Roman Space Telescope promises 300-megapixel views of the cosmos — CBS News — Top

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

Roman Space Telescope promises 300-megapixel views of the cosmos — CBS News — Top | AIPROPX

Using a donated Hubble-class mirror originally built for a spy satellite, NASA\u0027s Roman Space Telescope is poised for launch Sunday on a $4.3 billion mission to open a new window on the universe, taking wide-angle, ultra-sharp images that would require a half million 4K TVs to show in full.Put another way, officials say a single full-resolution image from Roman\u0027s 300-megapixel wide-field camera would cover 45 city blocks or the entirety of El Capitan in\u00a0Yosemite National Park. And it will collect that data faster than any previous NASA spacecraft.The Hubble Space Telescope has beamed back about 172 terabytes of data over 30 years while Roman will downlink a staggering 2,500 terabytes over its five-year primary mission.Put yet another way, Roman\u0027s sensitive wide-field camera and advanced detectors will scan broad swaths of the cosmos 1,000 times faster than Hubble, collecting as much data in one month as its older cousin could manage in a century.A "sheer powerhouse" of a telescopeThe flood of data is expected to shed new light on the nature of "dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe itself and accelerate the ... discovery of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman."Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe," he added.NASA science chief Niki Fox described the telescope as "a sheer powerhouse" and "literally a speed machine.""The speed at which we\u0027ll be scanning the sky, delivering vast amounts of data and returning results will be at an unprecedented rate, never done before," Fox added.The 42-foot-long, 18,000-pound telescope is named for the late Nancy Grace Roman, NASA\u0027s first chief astronomer, who championed the value of space telescopes throughout her career and was instrumental in the development of the Hubble Space Telescope. As such, she is often referred to as "the mother of Hubble."The new telescope is scheduled for launch atop a triple-core SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at the Kennedy Space Center at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday.It is bound for Lagrange Point No. 2 (L2), a gravitational eddy of sorts about a million miles on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun, where it will remain in place with minimal use of fuel. The James Webb Space Telescope is stationed in the same region for the same reason.From the vantage point of L2, Roman will study the effects of dark matter, the mysterious substance that pervades the universe, holds galaxies together and accounts for most of the mass in the cosmos, acting as a brake on the expansion of space itself, which is carrying galaxies farther and farther apart.At the same time, Roman will work to gain statistically significant insights into the nature of the equally mysterious dark energy, a repulsive force presumably present since the Big Bang that became dominant about 5 billion years ago as the universe expanded and thinned out. Ever since, the expansion of the cosmos has been speeding up.A new understanding of the universeRoman may help resolve a conflict between the strength of dark energy in the very early universe, as measured by probes studying the remnant 3-degree glow of the Big Bang\u0027s immediate aftermath, compared to Hubble observations of a specific type of supernova that indicate a slightly different value.When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, estimates for the age of the universe, from its Big Bang birth to the present, ranged from about 10 billion years to 20 billion years.Hubble was able to determine the speed of that expansion \u2014 the Hubble Constant \u2014 and thus the time that has passed since the Big Bang to an accuracy within 1%: 13.8 billion years.But detailed studies by researchers using spacecraft studying the afterglow of the bang \u2014 the 3-degree cosmic background radiation \u2014 came up with a different number. The mismatch \u2014 known as "the Hubble Tension" \u2014 suggests some critical element is missing in the current understanding of the universe and the forces driving its evolution."We\u0027re seeing evidence that the Hubble constant, as inferred from very early times, is not consistent with the Hubble constant that we measure closer to now, which is telling us that the model that connects those two things might not be quite right," said project scientist Julie McEnery. "We have a slight tension in our expectations for how structure should grow and evolve."That "slight tension" indicates a potentially serious flaw in the standard model of cosmology, the current understanding of how the universe, and everything in it, has evolved. It might even indicate dark energy is not the constant force it is thought to be, but might somehow change over time."We\u0027re probably not going to confirm the standard model of how the universe works," McEnery said. "We\u0027re very likely to demonstrate that our standard model is wrong, and to set ourselves on a path to figuring out how does our universe really work. It\u0027s hard to get [a better question than] the fundamental nature of your universe!"Roman\u0027s wide-field camera is one of two instruments aboard the spacecraft. The other is an advanced coronagraph equipped with deformable mirrors that can block out the glare of a star to detect the vastly dimmer light reflected from the atmosphere of an orbiting planet.Roman\u0027s coronagraph is expected to detect Jupiter-size planets orbiting Earth-like stars. By analyzing that reflected light, researchers may be able to tease out the elemental composition of those atmospheres."We think that we will be capable of detecting exoplanets that are about 100 million times fainter than their stars, and with that capability, we are hoping to see ... a Jupiter twin around a nearby star using visible light reflected from its cloud tops for the first time," said Vanessa Bailey, the Roman coronagraph instrument scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Then, we can use that light to study...