NASA has successfully launched the $4.3bn Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The observatory took off atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center at 7:26 a.m. local time on 30 August. The craft will now spend three months travelling to a point in space known as the second Sun–Earth Lagrange point (L2) where it will survey space with a field of view at least 100 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope.
From L2, which lies about 1.6 million kilometres from Earth, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will yield insights into dark energy and dark matter, discover and characterize exoplanets, map billions of galaxies, and gain fresh understanding of black holes.
It will do so via a 2.4-m primary mirror that is accompanied by two instruments: a wide-field instrument will obtain images in visible and near-infrared light while an experimental coronagraph will use masks, prisms and mirrors to cancel out the light from stars to help detect exoplanets.
“Roman will be a discovery machine that will bring us closer than ever before to answering humanity’s most profound questions about our cosmic history,” notes Nicola Fox, associate director for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
NASA intends the observatory to operate for at least a decade with three specific surveys planned for its initial five years. The first will identify tens of thousands of distant supernovae, many more than the 2000 currently known, while a second survey will observe more than a billion galaxies.
Both these sets of measurements, combined with data from other survey telescopes, will be used to improve our understanding of dark energy and its potential role in the speed at which the universe expands. Their observations of gravitational lensing will also allow astronomers to map dark matter.
A third survey, meanwhile, will search the centre of the Milky Way for signs of gravitational microlensing that will reveal more than 2000 otherwise invisible exoplanets.
Mother Hubble
The observatory was initially known as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope before it underwent several design changes due to cost pressures. In 2020 it was then renamed after Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018), who in the early 1960s became NASA’s first chief astronomer and is known as “the mother of the Hubble Space Telescope”.
Yet the Roman observatory won’t replace Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope, rather it will complement them, providing data from wide areas of the universe that those two instruments will then be able to observe in greater detail. ‘Great observatories’ – the next generation of NASA’s space telescopes, and their impact on the next century of observational astronomy
Indeed, Roman will survey the universe one thousand times faster than the Hubble, creating 1.4 billion terabytes of information daily – the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission.
NASA says that machine learning, artificial intelligence and “citizen science” will be used to help sift through the data and flag findings that astronomers will then study.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman praised the mission as “exactly the kind of success story we want to see”. He noted that it was completed “ahead of schedule and on budget”, adding that it “will demonstrate what is possible when America’s space programme pairs bold ambition with disciplined execution”.
