NASA launches Roman Space Telescope to uncover the universe’s biggest mysteries
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is on a mission to probe dark energy, hunt for distant worlds and transform our view of the universe
By Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura
Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. We’re kicking this week off by focusing on one major science news story: the launch of NASA’s next great space observatory.
Early in the morning on Sunday, August 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It’s now on a month-long journey to a spot known as Lagrange Point 2, or L2, which is more than 900,000 miles away from Earth.
Our guest today is Julie McEnery, who serves as senior project scientist for the mission. She’s here to tell us why scientists are so excited about this new space telescope and what it could teach us about the universe.
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Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today.
Julie McEnery: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Feltman: So how long has this telescope been in the works?
McEnery: If you start the clock when scientists first started imagining “What kind of mission would you want to put together to explore the newly discovered accelerating universe?” it starts in the early 2000s.
Feltman: Well, and so let’s take a step back for our listeners to talk about that. You know, what discoveries led scientists to want an observatory with these capabilities? You know, what questions were they starting to get excited to answer?
McEnery: Well, there’s three separate questions. So one of the most prominent was the discovery that our universe is accelerating. The idea that our universe is accelerating is crazy, right? What you know about in the universe is that the universe has matter, and gravity acts on matter, and it pulls it together. We would expect our universe to continue expanding at a constant rate or to even start to contract. When we went to measure how the universe is expanding as a function of time, we discovered that it’s actually accelerating, and that’s as crazy as if you were to throw a ball in the air, and instead of the ball coming back down, it accelerates out of there. So one of the reasons for Roman was to build an observatory that was going to be able to measure that phenomenon much, much better.
At the same time, the study of exoplanets, planets around other stars, was exploding. And one of the things that scientists wanted to do was to be able to design an observatory that could find a large number of exoplanets that were at large distances from their host stars using a technique called microlensing. And that technique requires a mission with a wide field of view and a good sensitivity.
And then there were also a group of scientists who were really interested in the science that you could do if you had wide-field, near-infrared surveys. And it turns out that a mission that gives you exquisite performance, exquisite sensitivity and an ability to conduct wide-field surveys in the near-infrared could address all three of those science questions, and that’s how Roman was born.
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