NASA soon sends a new one into space telescope Nancy Grace Romanthe successor to the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, which will hunt for dark energy and planets outside our system with an incredibly wide view of space. Its camera will capture an area of the sky up to 100 times larger than Hubble’s in a single photo, meaning it will see billions of galaxies during the mission.
How will the novel change our understanding of the universe?
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a new space telescope that works in the visible and infrared part of the spectrum, similar to Hubble, but with a much wider field of view. It has the same large mirror as Hubble, with a diameter of 2.4 meters, so it is just as sensitive, but its main advantage is that it can capture a huge part of the sky in one image. NASA named it after its first chief astronomer, Nancy Grace Roman, a woman nicknamed the “mother of the Hubble Telescope.”
The novel telescope is designed to answer some of the toughest questions in astronomy today: what dark energy is, how exactly the universe is expanding, and how common planets outside our solar system really are. Thanks to its wide view, it will be able to map the distribution of galaxies across a vast swath of the universe and track how the cosmic structure has changed over time. At the same time, they will hunt for signs of new planets, so they will combine the story of the “great cosmos” and “other worlds” in one mission.
The main camera, called the Wide Field Instrument, will have a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s infrared instrument, but with a similar level of detail. This means that Roman can perform a survey of the sky that would take Hubble hundreds or thousands of times longer. Over the course of the mission, it is expected to measure the light of as many as a billion galaxies, providing a huge database for space exploration.
Dark energy is an invisible component that, according to today’s knowledge, makes up the largest part of the universe and makes it expand faster and faster. Roman will look at how galaxies have spread through space and time, as well as the light from distant supernovae, to measure as precisely as possible how the speed of the universe’s expansion has changed. By comparing this data, scientists can test whether dark energy is something stable or changes as the universe ages.
Hunting for exoplanets and publicly available data for the whole world
In addition to galaxies, Roman will hunt for planets orbiting other stars, so-called exoplanets. One of his campaigns will be directed towards the center of the Milky Way, where he will monitor the tiny changes in starlight when another star or planet passes over them and “enlarges” them briefly – this effect is called microlensing. Thanks to this, the mission could discover thousands of new planets, including those cooler and farther from their stars, which other telescopes have difficulty seeing.
The novel will also have a special instrument called a coronagraph – a set of optical “glasses” and masks that block the star’s blinding light so that much fainter objects, such as planets, can be seen next to it. In this way, the telescope will be able to take direct images of some exoplanets around nearby stars and even study their atmospheres. Although this is more of a technology test than the main goal of the mission, it is an important step toward some future telescopes that may one day search for signs of life on Earth-like planets.
The novel is planned to be launched no later than May 2027, into the so-called L2 orbit, the same area of space in which James Webb Telescope. There, away from the glare of the Earth and Moon, they will have calm conditions for observing space for at least a few years, with the possibility of extending the mission if everything goes well.
A big advantage Telescope romance is that the data will be widely available to the scientific community worldwide, not just to one small team. The plan is that a large part of the time will be devoted to the main programs of the mission, but also that researchers from different countries can propose their projects and use the collected data for their own discoveries. Due to the enormous amount of information that the telescope will send, Roman is expected to shape space exploration for decades to come and make discoveries that we can’t even imagine yet.