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Just a few days ago I created the tag for the upcoming WFIRST space telescope for Will WFIRST and JWST be able to resolve each other? and today I have read it was renamed. From Space News:

WASHINGTON — NASA announced May 20 it is renaming a major space telescope under development after an astronomer who led the agency’s early work in space-based astronomy, even as the mission remains under threat of cancellation.

The agency announced that the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will now be known as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Roman, who passed away in 2018, joined NASA in 1959 as its first chief of astronomy, working for the agency for 20 years.

For some strange reason I still don't really have a feeling for how SE tags work. In addition to the tag I've just added a was pleased to see that the longer tag length limit accepts it.

This isn't my first meta question about how to deal with tagging of spacecraft when they are renamed, but in this case would the best thing to do be to remove the wfirst tag and leave the newer one?

In Astronomy SE I just created the longer tag:

Other meta questions here related to evolving names:

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    $\begingroup$ I can't remember when we did it, but we did end up merging wfirst into nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope, so I'm going to mark this complete. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Feb 22, 2021 at 17:43

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I suggest a "wait and see" approach. Who knows if the name is further refined to the "Roman Space Telescope" or if an acronym such as NGRST ends up being preferred? Let's wait to see what NASA finally ends up calling it.

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  • $\begingroup$ So you think we should keep both tags active for the same telescope? Won't that cause more problems later? $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    May 21, 2020 at 5:03
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    $\begingroup$ Merging tags is easy enough to do. But I suspect Roman Space Telescope will become the common name. $\endgroup$
    – PearsonArtPhoto Mod
    May 21, 2020 at 12:17
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per comments these are now merged under the tag . Thanks SE for increasing the character length limit of tags a few years back :-)

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