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#1 2025-12-16 20:11:11
- tahanson43206
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NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
This topic is available for NewMars members who might wish to provide link, images or text about the new wide field telescope that is in final testing on Earth.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/t … -complete/
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#2 2025-12-16 20:11:57
- tahanson43206
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Re: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
This post is reserved for an index to posts that may be contributed by NewMars members.
Index:
Post #3: Text of article about Roman telescope
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#3 2025-12-16 20:12:22
- tahanson43206
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Re: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/t … -complete/
The $4.3 billion space telescope Trump tried to cancel is now complete
“We’re going to be making 3D movies of what is going on in the Milky Way galaxy.”
Stephen Clark – Dec 16, 2025 4:25 PM |Artist's concept of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
A few weeks ago, technicians inside a cavernous clean room in Maryland made the final connection to complete assembly of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Parts of this new observatory, named for NASA’s first chief astronomer, recently completed a spate of tests to ensure it can survive the shaking and intense sound of a rocket launch. Engineers placed the core of the telescope inside a thermal vacuum chamber, where it withstood the airless conditions and extreme temperature swings it will see in space.
Then, on November 25, teams at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, joined the inner and outer portions of the Roman Space Telescope. With this milestone, NASA declared the observatory complete and on track for launch as soon as fall 2026.
“The team is ecstatic,” said Jackie Townsend, the observatory’s deputy project manager at Goddard, in a recent interview with Ars. “It has been a long road, but filled with lots of successes and an ordinary amount of challenges, I would say. It’s just so rewarding to get to this spot.”
An ordinary amount of challenges is not something you usually hear a NASA official say about a one-of-a-kind space mission. NASA does hard things, and they usually take more time than originally predicted. Astronomers endured more than 10 years of delays, fixes, and setbacks before the James Webb Space Telescope finally launched in 2021.
Webb is the largest telescope ever put into space. After launch, Webb had to perform a sequence of more than 50 major deployment steps, with 178 release mechanisms that had to work perfectly. Any one of the more than 300 single points of failure could have doomed the mission. In the end, Webb unfolded its giant segmented mirror and delicate sunshield without issue. After a quarter-century of development and more than $11 billion spent, the observatory is finally delivering images and science results. And they’re undeniably spectacular.
The completed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, seen here with its solar panels deployed inside a clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Credit: NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya
Seeing far and wide
Roman is far less complex, with a 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) primary mirror that is nearly three times smaller than Webb’s. While it lacks Webb’s deep vision, Roman will see wider swaths of the sky, enabling a cosmic census of billions of stars and galaxies near and far (on the scale of the Universe). This broad vision will support research into dark matter and dark energy, which are thought to make up about 95 percent of the Universe. The rest of the Universe is made of regular atoms and molecules that we can see and touch.
It is also illustrative to compare Roman with the Hubble Space Telescope, which has primary mirrors of the same size. This means Roman will produce images with similar resolution to Hubble. The distinction lies deep inside Roman, where technicians have delicately laid an array of detectors to register the faint infrared light coming through the telescope’s aperture.
“Things like night vision goggles will use the same basic detector device, just tuned to a different wavelength,” Townsend said.
These detectors are located in Roman’s Wide Field Instrument, the mission’s primary imaging camera. There are 18 of them, each 4,096×4,096 pixels wide, combining to form a roughly 300-megapixel camera sensitive to visible and near-infrared light. Teledyne, the company that produced the detectors, says this is the largest infrared focal plane ever made.
The near-infrared channel on Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, which covers much the same part of the spectrum as Roman, has a single 1,024-pixel detector.
“That’s how you get to a much higher field-of-view for the Roman Space Telescope, and it was one of the key enabling technologies,” Townsend told Ars. “That was one place where Roman invested significant dollars, even before we started as a mission, to mature that technology so that it was ready to infuse into this mission.”
With these detectors in its bag, Roman will cover much more cosmic real estate than Hubble. For example, Roman will be able to re-create Hubble’s famous Ultra Deep Field image with the same sharpness, but expand it to show countless stars and galaxies over an area of the sky at least 100 times larger.
This infographic illustrates the differences between the sizes of the primary mirrors and detectors on the Hubble, Roman, and Webb telescopes. Credit: NASARoman has a second instrument, the Roman Coronagraph, with masks, filters, and adaptive optics to block out the glare from stars and reveal the faint glow from objects around them. It is designed to photograph planets 100 million times fainter than their stars, or 100 to 1,000 times better than similar instruments on Webb and Hubble. Roman can also detect exoplanets using the tried-and-true transit method, but scientists expect the new telescope will find a lot more than past space missions, thanks to its wider vision.
“With Roman’s construction complete, we are poised at the brink of unfathomable scientific discovery,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA Goddard, in a press release. “In the mission’s first five years, it’s expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies. We stand to learn a tremendous amount of new information about the universe very rapidly after Roman launches.”
Big numbers are crucial for learning how the Universe works, and Roman will feed vast volumes of data down to astronomers on Earth. “So much of what physics is trying to understand about the nature of the Universe today needs large number statistics in order to understand,” Townsend said.
In one of Roman’s planned sky surveys, the telescope will cover in nine months what would take Hubble between 1,000 and 2,000 years. In another survey, Roman will cover an area equivalent to 3,455 full moons in about three weeks, then go back and observe a smaller portion of that area repeatedly over five-and-a-half days—jobs that Hubble and Webb can’t do.
“We will do fundamentally different science,” Townsend said. “In some subset of our observations, we’re going to be making 3D movies of what is going on in the Milky Way galaxy and in distant galaxies. That is just something that’s never happened before.”
Getting here and getting there
Roman’s promised scientific bounty will come at a cost of $4.3 billion, including expenses for development, manufacturing, launch, and five years of operations.
This is about $300 million more than NASA expected when it formally approved Roman for development in 2020, an overrun the agency blamed on complications related to the coronavirus pandemic. Otherwise, Roman’s budget has been stable since NASA officials finalized the mission’s architecture in 2017, when it was still known by a bulky acronym: WFIRST, the Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope.
At that time, the agency reclassified the Roman Coronagraph as a technology demonstration, allowing managers to relax their requirements for the instrument and stave off concerns about cost growth.
Roman survived multiple attempts by the first Trump administration to cancel the mission. Each time, Congress restored funding to keep the observatory on track for launch in the mid-2020s. With Donald Trump back in the White House, the administration’s budget office earlier this year again wanted to cancel Roman. Eventually, the Trump administration released its fiscal year 2026 budget request in May, calling for a drastic cut to Roman, but not total cancellation.
Once again, both houses of Congress signaled their opposition to the cuts, and the mission remains on track for launch next year, perhaps as soon as September. This is eight months ahead of the schedule NASA has publicized for Roman for the last few years.
Townsend told Ars the mission escaped the kind of crippling cost overruns and delays that afflicted Webb through careful planning and execution. “Roman was under a cost cap, and we operated to that,” she said. “We went through reasonable efforts to preclude those kinds of highly complex deployments that lead you to having trouble in integration and test.”
The outer barrel section of the Roman Space Telescope inside a thermal vacuum chamber at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland. Credit: NASA/Sydney Rohde
There are only a handful of mechanisms that must work after Roman’s launch. They include a deployable cover designed to shield the telescope’s mirror during launch and solar array wings that will unfold once Roman is in space. The observatory will head to an observing post about a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.
“We don’t have moments of terror for the deployment,” Townsend said. “Obviously, launch is always a risk, the tip-off rates that you have when you separate from the launch vehicle… Then, obviously, getting the aperture door open so that it’s deployed is another one. But these feel like normal aerospace risks, not unusual, harrowing moments for Roman.”
It also helps that Roman will use a primary mirror gifted to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government’s spy satellite agency. The NRO originally ordered the mirror for a telescope that would peer down on the Earth, but the spy agency no longer needed it. Before NASA got its hands on the surplus mirror in 2012, scientists working on the preliminary design for what became Roman were thinking of a smaller telescope.
The larger telescope will make Roman a more powerful tool for science, and the NRO’s donation eliminated the risk of a problem or delay manufacturing a new mirror. But the upside meant NASA had to build a more massive spacecraft and use a bigger rocket to accommodate it, adding to the observatory’s cost.
Tests of Roman’s components have gone well this year. Work on Roman continued at Goddard through the government shutdown in the fall. On Webb, engineers uncovered one problem after another as they tried to verify the observatory would perform as intended in space. There were leaky valves, tears in the Webb’s sunshield, a damaged transducer, and loose screws. With Roman, engineers so far have found no “significant surprises” during ground testing, Townsend said.
“What we always hope when you’re doing this final round of environmental tests is that you’ve wrung out the hardware at lower levels of assembly, and it looks like, in Roman’s case, we did a spectacular job at the lower level,” she said.
With Roman now fully assembled, attention at Goddard will turn to an end-to-end functional test of the observatory early next year, followed by electromagnetic interference testing, and another round of acoustic and vibration tests. Then, perhaps around June of next year, NASA will ship the observatory to Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to prepare for launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
“We’re really down to the last stretch of environmental testing for the system,” Townsend said. “It’s definitely already seen the worst environment until we get to launch.”
Photo of Stephen Clark
Stephen Clark Space ReporterStephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.
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#4 2026-08-29 16:26:37
- tahanson43206
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Re: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
NASA held a live news conference ahead of the planned launch of the Nancy Roman Space Telescope today.
CSPAN broadcast the event, and the recording will be available for anyone to view.
AI Overview The direct C-SPAN video links for the Saturday, August 29, 2026, NASA events covering the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope pre-launch updates include:Science Briefing: Watch the technical overview on the C-SPAN NASA Science Briefing Page.Pre-Launch News Conference: Access the operational briefing on the C-SPAN NASA Press Conference Page.These events feature NASA leadership, mission directors, and SpaceX representatives outlining the final weather reviews, Falcon Heavy rocket readiness, and mission objectives before the scheduled Sunday morning launch.
Press briefing:
https://www.c-span.org/program/news-con … nch/684580
Science Technical briefing:
https://www.c-span.org/program/news-con … nch/684577
The launch itself is planned for Sunday 2026/08/30:
AI Overview NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to lift off on Sunday, August 30, 2026, at 7:26 a.m. EDT.
Launch Details
Date: Sunday, August 30, 2026
Time: 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT)
Location: Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida
Rocket: SpaceX Falcon Heavy
How to Watch
NASA and Space.com will host live coverage before liftoff.
NASA's broadcast coverage is set to begin early in the morning at 6:20 a.m. EDT.
Official updates and the "go" announcement are detailed on the NASA Roman Mission Blog.
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#5 2026-08-29 16:52:02
- tahanson43206
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Re: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
The "instantaneous" launch requirement caught my eye. Here is Gemini's attempt to explain the challenges faced by the spacecraft navigation team:
Launch Window Factors for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
The precise launch window for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope—targeted for instantaneous liftoff on August 30, 2026, at 7:26 a.m. EDT aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy—is governed by strict orbital mechanics, environmental safety constraints, and mission architecture parameters.
While the Sun-Earth L2 point provides a gravitationally balanced environment, spacecraft in this region do not sit directly in the shadow of the Earth. Instead, they orbit L2 in a large quasi-periodic trajectory known as a halo orbit. This means the Earth does not continuously block the Sun, allowing Roman's solar arrays to receive direct sunlight for power generation while the observatory’s deployable Sun shield blocks direct solar radiation from reaching sensitive instruments.
The main orbital and engineering factors that dictate Roman's exact launch date and instantaneous daily launch window include:
1. L2 Transfer Trajectory and Eclipse Avoidance
Strict Eclipse Avoidance: Because Roman relies on solar power, its injection trajectory into the L2 halo orbit must ensure it never passes through the deep shadow of the Earth or Moon during transit or during its multi-year baseline halo orbit. The exact alignment of the Earth, Sun, and Moon at launch restricts the acceptable injection vectors, filtering out specific days of the month (especially around solar/lunar eclipse geometry).
Halo Orbit Insertion Geometry: To place Roman into its planned halo orbit using minimal propellant, the launch vehicle must inject the observatory into a direct transfer trajectory. Because the Earth rotates under the plane of the intended trajectory, the launch site (Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center) aligns with the targeted transfer plane only once per day for a split second, resulting in an instantaneous launch window.
2. Thermal and Attitude Constraints
Solar Beta Angle at Injection: Upon separation from the Falcon Heavy upper stage, Roman must immediately orient its solar array toward the Sun to begin battery charging and establish active thermal control. The angle between the Sun vector and the orbital plane (the Solar Beta Angle) at the precise moment of injection dictates whether the solar arrays can safely power the spacecraft while keeping optical assemblies in the shade.
3. Earth Station Geometry and Initial Tracking
Continuous Line-of-Sight: Following spacecraft separation, critical early-orbit events (such as solar array deployment, aperture cover release, and acquisition of signal) must occur within direct line-of-sight of NASA’s Near Space Network (NSN) ground tracking stations (e.g., Deep Space Network stations in Goldstone, Madrid, or Canberra). The timing ensures high-bandwidth telemetry is continuously available during these automated steps.
4. Launch Site Geometry & Range Operations
Colocation of Co-Orbital Assets: The trajectory must account for the position of existing L2 residents (such as the James Webb Space Telescope) to prevent long-term orbital overlap or communication interference.
Range Alignment: The exact azimuth of the launch out of Cape Canaveral must comply with range safety corridors while aligning with the required transfer inclination relative to the ecliptic plane.
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#6 2026-08-30 05:44:26
- tahanson43206
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Re: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
The launch of Nancy Grace Roman appears to have gone smoothly.
This was a SpaceX Super Heavy launch so it featured recovery of two of the boosters.
One touched down on the NASA feed and I presume the other did as well but will wait for confirmation.
That was an "instantaneous" launch window, and SpaceX appears to have nailed it.
The NASA commentary indicated there is some pretty advanced technology in this instrument.
This topic is available for posts about what that advanced technology might be, and for results as they come in.
Per Google Search:
Landing Summary:The First Booster: Landed seamlessly on Landing Zone 2 (LZ-2).The Second Booster: Safely touched down on Landing Zone 40 (LZ-40).The Center Core: Per the mission requirements to get the telescope to its deep-space orbit, the center core was intentionally expended into the ocean and not recovered.Both side boosters completed their synchronized touchdown within seconds of each other at roughly 7 minutes and 40 seconds into the flight.
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#7 2026-08-30 16:20:55
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Re: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
This post offers an article by Ashley Strickland of CNN
the images are available here: >>https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/30/science/nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launch
Ashley provides history as well as context for this new telescope.
Science
SpaceNASA launches ‘discovery machine’ to unravel the invisible universe
By
Ashley Strickland
Updated 7 hr ago
Teams ready NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to be encapsulated for launch. Sydney Rohde (Rocz)/NASAA massive observatory that scientists have called a “discovery machine” has launched toward the cosmos, beginning a journey that could mark a significant shift in our understanding of the universe.
Designed to seek out otherwise invisible and faint space objects, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. ET Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory reached orbit about 10 minutes later.
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launches with NASA’S Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope onboard from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday.
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launches with NASA’S Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope onboard from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday. NASA/Joel Kowsky
Over the next five years, the bus-size telescope’s observations could reveal answers to enduring mysteries such as dark energy, which fuels the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the universe, and dark matter, which provides the cosmos with structure but remains unseen. It could allow astronomers to spot previously unseen galaxies and exoplanets, worlds around stars beyond our solar system, as well rogue planets that don’t orbit stars at all.Dr. Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, reflected on the bittersweet feeling of watching the telescope launch Sunday morning.
“You see it growing up, and then it literally feels like it’s part of your team,” Fox said at a post-launch news conference. “It’s actually the member of the team that’s going to go on this grand expedition and send all that incredible treasure back to us here on Earth. But there is that moment where you think, ‘I’m never going to see that spacecraft again.’ I liken it to sending your kids to college.”
22935266-native.mp4.00_00_32_29.Still002.jpg
It looks like a car engine. Scientists think it could uncover the 'invisible universe'
2:27“Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said as the space agency unveiled the completed telescope on April 21 at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
With surveying capabilities more than 1,000 times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman will capture fundamentally different scientific observations that can’t be done with either Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope.
“Together, the three missions will complement each other, giving us a more complete picture of the cosmos and advancing our understanding of the universe,” Fox said. The mission team also said Sunday that Roman’s mission has the possibility of being extended up to 10 years.
President Donald Trump called in during the Sunday news conference to congratulate the Roman team on their “great success,” calling the US the “hottest in space.”
Roman will take around three months to reach its ultimate orbital position of about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth, known as Lagrange Point 2, or L2. The James Webb Space Telescope is also parked in this orbit, where spacecraft are balanced by the gravitational pull of Earth and the sun. L2 is about four times farther from Earth than the moon, according to NASA.
In the meantime, the observatory will go through commissioning — testing out its instruments in space and deploying the antenna that will relay Roman’s massive imagery back to Earth.
The telescope is expected to transmit one terabyte of data per day — like streaming 1 million songs from 1 million miles away down to Earth, said Jeremy Perkins, Roman telescope integration and test scientist at Goddard.
The Roman telescope will capture unprecedented views of the universe. NASA
The estimated $4.3 billion telescope has been in development for about a decade and became a priority for the scientific community about 16 years ago. Scientists around the world are anticipating the unprecedented insights Roman could deliver.“When you develop a tool that is radically different from anything you’ve had before, you will discover things that you didn’t know were out there,” said Dominic Benford, Roman program scientist at NASA who has been involved with projects related to the concept for more than 20 years.
“Part of what Roman is for as a discovery machine is to give people a way to ask the universe questions that we have yet to conceive.”
What makes Roman different
Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, laid the foundation for space-based observatories. NASANASA’s space telescopes have long explored life-altering questions, and in many ways, those capabilities are thanks to the observatory’s namesake, the “brilliant astronomer” Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, said Dr. Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA.
Roman was NASA’s first chief of astronomy in the 1960s and pioneered the idea of space-based astronomy observations, recognizing the power of lofting telescopes above Earth’s obscuring atmosphere. She became known as the “mother of the Hubble Space Telescope.”
“Although she’s often most associated with those first space telescopes, it’s really our full fleet that she deserves credit for,” Domagal-Goldman said. “Every time we build a new space telescope, we add capabilities we didn’t have before and that adds to her legacy. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is no exception.”
The Roman telescope’s first images are expected in January before it kicks off unprecedented surveys of the universe, powered by a field of view more than 100 times that of Hubble thanks to its wide field instrument.
Domagal-Goldman compared Roman’s capabilities to capturing an all-encompassing view of a forest as well as seeing sharp details of its trees, like leaves and birds, all at the same time.
This image simulates 1/140th of Roman's field of view when it observes the center of our galaxy. NASA
“Of course, this isn’t a forest we’re talking about; it’s the known universe, and those birds and trees are supernova galaxies, planets and stars,” he said during an August 5 briefing.
Dr. Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist, calls the new telescope’s observations the largest census that scientists have ever been able to take of planets across the Milky Way galaxy. It could find tens of thousands of previously unknown worlds and reveal just how common solar systems such as ours are across the cosmos.
“We’re going to be surveying patches of the sky going back over and over and over again to find new things that go bump in the night,” McEnery said. “Roman’s vast reach will allow us to find the weird, the rare and the unusual. We’ll redefine what it means to find a needle in a haystack.”
Some of those needles may include incredibly dim free-floating objects such as rogue planets or even small, wandering black holes, Benford said. Roman could also provide the first definitive proof of exomoons, or moons orbiting exoplanets.
Probing cosmic mysteries
An illustration depicts NASA's new observatory in orbit. NASADuring its five-year mission, the telescope will enable the discovery of billions of galaxies, thousands of exploding stars called supernovas and tens of billions of stars, according to Fox.
Stellar explosions occur so quickly that they often elude the gaze of telescopes. But Roman has the panoramic vision to see several at once, McEnery said, and the supernovas could act as cosmic candles to help astronomers track a mysterious force — dark energy — and unlock the role it may play in accelerating the expansion rate of the universe.
In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown that something sparked an acceleration of the universe’s expansion about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains unknown.
Scientists think the mysterious glow in our galaxy could be from dark matter. What that means
To study dark energy, Roman will measure how gravity bends light across large cosmic distances — creating a 3D map of dark matter in the process.
Dark matter has never been detected, but it is believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe and help hold stars and galaxies in stable orbits. Roman will map the distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters across the cosmos, looking for the signature gravitational effects of dark matter.
Unlocking the true nature of dark energy and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and if there is more to understanding gravity than meets the eye. Both dark matter and dark energy also play a role in the distribution and movement of objects, such as galaxies and stars, across the cosmos.
“Roman is designed to make the measurements that will determine whether there’s some sort of fundamental difference in the way the universe works compared to the way we think it works,” Benford said.
The James Webb Space Telescope (bottom) can follow up on discoveries made using Roman's broad view. NASA
All of Roman’s data will be made publicly available as soon as it is processed on Earth, providing a treasure trove for scientists to mine for answers to a multitude of cosmic queries.
“Instead of having a telescope that astronomers have to choose to point at a certain object, we just map lots and lots of sky,” Benford said. “Anybody who’s interested in star-forming regions, dying stars or distant galaxies, they’re already there in the data somewhere.”
Enabling a search for life
Roman's coronagraph will enable the search for faint planets. Sydney Rohde/NASAApart from its wide field instrument, Roman also carries a technology demonstration called a coronagraph, a proof of concept that’s like “doing magic with physics,” McEnery said.
Astronomers use coronagraphs to block blinding starlight to see finer details, such as planets that may be in orbit around stars other than our sun.
If we were able to see Earth and the sun from a great distance in space, the two objects would appear incredibly close together — and the sun’s blazingly bright light would overshadow Earth’s, Benford said.
Roman will be able to use its coronagraph like a shield against harsh starlight to spot planets that are otherwise difficult to see around other stars and identify them. The observatory will see the glow of a Jupiter-size or possibly a Saturn-size planet near another star, he added. The telescope may even be able to glimpse light reflecting off the tops of clouds on these planets.
This illustration shows how Roman will look for planets in orbit around other stars. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Hubble and Webb both have coronagraphs, but Roman’s experimental instrument is 100 to 1,000 times better than any built before, said Bertrand Mennesson, Roman deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Mennesson’s area of focus is on the coronagraph, and he has worked on the mission for 14 years.
“You send the coronagraph into space, and it’s set it and forget it,” Mennesson told CNN. “That’s what I call a passive system, and that’s the case with JWST and Hubble. Conversely, for Roman, it’s an active system.”
To correct for vibrations, fluctuations, thermal radiation or any other errors, Roman’s coronagraph has mirrors that change shape in real time to maintain absolute precision.
If the coronagraph performs as expected, it could pave the way for future observatories.
Think of Roman as being able to take a picture of a firefly next to a floodlight from the other side of the country, Domagal-Goldman said.
What’s even harder is taking the same picture, but without the firefly’s glow, and only the floodlight reflected off the firefly’s dark body.
“If we can do that second one, which Roman is a major stepping stone towards doing, we’ll be able to build our next flagship observatory, the Habitable Worlds Observatory,” he said.
NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory is a concept now. Here is one of several designs for the mission. NASA
Right now, that mission is just a concept. The Habitable Worlds Observatory would be the first designed to photograph Earth-like planets — and even search for chemical signs of life within the atmospheres of those planets.
“We’re not going to get there with Roman, but we’re going to get there because of Roman,” Benford said.
This story has been updated.
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#8 2026-08-31 14:51:23
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Re: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
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