NASA on Tuesday unveiled a new telescope capable of scanning vast swaths of the universe for planets outside our solar system and probing the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
The Roman Space Telescope is expected to discover tens of thousands of planets, which could help determine how many there might be.
“Roman will give Earth a new atlas of the universe,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said at a news conference at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the telescope was on display.
The 12-meter (39-foot) silver craft with huge solar panels will be transported to Florida before a launch into space aboard a SpaceX rocket planned for September at the earliest.
Roman, which took more than $4 billion and more than a decade to build, is named after astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, nicknamed the “Mother of Hubble” for her role in the development of the historic space telescope.
Thirty-six years after the launch of Hubble into space, which revolutionized astronomical observations, NASA hopes that Roman will help shed light on questions that remain unanswered.
Boasting a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s, the telescope will scan vast regions of space from its position 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth.
The telescope will send 11 terabytes of data per day to Earth, said Mark Melton, a systems engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center.
“In the first year we will have sent more data than Hubble will have in its entire life,” he said. AFP.
The telescope’s wide-angle lens will allow NASA to conduct a census of the objects that make up our universe, said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“Roman will discover tens of thousands of new planets outside our solar system. It will reveal billions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae and tens of billions of stars,” she said.
This wealth of information will allow NASA to identify areas of interest that can then be studied by complementary telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope.
Study the invisible
But Roman will also study the invisible: dark matter and dark energy, whose origins remain unknown but which constitute 95% of our universe.
Dark matter is thought to be the glue that holds galaxies together, while dark energy pulls them apart by accelerating the expansion of the universe over time.
Using its infrared vision, the telescope will be able to observe light emitted by celestial bodies billions of years ago, going back in time to hopefully discover more about these two phenomena.
Complementing work at Europe’s Euclid Space Telescope and the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, Roman will study “how dark matter structures itself throughout cosmic time” and “calculate how fast galaxies are moving away from us,” said Darryl Seligman, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University. AFP.
These discoveries could fundamentally change our understanding of the structure of our universe, said astrophysicist Julie McEnery, who led the Roman project.
“If Roman wins a Nobel Prize at some point, it’s probably for something we haven’t yet thought about or questioned,” Melton said.
