A new space telescope on the hunt for exoplanets is set to launch from the Kennedy Space Center at the end of the month.
It's called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and it's searching for evidence of galactic glue — the elusive dark matter that holds our universe together — as well as planets that exist outside our solar system.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting the launch for Aug. 30 at 7:26 a.m. The telescope will be on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, according to a release.
Scientists like NASA's Jeremy Perkins are eager to see the data that will beam back from the telescope once it's operational. He's the observatory integration and test scientist for this project.
On "The Florida Roundup," Perkins explained how the telescope was named after NASA's first chief astronomer, Nancy Grace Roman.
"She's the reason we have the Chandra X-ray Observatory; she's the reason we have Roman itself," Perkins said. "She was one of the people that really pushed the idea of putting our best and biggest telescopes in space and getting them out above the atmosphere. So if it wasn't for Nancy Grace Roman, we wouldn't have basically the science program that you see from NASA Astrophysics."
In terms of finding exoplanets, Perkins said the telescope is different from prior missions because the camera is really big. They have 18 4K-by-4K detections. This field of view is 100 times bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope. The goal is to find planets they haven't been able to see before.
During observations, they take a picture and move on. They then do that repeatedly for the five-year mission. So, it'll be a survey of a big part of the sky — it'll be about a terabyte of data a day.
"And one of our surveys that we're going to do is we're going to basically take a picture of the center of our galaxy, and take another picture and another picture and another picture, and look for changes," Perkins said.
He added that one of the ways you can find planets is by looking at them passing in front of the light of their star.
"So you can see the light from these stars change in brightness, and you can find many, many more planets than we found in the past," he said. "And we're talking about thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of planets that we're going to find this way with Roman."
Perkins explained that this will help tell scientists more about how planets form and grow and how we get solar systems like ours. Other questions this may help answer are whether Earth is a unique planet or if there are others that are like Earth — with the same size, mass and at the same orbit.
Another aspect is that they're flying a technology demonstration — the coronagraph. This instrument is designed to block starlight so they can see the reflected light off the planets around them.
"One of the analogies I've heard is that being able to block out the starlight is like looking at a lighthouse 3,000 miles away and being able to see one of those glow-in-the-dark watches like right next to it," Perkins said. "And so it's really, really hard. And the technology part of this is that we're flying deformable mirrors for the first time in space."
These deformable mirrors have little, tiny pistons on the back of them to change the shape of the mirror dynamically, he added.
"You see what the errors are in that wavefront in the light coming in, and you can change the shape of the mirror to correct for that. And they've been used all the time on the ground on big telescopes out in Arizona and other places to correct for the atmosphere because the atmosphere bends the light and changes it. And so you basically bend your mirror to counteract that bending of the light," Perkins explained.
He said that in space they don't have the atmosphere, but they do get errors introduced from the telescope, so this would try to counteract that.
Perkins added that he's excited to fill in the "census of planets" and see the first images of one of the bigger exoplanets to look at.
Roman is also looking for dark matter and dark energy. Perkins said this matters because these are the "forces that created what we see around us in the sky."
"When you're out in the country, and you look up in the sky and see the structures around you, you see the Milky Way, and you see the stars and how they all grow and evolve together and move around — dark energy and dark matter are kind of the forces that have been there since the beginning of the universe," he said.
It's called "dark" because they don't know what they are.
"Astronomers are not very creative with our names, and so we call things kind of like we see them," he said. "And the other way to think about it is because they don't interact with light, and so we can't really see them with optical light, but what we see is their impact on the universe."
Perkins added that scientists are hoping Roman can help give even more understanding of dark matter and dark energy. He's worked on this project for years while some engineers and scientists have been on it for decades.
"It's a pretty emotional and exciting time. It's kind of like a combination of seeing your kid go to college and having a child. It's kind of a weird mix of this is something we've been working on for a long, long time and it's finally getting real," Perkins said.
But what he's also thrilled for? The possibility that one day, years from now, someone could sift through terabytes of data and make a discovery of a lifetime.
"What I'm really excited about is there's going to be some grad student or a student right now or a kid in Kentucky in high school right now that in 10 years, they're going to be digging into Roman's data set and find something that no one thought should exist," Perkins said.
You can learn more about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on NASA's website.
This story was compiled from interviews by Brendan Byrne for "The Florida Roundup."
