NASA launches the Roman space telescope, a massive survey instrument with spy-satellite mirrors
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman telescope, built around a 2-metre mirror donated by the National Reconnaissance Office, was launched last month and will begin surveying the sky from a point 1.5 million kilometres away.
In January 2011 the National Reconnaissance Office offered NASA a pair of two-metre curved mirrors that were no longer needed for a secret satellite, prompting NASA to design a new space telescope around one of them. After ten years of engineering work, the Nancy Grace Roman telescope was launched last month and will travel to an observation point 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. Once operational, its 300-megapixel camera will produce some of the widest-field images ever taken from space, covering an area equivalent to 3,455 full moons in a single three-week survey.
Over five years the observatory will scan 50 times the sky Hubble covered in 30 years, returning roughly 20 petabytes of data. A built-in coronagraph will enable direct imaging of exoplanets by blocking host-star glare, and the mission will complement ground-based surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
Why it matters
Roman will dramatically expand our view of the universe, accelerating discoveries of galaxies, exoplanets and cosmic phenomena.
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