With a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble’s, NASA’s Roman Space Telescope will measure light from a billion galaxies, conduct microlensing surveys deep within the Milky Way to discover thousands of exoplanets, monitor hundreds of millions of stars, and offer a look at the environments of distant galaxies which could offer the greatest discovery of the century so far.
NASA has updated details of the epic mission that will begin as early as October 2026, 16 years after its conceptual approval in the United States National Research Council’s 2010 Decadal Survey, and a decade after greenlighting its development in February 2016.
The planet hunter previously known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIST) is now in Phase C of its construction, which is final design and fabrication. NASA has a launch target of October 2026, but with a timeframe of until May 2027.
“We’re leveraging the science community at large to lay the foundation, so that when we launch, we’ll be able to do great science right away,” said Julie McEnery, Roman senior project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space. Aviation Center, Maryland. “There’s a lot of interesting work to be done and a lot of different ways for scientists to get involved.”
An artist’s impression of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
NASA
Roman – named after pioneering US astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who, among her many accomplishments, played a key role in developing the Hubble Space Telescope at a time when women working anywhere in senior positions in science was discouraged – is finally ready to answer these questions. we’ve been thinking about dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics for a long time.
Although the pioneering astronomer will not witness this new era of space exploration – he died on Christmas Day 2018, aged 93 – it is a very fitting tribute.
“Roman will be an incredible engine of discovery, combining expansive views of space with keen vision,” said McEnery. “His time domain survey will yield a treasure trove of new information about the cosmos.”
Its main mirror is 2.4 m (7.9 ft) wide, making it the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope’s main mirror, but only one-fifth the weight, with a field of view 100 times larger than its predecessor.
While recent Kepler Space Telescope studies have focused on stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way, Roman will head to its center, for the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, using infrared vision to peer through clouds of dust to looking at the central region of our galaxy. galaxy. There, he will watch out for microlensing events, which, by observing signs of ‘warped’ gravitational forces, could reveal (so to speak) previously unknown exoplanets.
Due to the density of stars in this region, scientists expect to see more than 50,000 microlensing events, revealing ‘rogue’ planets, black holes, neutron stars and trans-Neptunian objects.
The current plan is for Roman to take a happy photo every 15 minutes for about two months. This will be repeated six times over the mission’s initial five years, bringing the total observations to more than one year.
“This will be one of the longest exposures of the sky ever done,” said Scott Gaudi, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, whose research helped guide Roman’s survey strategy. “And it will cover largely uncharted territory when it comes to the planet.”
Astronomers believe the survey will also reveal more than 1,000 planets orbiting far from their host stars in systems farther from Earth than previous missions.
If that weren’t enough for Roman’s first mission to space, the telescope is also expected to detect more than 1,000 neutron stars and hundreds of stellar-mass black holes. Astronomers will also use galactic photographers to discover thousands of Kuiper belt objects, icy bodies that are mostly scattered beyond Neptune.
NASA Goddard team members along with the Ball Aerospace integration and test team pose after sRCS was integrated into WFI Roman
Aerospace Ball
The Roman Space Telescope will rely on two main components for its data collection. The Wide Field Instrument (WFI) provides wide-field imaging and spectroscopy, ideal for cosmology and exoplanet surveys, while the Coronagraph instrument (CGI) will focus on high-contrast imaging and spectroscopy to observe exoplanets and debris disks.
Scientists are also looking at how advances in machine learning will help analyze the trillions of images Roman has collected.
“The prep work was complicated, in part because everything Roman did was interconnected,” McEnery said. “Each observation will be used by multiple teams for different science cases, so we created an environment that makes it easy for scientists to collaborate.”
Learn more about the Roman missions here. Check out the latest mission planning from NASA in the video below.
Roman View of the Dynamic Universe
Source: Goddard Space Flight Center
2023-10-25 10:36:29
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