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NASA's next "great observatory" begins mission to widen our view of the Universe
Confirmed
In Short: NASA's $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has launched to study dark energy and dark matter, among other cosmic phenomena.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a $4.3 billion observatory, has embarked on a mission to explore the universe's most mysterious forces, including dark energy and dark matter. The telescope, equipped with a 300-megapixel camera and a refurbished spy mirror, was launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The telescope is expected to shed new light on the nature of dark matter, dark energy, and the structure of the universe itself, as well as accelerate the discovery of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system, according to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.
What's confirmed
- NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a $4.3 billion observatory, has embarked on a mission to explore the universe's most mysterious forces, including dark energy and dark matter. The telescope, equipped with a 300-megapixel camera and a refurbished spy mirror, was launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
- The telescope is expected to shed new light on the nature of dark matter, dark energy, and the structure of the universe itself, as well as accelerate the discovery of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system, according to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.
What's still developing
- “This is a big spacecraft,” said Denton Gibson, NASA’s launch director for the Roman mission.
- NASA announced in 2020 that the next great observatory, up until then known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), would be named in honor of Roman.
- “Roman’s large field of view and fast survey speeds will reveal untold cosmic objects while shining a light on dark energy and dark matter,” Fox said.
- Cosmologists are eager to learn more about dark energy, an unseen force that, according to the Standard Model of the Universe, makes up about 70 percent of the cosmos and is responsible for accelerating the Universe’s expansion.
- The new mission will extend the vision of NASA’s other famous observatories, providing a field of view 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope and complementing the groundbreaking work of the James Webb Space Telescope.
- Roman is just the second NASA-led astrophysics mission to launch this century, following the launch of Webb in 2021.
- The rocket sent the observatory toward an observation post around the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, a gravitational balance point nearly a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.
- Ground teams will activate and calibrate the observatory during the transit, and scientists aim to have the first science images ready for publication by the end of the year.