NASA has officially unveiled the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a powerful new space observatory designed to search for planets beyond our solar system and study some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including dark matter and dark energy.
Speaking at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the telescope will give Earth “a new atlas of the universe.” The large silver spacecraft, fitted with wide solar panels, is expected to be moved to Florida ahead of a launch on a SpaceX rocket as early as September.
The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, often called the mother of the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA said Roman will have a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s, allowing it to capture light from as many as one billion galaxies during its mission.
Roman is also being built to block starlight so it can directly observe exoplanets and planet-forming disks. It will carry out a large survey of planetary systems across the Milky Way while helping scientists answer key questions about dark energy, distant planets, and infrared astronomy.
The project has cost more than $4 billion and took over a decade to build. Once launched, the telescope will operate around 1.5 million kilometers from Earth at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, also known as L2.
NASA says L2 is a stable location in space where gravitational forces help keep spacecraft in a steady orbit with minimal adjustments. The steady thermal environment there will allow Roman to collect data with performance up to ten times better than the Hubble Space Telescope in many areas.
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According to systems engineer Mark Melton, the telescope will send around 11 terabytes of data back to Earth every day.
