NASA launched the $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday, sending a powerful new observatory into space on a mission to investigate some of the universe’s biggest mysteries.
The telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and a major figure in the development of the agency’s space-based astronomy program. Her efforts to advance space telescopes eventually earned her the nickname the “mother of Hubble.”
Roman will spend roughly three months traveling to its destination near Lagrange Point 2, or L2, about 1 million miles from Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope already operates from the same general region of space.
Once operational, Roman will give astronomers something significantly different from NASA’s other major space telescopes: the ability to survey enormous sections of the sky relatively quickly.
From Spy Hardware to Space Telescope
Part of Roman’s story begins not with astronomy, but with U.S. intelligence.
Key optics used for the telescope, including its primary mirror, came from hardware originally built for a U.S. intelligence reconnaissance program. The National Reconnaissance Office later made the unused equipment available to NASA, which adapted it for the Roman mission.
Roman’s primary mirror is the same size as Hubble’s, but the new telescope has a field of view at least 100 times larger.
Its Wide Field Instrument features a 300-megapixel infrared camera designed to capture massive amounts of astronomical data.
NASA expects Roman’s surveys to record more than 2 billion galaxies and roughly 20 billion stars. The telescope is also expected to observe tens of thousands of exploding stars and other short-lived cosmic events.
That enormous field of view is at the heart of Roman’s mission. While Hubble and Webb excel at making detailed observations of individual targets or relatively small areas of space, Roman is designed to rapidly survey much larger portions of the sky.
Those surveys could give scientists an unprecedented amount of data for studying how the universe has evolved.
Investigating the ‘Dark Universe’
One of Roman’s biggest assignments will be studying two of astronomy’s most puzzling subjects: dark matter and dark energy.
Dark matter cannot be directly observed, but scientists can detect its influence through its gravitational effects on galaxies and light. Dark energy is the term scientists use for whatever is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Roman will examine the distribution and structure of galaxies across cosmic history and study gravitational lensing, a phenomenon in which gravity bends light traveling through space.
Those observations could allow researchers to put the leading model of the universe through increasingly precise tests and determine whether it fully explains what astronomers see.
With billions of galaxies potentially included in Roman’s surveys, scientists will have an enormous dataset to work with as they investigate how the universe grew into its present form.
Roman Will Hunt for New Worlds
Roman is also a planet hunter.
The telescope is expected to dramatically expand the number and variety of known planets beyond our solar system, giving astronomers a broader picture of the worlds that exist throughout the Milky Way.
Roman also carries a technology demonstration known as a coronagraph.
The instrument is designed to block the overwhelming light coming from a star so astronomers can detect the much fainter light from large planets orbiting nearby.
Beyond the planets Roman itself could observe, the coronagraph could help prove technologies needed for future space telescopes capable of directly photographing smaller, rocky planets more similar to Earth.
Roman’s combination of a wide field of view, powerful infrared camera and planet-imaging technology gives the observatory an unusually broad mission.
