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In brief:
- NASA has announced a powerful new space telescope called Roman.
- NASA hopes Roman can help it answer the questions Hubble couldn’t.
On Tuesday, NASA introduced a groundbreaking new telescope designed to explore the vast expanses of the universe, searching for planets beyond our solar system and delving into the enigmatic realms of dark matter and dark energy.
Dubbed the Roman space telescope, this instrument is anticipated to uncover tens of thousands of planets, potentially shedding light on the abundance of such celestial bodies in the cosmos.
“Roman will provide Earth with a new celestial map,” stated NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman during a press briefing at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the telescope was unveiled to the public.
The telescope, which features a 12-meter structure and expansive solar panels, is set to be transported to Florida. There, it will be launched into space aboard a SpaceX rocket, with the earliest launch window projected for September.
This ambitious project, named after astronomer Nancy Grace Roman—affectionately known as the “Mother of Hubble” for her pivotal role in the development of the renowned space telescope—has taken over a decade and more than $4 billion USD (approximately $5.58 billion) to complete.
Thirty-six years after Hubble launched into space, revolutionising astronomical observations, NASA hopes Roman will help to shed light on questions that remain unresolved.
Boasting a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s, the telescope will sweep across vast regions of space from its position 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.
The telescope will send 11 terabytes of data a day down to Earth, said Mark Melton, a systems engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center.
“In the first year, we’ll have sent down more data than Hubble will have for its entire life,” he told AFP.
The telescope’s wide-angle lens will allow NASA to conduct a census of the objects that make up our universe, said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“Roman will discover tens of thousands of new planets outside our solar system. It will reveal billions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae and tens of billions of stars,” she said.
This wealth of information will enable NASA to tease out areas of interest that can then be investigated by complementary telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope.
Study the invisible
But Roman will also study the invisible — dark matter and dark energy, whose origins remain unknown but which are thought to constitute 95 percent of our universe.
Dark matter is believed to be the glue that holds galaxies together, while dark energy pulls them apart by making the universe expand faster and faster over time.
Thanks to its infrared vision, the telescope will be able to observe light emitted by celestial bodies billions of years ago, effectively looking back in time to hopefully discover more about the two phenomena.
Complementing the work of Europe’s Euclid space telescope and the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, Roman will probe “how the dark matter structures itself throughout cosmic time” and “calculate how fast galaxies are moving away from us,” Darryl Seligman, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University, told AFP.
These discoveries could fundamentally change our understanding of the structure of our universe, said astrophysicist Julie McEnery, who led the Roman project.
“If Roman wins a Nobel Prize at some point, it’s probably for something we haven’t even thought about or questioned yet,” said Melton.
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