Spy to Space: The Science Behind NASA's Roman Space Telescope
"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:
As NASA prepares to launch its new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope this weekend, Rochester Institute of Technology's Prof Don Figer examines the telescope's purpose and its origins in US spycraft.
NASA plans to soon launch anew space telescopethat will survey a billion galaxies to trace how the universe evolved over time, all courtesy of America's spy programme and decades of research into detector technology.
The telescope, known as theNancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, was first developed by the National Reconnaissance Office, before beingtransferred to NASA in 2012. The intelligence agency no longer needed the hardware [PDF] for its future missions, so itsent the unused telescope to NASA. The space agency spent over a decade making modifications and aims tolaunch the telescope into space as early as 30 August 2026.
Once in position, the telescope will take data thatastronomers like mehope will help answer some of the field's most puzzling questions.
You can expect a slew of exciting discoveries from the new telescope because it was built to lookacross the universeandstudy the three-dimensional distribution of dark matter. While scientists haven't directly observed it before,dark matter produces unseen effectson objects in the universe, similar to those produced by visible matter.
Likewise, Roman will seeexploding stars called supernovasthat allow astronomers tomeasure how fast the universe has been expanding. Those measurements will help astronomers measure thevarying expansion rate of the universe. Dark matter anddark energy, also not yet directly observed, together are the source of the vast majority of energy in the universe, but their physical natures are unknown.
Closer to home, Roman will monitor small variations in light from stars near the centre of the Milky Way galaxy in order to infer the presence ofrogue planets drifting between the stars. As a planetpasses in front of a star, it briefly perturbs and magnifies the light from the star behind it, confirming its presence.
Finally, Roman has acoronagraph instrumentthat will test the technology for future missions that plan to detect Earth-like planets around other stars. A coronagraph blocks most of the light from a star so astronomers can detect the much fainter planets orbiting it. For an Earth-like planet around a sun-like star, the host star can be 10bn times brighter than the planet.
The Roman telescope's coronagraph will help it study distant planets as they pass in front of a star.
When NASA received Roman, it turned one challenge about the telescope's spy design into an opportunity. The telescope hasa wide field of view, at least compared with most space telescopes made for astronomy. This means it can see a large swath of the sky at once. There lies an opportunity - while telescopes like theHubble Space Telescopesee narrow fields very deeply, Roman will be able to see much larger fields.
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