So that deploys. It's been tucked up under Roman since it left Maryland. I'm losing track of time.

It's been very busy. But basically, it's been tucked up under the observatory since it's left Maryland. And so it's going to pop out for the first time in those few couple of days. And then we have a cover over the primary mirror. So we've got a mirror that's 2.4 meters in diameter. So it's the same size mirror as Hubble. And it basically sets the whole scale for Roman. So Roman is a big telescope.

So if you've seen a fal-and-most people don't have it seen a falcon. But in Florida, I can say, if you've seen a falcon rocket, you know how big that faring is. And we almost fit the whole thing in there. I mean, there's not much room left in the falcon fairing. Is that like school bus size? What would you compare Roman to? Yeah. Yeah, so I like baseball.

So the way I think about it is, is you can fit three Romans between home plate and first base. So end to end, end. So if you think about how fast a base runner can get, it would take them that long to get past three Romans to the end. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a big telescope. Well, that's why it needs the Falcon Heavy right. 27 engines are going to get it off this planet and because it's going to a very interesting place, right?

For us here in Florida, we see stuff launch all the time into low Earth orbit. This is not going to low Earth orbit, though. Where's Roman living? Yeah, so we're going to what's called the Lagrange Point 2, which is a balance point in the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun. And there's a few reasons we're going there. One, it gets us away from the Earth blocking our view to the sky. So if we're out there, we can see all the sky pretty much all the time,

pointed away from the sun. The other thing it does is it's really stable out there. So if you're in orbit around Earth, you're constantly going in and out of the sun. And so you're heating up and cooling down and heating up and cooling down. And we want to be really stable. So one reason we go out to L2 is so that we keep the same temperature basically all the time when we're out there. Very cool. Very cool.

We've been calling it Roman. The full name is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Was Nancy Grace Roman a person? Yes. She was NASA's first chief astronomer. And she is the reason we basically have the space telescopes that you're very familiar with. She's the reason we have Hubble. She's the reason we have the Shandra X-ray telescope.

She's the reason we have Roman itself. She was one of the people that really pushed the idea of putting our best and biggest telescopes in space and getting them out above the atmosphere. So if it wasn't for Nancy Grace Roman, we wouldn't have basically the science program that you see from NASA Astrophysics. What do you hope we might find out there? What interests you about astronomy? Email us your thoughts and questions for Jeremy at Radio at the Florida Round. up.org or give us a call at 305995-1800.

Jeremy, let's talk about the science. It will do once all those deployments are done, and you get to breathe that sigh of relief. And let's start with exoplanets, right? This is such a fascinating aspect of astronomy, because to me it's so new. You know, just a couple of decades. We've gone from identifying zero exoplanets to over 6,000 planets orbiting other stars, and Roman wants to find more. How's it going to do that?

Yeah, so the primary way we're going to do that is we have a really big field of view. So one of the big difference between Roman and other missions that we've flown before is our camera is really big. We have 18 4K by 4K detectors. A sense of scale for this, most people are familiar with seeing the pictures we get from the Hubble Space Telescope. Roman's field of view is 100 times bigger than Hubble. And then we're really stable, like I said before. And so our primary way of doing observations is not really like we point at one object and stare at it and learn all we can about it, is we take a picture and we move and we take a picture and we move.

And we do that over and over and over again for the five-year mission. And so we're going to survey a huge part of the sky. And one of our surveys that we're going to do is we're going to basically take a picture of the center of our galaxy and take another picture and another picture and look for changes. And one of the ways you can find planets is you look at them passing. in front of the light of their star. And so you can see the light from these stars change in brightness, and you can find many, many more planets than we found in the past.

So we're talking about thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of planets that we're going to find this way with Roman. And what that's really going to do is it's going to tell us more about how planets form and grow and how we get solar systems like our own and figure out kind of, is Earth a unique type of planet, or are there many types of plants? out there that look like Earth that are the same size, the same mass, at the same orbit. And we've found, like you said, lots of planets already. But what Roman is going to do is kind of fill in the gaps and find those planets that we haven't

been able to see before. So that's the primary thing that Roman is going to do. The other cool thing is like the Ann Moore part is that we're flying a technology demonstration, which is the chronograph, which is our other instrument. And that instrument is designed to block out the starlight so that we can see the reflected light off of the planets around them. So we're looking at planets beyond our own solar system, looking at very, very distant stars

to try to see the planets orbiting them. And I'm wearing a watch right now. And in the past, I had a, like, one of those glow in the dark watches. And so one of the analogies I've heard is that being able to block out the starlight is like looking at a lighthouse 3,000 miles away and being able to see one of those like glow in the dark watches, like right next to it.

And so it's really, really hard. And the technology demonstration part of this is that we're flying deformable mirrors for the first time in space. What's a deformable mirror? Right. So these are mirrors with little tiny pistons on the back of them to change the shape of the mirror dynamically. And so you basically measure the light coming in and you see how what the air is are in

that wave front and the light coming in. And you can change the shape of the mirror to correct for that. And they've been used all the time on the ground on big telescopes out in Arizona and other places to correct for the atmosphere because the atmosphere bends the light and changes it. And so you basically bend your mirror to counteract that bending of the light. In space, we don't have the atmosphere, but we do get errors introduced from the telescope itself. And so this is to basically counteract that. And that's, we've never done this before in space.

And so this is, this is one of the first times we're trying this out. And we're trying this out now in Roman as a tech demo, as a secondary instrument, for the next generation of missions, which are going to be even better at finding these types of planets. So all of this complex and engineering in optics to essentially snap a picture of a planet outside of our own solar system for the first time ever. Right. Is that what you're saying? Basically, it's going to be really, really cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What do you think we're going to find? So what I'm really excited to find with the exoplanet thing is filling in the census of planets and trying to determine how planets form and evolve and is what we see around us, like the planets we see around us. Is that unique or is that ubiquitous throughout the galaxy? And then I'm going to be really excited when that tech demo actually does what it's supposed to do and gets the first images back of one of these bigger planets to say that, yeah, this is a technology that's going to work in the future. There is also an aspect of this mission that Roman is looking for some elusive buggers in the cosmos, right? Dark matter and dark energy. First of all, if you can explain it to me, so I understand what is dark matter and dark energy and why does it matter?

Yeah, so it matters because dark matter and dark energy basically created, are the forces that created what we see around us in the sky. When you're out in the country and you look up in the sky and see the structures around you, you see the Milky Way and you see the stars and how they all grow and evolve together and move around. Dark energy and dark matter are kind of the forces that have been there since the beginning of the universe that have given that to us. And we call them dark matter and dark energy because we just don't know what they are. Astronomers are not very creative with our names. And so we call things kind of like we see them. And the other way to think about it is because they don't interact with light. And so we can't really see them with optical light.

But what we see is we see their impact on the universe. And so dark, a way to think about it is dark energy is the force that's pushing stuff away. And dark matter is what's pulling it together. And it's been doing this over cosmological time. And so it's really hard to think about like how long that is. but it's extremely long. Billions and billions and billions of years that they've been doing this.

And so these are the forces that have given rise to galaxies and clusters of galaxies and how they interact with each other. And the really cool thing right now is we think our understanding of these is not quite right. There's something a little tweaked about them. We think that maybe dark matter

is getting a little weaker. We don't think we know everything about dark energy that we want to know. And in the end, we don't really know what they are. And so one of the reasons Roman exists is to try to answer those questions. And going back to like the primary instrument on Roman, the wide field instrument, this is with the wide field of view. We're going to be viewing billions of galaxies and lots and lots and lots of stars to try to answer these questions. Because when you're dealing with forces that are universal, you have to basically look at as much of the universe as you can to try to understand how they work.

I'm Brendan Byrne. You're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio Station. You mentioned something about how we don't really know if this is how it works. And I think that's something that's so interesting about sciences, you're asking a question that you don't know the answer to. What other kind of cosmic mysteries may Roman uncover? Right. So Roman is a survey mission. And what that means is that we're looking at a large chunk of the sky. So we take a picture and move and we take a picture and move and take a picture and move. And what that ends up being is a huge data set. And so we're talking about a terabyte of data a day.

And I mentioned this to you before. When you're thinking about a terabyte of data, it's like, okay, what is that? It's like, I can go to the store and I can order online a disk that's a terabyte in size. But the way I've thought about it is we're going to go a million miles away and streaming a terabyte of data back to earth every day is kind of like streaming a million songs back to earth from a million miles away. And that's kind of like trying to find a music or a song you like in a big streaming service. Like if I had a million songs, like how do I know what I like? I have to depend upon algorithms to find the gold and kind of that thing about what I like. And so what I'm

really excited about is that there's going to be some grad student or a student right now or a kid in Kentucky in high school right now, then in 10 years, they're going to be digging into Romans data set and find something that no one thought should exist and are going to find the new and the unusual that's going to really change how we view how astrophysics works. So we're getting to the point where there is more data than there is scientists working on the mission. Oh, very much so. When I was, when I started out in science, you, you, you, You could like download a data set and analyze it on your, on your laptop or in your local computer and try to figure out, okay, I'm looking at this object and trying to figure out what's going on. But now we have to use tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence to actually dig into the data.

And with the supervision of the scientist, find new and unusual things. We've got an email from Greg in St. Pete who asked about funding. And one thing about the Roman Space Telescope, it was under budget. ahead of schedule, but still, these are very, very expensive projects. And if I'm not a scientist, why does this mission matter to me? Why is it worth it? Yeah, so personally, I think it's worth it because we're trying to understand how the universe works.

And I think that as humans, we are very curious creatures. And we want to go up and beyond, we want to go beyond the horizon. We want to get in that boat and see what's out there. We want to try to understand how the world works around us. And that's worked really well for us in the past. And I think that that curiosity is what drives me. And I think that as a country and as a world, I think that that drives almost all of us to try to find out what the new and unusual and try to figure out how the world is working around us. Jeremy, we're days away from this mission.

You told me before we got on the air that you saw Roman for the last time before it gets encapsulated and lofted off this planet. Yeah. How are you feeling right now? It's a weird feeling. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's been working on this for years and a lot of the engineers and scientists have been working on this for decades. And so right now it's a it's a pretty emotional and exciting time seeing, it's kind of like a combination of, of seeing your kid go to college and having a child.

It's, it's a kind of a weird mix of, of this is something we've been working on for a long, long time and it's finally getting real. And then there's also been scientists that have been thinking about. this mission for even longer, and this is a chance for them to get the data for the first time and really see what this thing can do. Where are you going to be? I'm going to be out at Kennedy with my nephews and my family. I'm watching the things off.

Excellent. Jeremy Perkins is NASA's observatory integration and test scientists for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Jeremy, thank you. Good luck with your mission. You're listening to the Florida Roundup from your public radio station. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Brendan Byrne. We've been speaking about an upcoming uncrewed space mission. Now, we'll take a moment to look at past human missions off the planet. Winston Scott is a retired NASA astronaut.

Born and raised in Miami, Scott would go on to attend Florida State University to study music. That's where he started getting into engineering, leading him on a path to becoming a naval aviator, then an astronaut. Scott flew on two space shuttle missions during his time with NASA, Endeavor and Columbia. He spoke about his experience with our partner station, WUFT and Gainesville, for their series, Constellation Conversations. The journey from Earth to orbit is incredible. The action starts at seven seconds before the clock hits zero. My name is Winston Scott, and I'm a retired NASA astronaut and U.S. Navy captain. I had the privilege of flying two space shuttle missions,

nine days on the shuttle endeavor, then 16 days on the shuttle Columbia. The ground-locked secret to computer will ignite the main engines, and smoke and fire is billowing up around the front windscreen. The shuttle is shaking and vibrating, but you aren't going any place yet. If all three engines come up to speed properly, the clock hit zero, then a solid rocket boosts will ignite, and all of a sudden you're off to the races.

It literally jumps off the pad. Boost your ignition and lift-off of endeavor in pursuit of a Japanese satellite. The shuttle would kick you in the backside. You pass 100 miles per hour before you clear the tower. Pass Mark I, the speed of sound in roughly 45 seconds, and then you just continue to go faster and faster and faster. And then eight and one-half minutes later you're in orbit. My first launch was at night.

It was dark outside, obviously. But about halfway through the ass and I could look like the front windows, see the day half of the earth coming. The first time you can look out of the window really is when I remember getting out of my seat on my first flight. The first time I unstrapped and got out of my seat can look over and down at the earth. Then you get the realization of how high you are and how fast you're going over the surface. First thing you notice is how small the earth is because you can see past its boundaries.

Then you can see essentially the atmosphere. It's 50 miles thick, but it looks thin, almost like an onion skin from up there. The continents are beautiful, bright and colorful. The oceans are bright and colorful. You circle the Earth every 90 minutes. See, you've got 45 minutes in daylight, followed by 45 minutes of nighttime on the dark side of it over and over and over again. It really gives you a sense of wanting to take care of the Earth because it's so fragile looking.

The reentry from space and return to Earth is a little bit different from going up. From the time you descend and you begin to touch the atmosphere, we call it entry interface. From entry interface, the time you land, it was about an hour on the space shuttle because you had to reenter in a controlled manner and dissipate all that energy in a controlled manner. We all know what happens to objects that enter the Earth atmosphere uncontrolled. They burn up. We don't want that happen. At one point through the reentry, you're going so fast that the air out actually ionizes

outside. You've got this hot, bright, orange, yellowish plasma built up around the windscreens. It's like you're riding inside a big fireball, which you are. And then you make your way around the earth, gradually slowing down until you overhead Kennedy Space Center, turning on to find out to land. And the landing is very similar to an airline, but a whole lot faster than that. gear touchdown. Devere rolling out on runway 1-5 at the Kennedy Space. The one thing I would like people to know about space or to realize about space is not so

much how it looks the physical properties of it, but the fact that the Earth is so small and the fact that we are all really one people. We may be different ethnic groups. We may speak different languages and have different philosophies, but we're one family and we're on one planet, and we ought to really do a good job of working with each other and taking care of the birth and each other rather than all the fighting that we see going on around the Earth. That's a little bit philosophical, but that's the most important thing I think about the spaceflight. That was Florida native and retired NASA astronaut Winston Scott. These days, he serves as director of operational excellence at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex

and is Professor Emeritus at the Florida Institute of Technology. I'm Brendan Byrne, and you're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio Station. From orbit, back down to Earth for some education news. The state is investing $2.4 million towards speech and debate programs this school year. Central Florida Public Media's Kayla Kisle tells us more about the new Florida debate initiative. The initiative, sponsored by State Senator Jason Broder, supports debate camps, civic experiences, and training for teachers and coaches. It also focuses on rule and high-need communities and English-language learners. Broder says debate is especially important in the age of artificial intelligence

when people can curate their own content and rarely encounter opposing viewpoints. I think we've lost the ability to maybe humanize the other side in many ways. And so this is an opportunity to have people maybe go into something that's uncomfortable, such as an opposing viewpoint, and be able to see the merits of the argument logically. Students like Luis David Ladazevsky, who immigrated to Central Florida from Venezuela, used debate as an opportunity to improve his pronunciation in English skills. Now he says he hopes other students like him can find that same opportunity. They don't understand the amount of life and change that can happen.

They start to believe that they matter. They start to believe that they have something to say that no one else was willing to listen before. The $2.4 million is recurring state funding included in Florida's 2026-27. budget with annual reporting required on how the money is spent and how debate programs are developing. That was Central Florida Public Media's Kayla Kissel reporting. More now on extracurricular activities from the debate stage to the field. For the first time, Florida high schoolers can satisfy both their physical education and arts requirement through marching band. That's after a new law went into effect last month. From our partner station W. LRN in Miami, Sophia Zeran, takes us to

Flanagan High School in Pembroke Pines. where the award-winning marching band is grateful that their hard work is being recognized in their academics. In marching band, there's no room for interpretation. That's what we learned while watching the Falcon Sound, a competitive high school marching band in Broward County practice under the Florida Sun. There are many moving parts to an award-winning marching band. So the Falcon Sounds director, Shelby DeVore, explains. There's actually four main components of this marching band.

So there's the traditional instruments that you think about. And then we have the drum line, also known as the battery. Color Guard. We have one more group that are inside right now, in front ensemble. So those are all the marimbas, xylophones. We have a keyboard. We have a guitar. Over the summer, the band gathered for three weeks for 12-hour day.

days, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. From 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., the students are inside, away from the scorching heat, and spend time focusing on their music. But at 8 a.m., in most spaces at Charles W. Flanagan High School in Pembroke Pines, on this warm Tuesday morning, you can hear the bellowing sound of a metronome. Who's the first tuba? And that's Wokobos, the visual tech, instructing the students on their steps and movements. Just last year, they came in third place at a regional Florida marching band championships contest for their piece titled Journey to Oasis. As the students march, dance, and play across the football field, the physical component of this extracurricular becomes more evident. That's why this year, a Florida law went into effect that allows Florida high school students to achieve both their arts and physical education

credits at the same time. They get more resilient every time we see them. That is Valerie Figueroa Alvarez, the visual caption head for the Falcon Sound. She's been with a marching ban for five years overseeing the physical fitness component of the program. They learn what means to have grit and be able to push through your comfort zone. So, you know, is something uncomfortable or is it actually pain, right? And I feel like with these kids, every time we come back and we see them, they want to grow and they want to push and they don't want to be comfortable. So that, that I think is the biggest thing that I notice. Being one of the top marching bands in Florida means the students see this extracurricular as anything but extra extra.

16-year-old Hannah Zumbach is going into her junior year at Flanagan and has been doing marching band since middle school. A lot of people just don't know how much work and physical endurance we have to put into this sport. And we're also, not only are we moving, but we're also playing. So that's definitely, I would say, the arts factor in there. So I think it's pretty cool that they're actually doing this for us. Zumbach says that thanks to the new law, she'll be using her time in marching band to get her PE credits. divorce says a change like this has been a long time coming.

They work hard just as hard as any other sports team does. It definitely opens the door to a lot of, especially for kids who might not be all that interested in sports. But they know that they love band. This gives them an opportunity to be physical and to be healthy while it's still doing something that they love and making music together. So whether students want to learn how to dance to the sound of a live band or literally march to the beat of their own drawing. drum. Academic credit is being given for the effort it takes both physically and artistically to be part of a high school marching band. In Pembroke Pines, I'm Sophia Saran. WLRN's Sherry Lynn Cabrera helped produce this story. We've marched to the end of our program for today.

From the Central Florida Public Media Studios in Orlando, the Florida Roundup is produced by WLRN public media in Miami with assistance from WUSF in Tampa. The show is produced by Bridget O'Brien. Denise Royal is W. LREN's senior producer of content streaming and news products. W. LRN's director of live original programming is Katie Munez, and the vice president of radio is Peter Mayors. The program's technical director is M.J. Smith. Engineering help from Doug Peterson, Harvey Brassard, and Ernesto J.

Our theme music is provided by Miami Jazz guitarist Aaron Leibos at Aaron Leibos.com. If you missed any of today's show, you can download it and pass programs on the NPR app. Thanks for calling in and listening. I'm Brendan Byrne. Tom Hudson is back next week.