Inside the clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, engineers have completed the construction and testing of a large new space telescope that will study the universe on an unprecedented scale. The telescope, named the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope after NASA’s first chief astronomer, has now been officially completed after more than a decade of development. According to WTOP News, project manager Jamie Dunn said, “It is a lot of work, millions of hours is no exaggeration. That’s actual, actual math.”
The telescope stands over 40 feet tall and is designed to observe the universe with an extremely wide field of view. Scientists say this will help deepen understanding of dark energy and dark matter, as well as discover tens of thousands of exoplanets.
Senior project scientist Julie McEnery said, “One month of Roman observations would correspond to a century with Hubble.”
The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, is still operational today. McEnery noted that Roman’s wide-field survey capability may also help scientists identify flaws in current cosmological theories.
“Current observations hint that our standard model of the universe is incorrect. … Roman will be able to confirm these and set us on the path to understanding what’s right,” she said.
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Unlike previous space telescopes that focused on individual targets, Roman will scan large portions of the sky at once. Mission program manager Lucas Paganini described the shift from studying discreet, “individual objects” to “observing huge portions of the sky in order to fundamentally address something very human, which is trying to understand where do we come from and what about this universe we live in, how’s it evolving.”
The Roman telescope is also equipped with a coronagraph, a special instrument that blocks out starlight, allowing scientists to directly observe planets orbiting other stars.
Vanessa Bailey, coronagraph scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that Roman would be “more stable than all of these other observatories that we’ve built before, and that’s what allows us to do starlight suppression at these unprecedented levels.”
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the telescope “will give the Earth the new atlas of the universe.”
Nicola Fox, Associate Administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said that Roman also lays the foundation for future exploration and advances key technologies and science.
By Xie Xinyu
