We have a quick quiz!
What spacecraft has a former spy telescope mirror, 1.3 million names on board, weighs 18,000 pounds, and is the size of a school bus carrying a 300-million pixel digital sensor to view the universe like never before?
If you answered the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, then you are correct. You should reward yourself by “owning” one of those 300 million pixels as your own by signing up at the telescope’s “Adopt A Pixel” portal. I did so right after Roman achieved “nominal orbit” following its planned 7:26 a.m. liftoff in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
Twenty years from napkin drawings and $4.3 billion to get to the launch pad on Sunday, Roman is going to provide a view of the universe that is 100 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope and far larger than the James Webb Space Telescope. The wide field of view will allow a scrutiny of the universe humans have never been able to do from space.
According to NASA, “each Roman (Wide Field Instrument or WFI) image will capture a patch of the sky bigger than the apparent size of a full moon. Hubble’s infrared images, taken with its Wide Field Camera 3, are about 200 times smaller. Even Hubble’s widest exposures, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys, are nearly 100 times smaller. Over the first five years of observations, Roman will image over 50 times as much sky as Hubble covered in its first 30 years, surveying the sky up to 1,000 times faster than Hubble can while maintaining similar sensitivity and infrared resolution.”
NASA said that the WFI will image and map hundreds of millions of stars not only in the Milky Way galaxy, but billions of galaxies and “enable detailed observations and data acquisition into dark matter and dark energy.”
As described by NASA, the coronograph is expected to discover over 100,000 exoplanets by “using a system of masks, prisms, detectors, and even self-flexing mirrors built to block out the glare from distant stars and reveal the planets in orbit around them, to demonstrate that direct imaging technologies can perform even better in space than they have with ground-based telescopes.”
“As it captures light directly from large, gaseous exoplanets, and from disks of dust and gas surrounding other stars, it will point the way to technologies for even larger space telescopes,” the space agency said. “Once the technology is successfully demonstrated over the mission’s first 18 months, the coronagraph instrument could become open to the scientific community.”
A way to grasp the telescope’s power is to think of humanity receiving 1.4 terabytes per day, which a NASA commentator described Sunday as “a million songs a day from a million miles away.”
To see one of the telescope’s images in full resolution, comprising a trillion pixels, would require half a million high definition TVs, which would require 45 city blocks to hold them all.
For the next 100 days, the telescope will head to a point in space about a million miles from Earth called L2, which is also the current location of the James Webb Space Telescope. Officials say it will take a month for engineering checks, which, if all is OK, will then allow the start of the science checkout of Roman.
The telescope’s first images will be obtained and processed with an expected release date for the public in early 2027.
Roman’s nominal mission length is five years, but could go up to 10 years if all goes well. The spacecraft has been designed for robotic fueling, which could extend its life span even longer.
The D.C. region plays pivotal mission roles as the Roman Space Telescope Project Office is based at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where the telescope was built. The telescope is managed with participation from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
When fully operational, Roman will take us on a daily magic carpet ride of new images of the Universe and the mysteries and discoveries they will provide.
Buckle up!
Follow Greg Redfern on his daily blog to keep up with the latest news in astronomy and space exploration
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