NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch this weekend, and the mission could help answer some of the biggest questions about our universe. Many at nearby Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt are part of the project.

Matthew Bolcar, the Roman mission’s Optical Systems Lead at NASA Goddard, has helped get the telescope ready for liftoff. He says it has a clear mission. “The two big things it was designed for was to study dark energy and dark matter; these are two fundamental aspects of the universe that we don’t really understand that well.”

Bolcar says Roman will also study exoplanets, planets that are orbiting other stars.

“Small rocky planets like Earth and Mars all the way up to big gas giants like Jupiter and Neptune, that’s something that you know that will detect a whole new range of these planets to understand how common they are and how common solar systems like ours are out there,” he said.

According to a NASA press release, Roman is equipped with “star glasses” that allow its internal mirrors and filters to shapeshift in real-time — dimming the glare of nearby stars to reveal orbiting planets and debris disks.

It’s also using something called cosmic time-lapse, where the telescope repeatedly photographs the same wide swaths of space. That will allow for the creation of high-resolution time-lapses of the universe in motion.

Bolcar considers this launch a flagship mission, like the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope or James Webb. “We’re really sort of marking a time where we’re going to change our understanding of the Universe,” he said.

The Telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, who passed away in 2018. She was also known as the “mother” of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Source