The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a panoramic view of the cosmos – once it leaves the planet next month. Its main tasks include studying dark matter and searching for signs of life on exoplanets, or planets outside of our solar system. Named after NASA's first chief astronomer, Roman's view will be 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Julia McEnery, the Roman telescope's senior project scientist with NASA said the observatory will conduct revolutionary surveys.
"These are the keys that will allow us to unlock the fundamental nature of dark matter and dark energy and the fabric of the universe itself," McEnry said. "Our universe puts on spectacular cosmic displays every second, but these events happen very quickly and often elude our telescopes. With Roman's panoramic vision, we'll not only catch these events but see several at once. We'll identify 10's of 1000's of supernovae and use these as markers to track the expansion history of the universe."
Ahead of its launch on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, technicians at NASA loaded 290 gallons of hydrazine fuel into the spacecraft. After launching, Roman will use that propellant to navigate itself about one million miles away from Earth to begin its observations.
Jeremy Perkins is the Roman telescope integration and test scientist with NASA. He said as Roman begins to navigate itself to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, the team will begin readying Roman to start collecting images and data.
Perkins said because of Roman's power and technology, it's almost like "we never stop taking images of the sky, and our images are really big. We're talking about sending about one terabyte of data down to the ground every day. This is kind of like streaming a million songs from a million miles from Earth down to Earth. That's more music than I'll probably listen to in my whole life."
NASA and SpaceX are targeting liftoff no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EST Sunday, Aug. 30, which would put the mission nine months ahead of schedule.
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