NASA launched its $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday, sending a new wide-angle observatory into space to study some of the universe’s biggest unknowns.
Roman is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and an influential figure in the development of of its space-based astronomy program. Her work eventually earned her the nickname the “mother of Hubble.”
Roman will spend roughly three months traveling to Lagrange Point 2, or L2, about 1 million miles from Earth. James Webb already observes from the same general region of space.
Spy history
Roman’s mirror has an unusual history. Key optics, including its primary mirror, came from hardware originally built for a U.S. intelligence reconnaissance program before the National Reconnaissance Office made the unused equipment available to NASA.
NASA later adapted that hardware for Roman. Its primary mirror is the same size as Hubble’s, but Roman has a field of view at least 100 times larger.
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Roman’s Wide Field Instrument uses a 300-megapixel infrared camera. NASA expects its surveys to record more than 2 billion galaxies and roughly 20 billion stars, along with tens of thousands of exploding stars and other brief cosmic events.
That scale is central to Roman’s mission. Hubble and Webb specialize in detailed observations, while Roman is built to cover much larger stretches of sky quickly and produce enormous surveys for scientists to analyze.
The dark universe
A major goal is to study dark matter and dark energy.
Scientists cannot observe dark matter directly, but they can detect its gravitational effects on galaxies and light. Dark energy is the term used for whatever is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
By tracking the structure of galaxies over cosmic history and studying gravitational lensing, Roman could help scientists test whether today’s leading model of the universe fully explains what they observe.
A planet hunter, too
Planet hunting is another major part of the mission. Roman is expected to dramatically expand the catalog of worlds known beyond our solar system.
Roman also carries a technology demonstration called a coronagraph. By masking the light from a star, the instrument is designed to reveal the far dimmer light coming from large planets nearby.
The experiment could lay groundwork for more advanced observatories designed to photograph rocky worlds more like Earth.
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