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NASA is set to launch its latest multibillion-dollar telescope Sunday morning, as scientists gather at Florida’s Space Coast and await liftoff with bated breath.
After riding atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope promises to vastly expand our knowledge of planets beyond our solar system and advance the search for elusive “Earth twins.” The observatory will also help scientists better understand the cosmic tug-of-war between invisible “dark matter” and “dark energy” — a contest whose outcome could either expand or collapse the universe.
Massive teams of engineers and scientists — including personnel from Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — have worked for over a decade to develop the $4.3-billion telescope. As a member of NASA’s class of “flagship” astrophysics missions, its acclaimed colleagues include the Hubble and the James Webb space telescopes.
As the agency pivots to putting astronauts on the moon, this $3-billion space-copter is the agency’s last large-scale mission to explore the solar system.
Roman, named after the woman at NASA who championed the Hubble telescope, will run explorational laps around the 36-year-old observatory. It will view the heavens in the same crisp detail as Hubble, but can survey an area of sky in one year that would take Hubble 1,000 years.
“This truly takes a village,” said Vanessa Bailey, JPL instrument scientist for the coronagraph sensor that will aid in the search for other worlds. “I grew up in rural South Dakota, and the closest town to me had about 2,000 people. There have been more than 2,000 people who have contributed in some way just to the coronograph instrument on Roman — not even Roman as a whole.”
In a field where scientists need reams of information to answer their most burning questions, “Roman gives us this amazing, unprecedented, cutting-edge data — and a huge amount of it,” said Dida Markovic, a JPL research scientist. Markovic is a deputy principal investigator for one of the teams tasked with analyzing the barrage of data (enough to fill up the storage on about 40,000 laptops over Roman’s five-year mission).
Since the 1990s, scientists have cataloged more than 6,300 worlds orbiting stars other than our sun. Roman aims to find 100,000 more of these exoplanets.
The vast majority of discovered exoplanets were found not by taking a picture of the planet, but by sensing it indirectly — how its orbit causes its star to wobble, how it dims the star when it passes in front or how its gravity warps the light of a different star in the background.
These methods are quite good at finding gigantic planets and planets that orbit incredibly close to their host stars — in other words, planets nothing like Earth.
Roman will not only use these methods, but also try to observe some planets directly, measuring light that traveled all the way from the planet’s atmosphere.
The trouble is, Earth-like planets can be more than a billion times dimmer than their host star. That’s harder than trying to spot a firefly right next to someone flashing their high-beams at you.
The James Webb Space Telescope can see planets about 100,000 times dimmer than their star. It does this by covering the host star from its view with masks, called coronagraphs, to better see the planet (like covering up the blinding headlights with your hand).
