GREENBELT, Md. — On Tuesday (April 21) here at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, I saw scientists standing proudly around a metal device with towering orange solar panels and a gleaming silver pedestal. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is finally completed, shining brightly before my eyes in a sterile white clean room.
Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist, said at a press conference Tuesday that “we very much hope, and indeed hope, that the most exciting science from Roman will be something we didn’t expect and couldn’t predict. But it will set up new deep questions for future missions to address.”
Named after NASA’s first director of astronomy and the first woman to hold an executive position at NASA, this space telescope will become yet another valuable tool in humanity’s quest to understand the true nature of the universe. It is the eyes of other powerful robots in the sky, viz. james webb space telescope (JWST), SPHEREx, the Euclid Space Telescope, and even some old but always impressive hubble. However, as with each of these landmark observatories, this new observatory has its own specialties. We’ll discuss some of these specifications in a moment.
Notably, it is currently scheduled to launch in September 2026. This is eight months ahead of schedule and on budget. Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (abbreviated as “roman”) has the potential to show us parts of the universe that we have not yet touched.
According to NASA, Roman’s primary mirror is about 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) wide, about the same width as Hubble’s primary mirror. But Roman has the ability to take images that capture parts of the sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble.
“Its surveying capabilities are more than 1,000 times faster than Hubble and can depict 200 times more of the sky in a single image,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during the conference. “Roman can process in one year what Hubble would take 2,000 years to process. The images are so large that there are no screens large enough to display them.”
If you say that in contextover its nearly 35 years of service, Hubble has collected approximately 400 terabytes of data. Once the space workstation is fully operational, Roman should be able to create 500 terabytes of data Year by year.
The possibilities are endless when it comes to what this data can contain. It is usually the gold standard for companies telescope;As scientists often say, we always hope to answer questions we never even thought of asking.
cosmic and panoramic
Roman is specially tuned to capture the images below. universe Visible light and near infrared light. Different telescopes observe the universe at different wavelengths of light. For example, JWST specializes in infrared observations, and Hubble’s capabilities allow it to observe some infrared light as well, but mostly visible and ultraviolet light.
This variety is important because it allows us to think of a section of the sky as having different layers. For example, many very distant objects can only be seen in the infrared, which consists of very long wavelengths that are invisible to the human eye, so an infrared telescope is needed to decipher their layers. But there are also visible-light objects in that same part of the sky that need to be studied in more detail, which requires super-powerful telescopes that act like the human eye. and so on.
Roman stands out in several ways, including its fast data processing speed, which we mentioned earlier.
Compared to JWST, Roman’s images (taken with its aptly named Wide Field Instrument (WFI)) are 50 times wider but shallower. This is because Roman does not need access to deep space like JWST. As mentioned earlier, it cannot see infrared light like JWST, so tracing too far back would be wasteful.
Specifically, WFI consists of 300 megapixels. Visible to near infrared Imaging cameras and slitless spectrometers (special tools that allow scientists to capture the dispersion of light of objects in their field of view). But there’s something uniquely special about that shallow panoramic view.
This means scientists don’t have to be so picky about which part of the sky they’re looking at. Just by investigating, they can find strong clues that they should focus on. This allows Roman to catch events that happen very quickly, such as: high speed wireless burstand increases the chances that scientists will witness something surprising supernovacollide neutron star Other phenomena that are easy to miss are also recorded the moment they occur.
“So we’re going to see thousands of supernovae, some of them farther away than any supernovae we’ve seen before,” Dominic Benford, program scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, told Space.com. “Tracing the history of the universe through the explosion of stars.”
There’s also hope that Roman will help uncover the details of one of our universe’s greatest mysteries: the dark side.
dark and pale universe
Despite years of searching for answers, scientists still don’t know what exactly dark matter and dark energy teeth. All we know for sure so far is that the normal matter in our Universe doesn’t seem to be enough to keep galaxies from falling apart like horses on a merry-go-round that aren’t properly nailed down, and that the Universe is also accelerating its continued expansion much faster than seems normal. The former is explained by the appearance of a substance called “dark matter” from a distance from normal matter, and the latter is explained by “dark energy” that drives its expansion.
Together, these two substances make up 95% of the universe, but have never been reliably detected. That’s totally weird if you ask me.
Of course, with such a track record, we don’t know what Roman will suddenly reveal. dark universe Actually, if everything goes according to plan, we can expect to get pretty close.
Thanks to its beautiful wide field of view, Roman will be able to capture large amounts of images quickly. galaxy Generate detailed 3D views of the universe. Therefore, it will be possible to show various galaxies, orbital dynamics, etc. expansion of the universe — The two main ways we investigate dark matter and dark energy.
“We also study how the universe itself has expanded over time, and these are key to unlocking the fundamental properties of dark matter and dark energy, the very fabric of the universe,” McEnery said.
And that’s not to mention what Roman’s other specialized suite of equipment can do for science. For example, it is equipped with a coronagraph, a tool that blocks the glare of the distant sun and allows missions to directly capture images. exoplanet. In fact, NASA says the telescope’s coronagraph can detect planets 100 million times fainter than their stars. Officials say its capabilities are about 100 to 1,000 times better than existing space-based coronagraphs. In summary.
“The Roman coronagraph will be able to directly image starlight reflected from similar planets. Jupiter “They differ in size, temperature, and distance from their parent star,” the summary says.
The road to launch
Now that Roman is complete, the next stage of its journey will begin soon. This includes transportation to NASA launch sites. kennedy space center It is undergoing the necessary tests for launch in Florida.
A huge amount of pre-launch testing has already been carried out on Roman so far, including bombarding the meager observatory with extreme sounds, shaking it to extremes, exposing it to extreme heat and extreme cold, and even more (all equally extreme) experiments. It may sound wild, but what matters is whether Roman can reliably handle the rigors of launch and the most extreme environment we know of: space.
“Most of the work that remains is final checkout and finishing touches,” Roman Observatory Integration and Test Scientist Jeremy S. Perkins told Space.com. “There’s a lot of full-scale finishing work, making sure we’ve installed and removed all the sensors that were there for testing.”
Regarding the launch procedure, after all aspects of testing were worked out, NASA chose the following method: space x A Falcon Heavy rocket carries this treasure into space. There were 11 items falcon heavy The 70 meter (230 ft) tall rockets launched to date have a 100% success rate.
Once in space, after separating from the rocket, Roman will head to a stable point about 1 million miles from Earth. Lagrange point 2or L2. This is a popular destination for space explorers. That’s because it will be protected from the sun’s heat while orbiting so Mission Control can easily communicate with it.
I hope JWST, Euclid, and the rest of the L2 crew welcome Roman with open arms (solar panels?).
Correction 4/21: Julie McEnery’s name has been updated to reflect the correct spelling.
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