The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a panoramic view of the cosmos. 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.
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 – where it will call home some one million miles away – the team will begin readying Roman to start collecting images and data.
"It takes us a good three plus months to get out there, and we're spending that time checking everything out and doing a whole bunch of calibrations and making sure everything is working the way we know it can," Perkins said. "It's basically like our time to kick the tires and just make sure that the focus is right, the pointing is right. We do a lot of staring at the sky to get our first measurements of the sky."
Roman's data will be publicly available. 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."
The observatory will launch aboard SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Rocket from the Kennedy Space Center. NASA and SpaceX are targeting liftoff Sunday at 7:26 a.m. EST which would put the mission nine months ahead of schedule.
NASA's launch coverage will begin at 6:20 a.m. and can be found here.
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