NASA’s new telescope will reveal ‘dark space’

NASA complete the following space observatory, designed to create sharp, stunning maps of the whole place while revealing how mysterious, invisible objects and distant worlds shape the universe.

About a quarter century after the Hubble Telescope redefined astronomy, and in a few years time James Webb Space TelescopeNASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope he won’t join them as a replacement, but as a big picture partner. Where Hubble and Webb zoom in for close-ups, Roman will capture Hubble-like details across areas nearly 100 times larger, turning isolated snapshots into sweeping surveys that show the structure of the universe.

At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, engineers are wrapping up launch tests for the state-of-the-art telescope. Next, the probe will travel 900 kilometers to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where teams will prepare it for launch.

That could happen as early as this September, about eight months ahead of schedule, NASA officials said at a press conference on Tuesday, April 21. Once in space, Roman will head into a stable orbit 1 million miles from Earth, near the same point. where Webb orbits the sunand embark on a multi-year deep space imaging mission.

“We didn’t want to wait to launch Nancy Grace Roman. We are eight months ahead of schedule,” said Nicky Fox, NASA’s director of science. “Everybody felt the urgency. Everybody was running towards this.”

Named for Nancy Grace Roman, who became the agency’s first head of astronomy and one of its first female directors, the telescope bears a legacy of opening new windows into the universe above Earth’s atmosphere. He named the “Hubble’s mother,” Roman helped lay the groundwork in the 1960s for the entire array of space telescopes.

A wide shot of a dark universe

At the center of the mission is an eight-foot-wide Roman mirror, the size of Hubble, paired with a powerful infrared camera, like Webb. The field of view of that camera is the Roman’s greatest strength. In one shot, it can see an expanse of sky that Hubble can’t match.

Because a space telescope can only see a patch of the sky at once, it must take many different “points” — individual shots directed in slightly different directions — and combine them into a mosaic.

In 2023, Ami Choi, an astronomer and scientist for the Rome Wide Field Camera, compared the differences between Hubble and the new telescope. Taking pictures Andromeda GalaxyHubble has to take 400 small pictures and combine them. With a Roman camera, that should only take two points, he said.

This wide, sharp view is what scientists need to study the so-called “dark space.” Ordinary matter – the stuff that makes up stars, planets, and even people – makes up only about 5 percent of the universe. A big part of it a dark story and dark energy, which does not emit light but leaves clues where it has influenced the expansion of the universe and the formation of galaxies.

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“The observations now suggest that our standard model of the universe is wrong,” said Julie McHenry, the project’s chief scientist, referring to the cosmologists’ best approach. “Roman will be able to confirm this and put us on the path to understanding what is right.”

Roman will track those clues in several ways at once. By mapping the location and shape of hundreds of millions of galaxies, it will show how structures have evolved from the early universe to the present day. Subtle distortions in the galaxy’s composition will reveal how invisible clumps of cosmic matter bend their light on its way to us, revealing hidden dark matter. At the same time, Roman will discover and track large numbers of a special type of exploding star, known as Type Ia supernovas; their predictable brightness allows astronomers to measure how fast space has expanded over time.

Taken together, these measurements will allow scientists to test competing theories about dark matter, dark energy, and the laws of gravity itself with greater precision than ever before. Other observatories can make similar kinds of measurements, but none combine Rome’s sharpness and infrared sky coverage, NASA mission leaders say, allowing it to see more distant and dust-covered galaxies.

A new census of distant exoplanets

Roman’s wide field strength also makes it adept at it an exoplanet hunting. Previous missions like Kepler and TESS mostly found planets close to their stars, where they multiply a faint interspersion of starlight in a regular rhythm. Roman will focus on a different region of the planetary systems: the cool, outer regions, where worlds like Jupiter and Saturn reside. It may also receive wandering planets not bound to the stars.

To do this, Roman will repeatedly monitor the dense star fields near the center of our Milky Way. As the foreground star passes in front of it more distantly, its gravity will briefly increase the brightness of the background star. If the star in front is carrying planets, it can produce small blips in that light. This process, called microlensingit works best in the kind of tight, weak, and remote areas that Roman is expected to capture.

Through his mission, Roman will try to record thousands of these bright events, revealing distant planets and a host of other surveys that are largely missed. From that transit, astrologers will compare the formation of our solar system and many others and judge that having rocky inner worlds and large outer planets is a rare or rare phenomenon.

The Roman will test again improved coronagraph — a system of masks and mirrors that block the star’s light so that the telescope can try to see the dim light of the planets around it. For Roman, this is more of a technical experiment than an everyday scientific tool, but if it works, it will set the stage for a future observatory whose main goal is to directly image Earth-like worlds around other sun-like stars.

“What astronomers can do today with coronagraph instruments is to see planets that are a million times dimmer than their stars,” Vanessa Bailey, a NASA scientist in Rome, told Mashable. “What we’re doing with the Roman coronagraph is hopefully going to come in at 10 to 100 million times dimmer, maybe more, in the best case.”

To hold the whole place in motion

Roman is also designed to study how the sky changes, creating an authentic “before” and “after” library.

One of its largest probes will repeatedly scan high-latitude areas of the sky, far from the Milky Way’s plane. By returning to the same fields every few days, Roman will catch the supernovas as they burn and fade, watch black holes shine as they feed on nearby objects, and reveal other temporary, amazing phenomena in the distant universe. Its infrared vision will reveal explosions and flares in dust clouds that hide from visible telescopes.

Another important program will be staring at the edge of the Milky Way. There, Roman will track how the brightness of millions of stars rises and falls on time scales of minutes to months. Those records will not only enable the search for the dwarf planet but also reveal other phenomena, such as neutron stars and black holes.

Because Roman will cover such large areas in fine detail, his photographs will also be a long-lasting reference tool. When other telescopes later see something strange – a a burst of high energy radiationfor example, or an unusual variable star — astronomers will be able to pull up previous images of Roman and see what was there before the excitement.

“The images it captures will be so large that no screen is large enough to display them,” said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman. “Roman is going to give the World a new Atlas of the universe. I think it’s worth pausing just to think about how amazing that is.”