RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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CAPE CANAVAREL, Fla. — It was a bright and sunny morning here in Florida when the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off planet Earth against a magical blue sky.
"What a glorious dawn launch," Jackie Townsend, the Roman Space Telescope 's project manager, said during a post-launch press conference on Sunday (Aug. 30). "The ride was magnificent — it put us right where we wanted to be. All of the deployments went great."
Roman lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket right on cue at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT), beginning its journey to revolutionize the way we see the universe. It will be able to do this thanks to the two stars of its toolkit, the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and the Coronagraph Instrument. The former is meant to image extremely wide sections of the cosmos to capture tons of fleeting phenomena that are hard to catch — things like supernovas, fast radio bursts and maybe even colliding neutron stars .
Its uniquely wide view will also help scientists decode the intricacies of dark matter and dark energy while perhaps clearing up some contradictions about our universe that scientists have been scratching their heads over for decades. What's the source of the puzzling " Hubble tension ?" Why exactly is the universe expanding the way it is? Are we alone?
Meanwhile, the coronagraph will take direct images of exoplanets and bring us a gallery of "Pale Brown Dots" from beyond our solar system akin to the Voyager spacecraft's priceless "Pale Blue Dot" portrait of Earth .
The Roman Space Telescope lifts off. (Image credit: Chelsea Gohd)
What happens now?
Now that it has lifted off, the Roman Space Telescope will undergo a 90-day commissioning period while traveling to its station in space at the sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, or L2. This is a gravitationally stable point in space on the side of Earth always opposite the sun; it's a popular location to send telescopes because the orientation allows spacecraft to remain safe from heat while still getting a great view of the universe. Notably, the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is also located here.
"Roman will travel nearly 1 million miles away from Earth to Lagrange Point L2 and begin transmitting imagery and data back home that will contribute to world-changing science along with captivating imagery like we see from Hubble and James Webb," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during today's press conference. "I have no doubt that Roman will become a household name alongside those great instruments of discovery."
Right after getting off the ground and successfully separating from the spacecraft, Roman started undergoing several typical post-launch procedures — for example, outgassing, referring to the spacecraft releasing any trapped gases once exposed to the vacuum of space, getting "power positive" and plunging to the really cold temperature levels necessary to keep its instruments safe.
A visualization showing what the Roman Space Telescope looks like from the side. (Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)
The picture-perfect launch today adds to Roman's glowing record of efficiency and performance. This telescope has been in development for over a decade and has an estimated total cost of about $4 billion — but while this may sound like lots of time and money, it's pretty good for a space mission. The JWST, for instance, cost about $10 billion. Roman, in fact, was completed under budget and ahead of schedule. And now, it turns out that even the famously fickle Florida weather couldn't stop this space explorer in its tracks.
"The weather got the memo that Roman is always early," Townsend said.
The Roman Space Telescope's solar arrays. (Image credit: NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya)
What exactly will Roman do?
The Roman Space Telescope is a huge deal for astronomers. First of all, with its WFI, it's meant to process a tremendous amount of data in relatively short periods of time in order to survey gigantic zones of our cosmos. For context, the Hubble Space Telescope has generated about 400 terabytes of data across its 35 or so years of service, while Roman will be generating about 500 terabytes every single year.
"Our main survey will take over a year and be really huge," Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said during a prelaunch conference on Saturday (Aug. 29). "We would need over half a million 4K TVs to fully display the single Roman image on our largest survey."
Roman will also view the universe in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum like the JWST, but with a wide-field, shallow view rather than the JWST's super narrow but deep view. This is a big deal because infrared observations are key for astronomers; they allow us to view objects hidden behind interstellar dust and gas as well as objects in the very (very) distant universe emitting light wavelengths that stretch out from bluer, tight ones into redder, longer ones.
And second of all, Roman's coronagraph is state-of-the-art. It's the first "active" coronagraph to be flown in space, which means it's able to actively adjust itself to enhance its observations. The concept is basically like a solar eclipse; a coronagraph blocks out the glare of a star such that anything around that star can come into focus. And that means exoplanets — specifically large ones for Roman's capabilities. NASA will be using Roman foremost to find Jupiter -like worlds around other stars in the universe.
"If you try to imagine seeing an exoplanet next to a star, it's going to be very challenging," Vanessa Bailey, Roman's coronagraph instrument scientist, said during the prelaunch briefing. "The starlight is going to be overwhelmingly bright. It's like trying to see a firefly next to a lighthouse hundreds of miles away. We can use a technology called a coronagraph inside of our camera to block that lighthouse and see the firefly."
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