Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, fully assembled.
Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Last December, we reported that the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope had completed construction. Now slated for a September launch, NASA held a press conference on Tuesday to detail the performance of the new high-powered infrared imaging tool.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (“Roman”) will take a survey (NASA often calls it a “census”) of the universe in unprecedented detail. In the live broadcast, NASA officials went over the many aspects of astronomy and astrophysics that they hope to benefit.
But first, here’s a cool cinematic trailer they released, alongside the live event.
One thing NASA is proud of (and rightfully so) is that the entire Rome project came in ahead of schedule and under budget. The agency apparently feels it’s important to emphasize this fact, not just because it’s proud, but because it knows that any pure science initiative will be scrutinized from a budget point forward.
Talking about its ability to bring an ambitious scientific experiment to a high success rate will help more than just this particular project.
Another point that was heavily emphasized was the sheer scale of what the Romans could do. At one point, NASA Director Jared Isaacman pointed out that Roman’s data-gathering capabilities are “more than 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and can map 200 times the sky in one image.”
He said it could complete in a year what Hubble would take 2,000 years to process, and that its 300-megapixel images are too large to be displayed on any screen in the world. (Sorry, Jared, but I should point out that the Las Vegas Sphere is a 300+ megapixel screen, which is almost sharp enough to display that many pixels at once.)
All that data will be used widely, but mainly for two purposes.
First, NASA has installed a coronagraph that can dim the star enough to allow direct imaging of exoplanets, even if they are very close to the star. That should allow for unprecedented new information on exoplanets, as direct imaging can yield information that would never be seen with a traditional eclipse, or transit, of an exoplanet in front of its star.
Another main objective is to investigate dark matter and dark energy. By visualizing the vast structure of the universe and the distribution of billions of galaxies, NASA hopes to see a more detailed map of dark matter. It also hopes to observe this change in distribution over time, which could help see the impact of dark energy, too.
The Roman is scheduled to operate for at least five years, although its lifespan will likely exceed that; in those five years of service, it should collect about 2.5 petabytes of data.
Remember that the relatively small volumes of data collected by Hubble and other space observatories generate new information continuously, even years after initial publication; even at earlier levels of performance, it is still possible for scientists to miss effects in the data.
We’ll keep you up to date as the first Roman observations pour in to reveal amazing new exoplanets and profound new insights into the fundamental nature of the universe.
