After passing some of its final inspections, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — known as Roman — is now on track to launch eight months earlier than originally planned, according to NASA.
Roman is set to launch on August 30, 2026, and will help us gain a wider view of the universe and collect data faster than its predecessors, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope will do so thanks to the incredible equipment and instruments built into it.
These instruments include the primary mirror, which was gifted to NASA by a U.S. intelligence agency, the Wide Field Instrument, and an advanced coronograph. Altogether, these instruments could help us map out more of the universe than we ever imagined.
“It is an incredible feat of precision engineering. It's quite possibly the most complex scientific instrument that NASA has ever built,” Dominic Benford, the program scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, told Discover.
The Roman Telescope: From Spying Satellite to Cosmic Voyager
At the heart of Roman is the Optical Telescope Assembly, home of the primary mirror, 9 additional mirrors, and other electronics and supporting structures. The primary mirror was actually a donation from the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) — an agency that builds surveillance and spy equipment for the CIA and NSA.
The NRO no longer needed the mirror, and NASA was able to retrofit it to Roman, allowing the telescope to collect and focus light from objects both near and far across the cosmos. It even helped make Roman larger than it was initially supposed to be, according to Benford.
The mirror is 7.9 feet across, nearly the same size as the one on the Hubble, and will weigh less than one-fourth as much as Hubble's mirror. With the lighter weight, the telescope will be more agile, able to move easily and take precise images.
Read More: James Webb Space Telescope Captures Smallest Exoplanet Ever Seen in Historic First
The Technology in Roman’s Primary Mirror
Roman’s primary mirror is durable yet delicate, and it needs to be to travel through space and collect ultraprecise measurements.
The primary mirror, according to NASA, is layered in silver that’s less than 400 nanometers thick, which is roughly 200 times thinner than a human hair. The scientists on the Roman team specifically chose silver because of its high reflectivity in near-infrared light.
This differs from the JWST, which is coated in gold to enhance long-wavelength infrared observations, and from Hubble, which is coated in aluminum and magnesium fluoride to enhance visible and ultraviolet light.
Roman’s Advanced Wide Field Instrument
Besides the advanced mirror technology — which feels like something out of a spy thriller — Roman will also be equipped with other incredible technology that will help us peer into the universe.
One advanced piece of tech is the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will help us see into the far reaches of the observable universe, according to NASA. This camera will allow Roman to capture large patches of sky, even those larger than the full moon. With this technology, Roman can cover over 50 times as much sky in 5 years as Hubble covered in its first 30 years of survey. This would help to image the sky up to 1,000 times faster than Hubble, according to NASA.
“What makes this such a phenomenal instrument, and I think such a revolutionary instrument, is that the camera has what we call a focal plane array,” Benford told Discover. “That's the part that senses the light, that measures the light. […] It has a set of 18 individual detector chips, which we call sensor chip assemblies, each of which is a 16-million-pixel sensor.”
Benford also added that Roman can take images in visible light, with its visible-light camera about 100 times larger than Hubble's.
“To my knowledge, it's the largest infrared focal plane that has ever been produced,” Benford continued.
What this all means is that Roman can capture images in different colors using filters and non-filter elements, such as prisms, which allows experts to measure the individual colors of light in an object like a galaxy with more precision.
A Coronagraph That Could One Day Detect Signs of Life
Another amazing piece of technology on the telescope is the Roman Coronagraph Instrument, a system of flexible components that will help block the glare from some stars and allow the telescope to obtain clearer images of surrounding planets and other cosmic bodies, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This is in part thanks to the NRO donation, which enabled the use of a larger telescope.
"The Roman coronagraph is intended to be the first time we will use an active coronagraph in space,” Benford told Discover. Coronagraphs have been used before, but they have been passive; the one on Roman will be active.
“An active coronagraph is one where we are constantly measuring the light that we're getting from the star and actively controlling optical elements inside the instrument to reduce the amount of light from the star at the places that we care about,” Benford said.
Coronagraphs have also been used on ground telescopes, but the Roman coronagraph will be about 1,000 times better than what has been possible so far, Benford added.
The coronagraph will not only help us get a better view of distant planets but also open up possibilities for future research on exoplanets and even the search for life beyond Earth.
It’s possible to use this instrument to one day measure the atmospheric chemistry on exoplanets and look for signs of oxygen, ozone, water, carbon dioxide, methane, and other elements that could make up a habitable atmosphere.
Read More: Hidden Clues on Dark Matter Come into Sight With a New High-Resolution Map of the Sky
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from NASA: NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Primary Mirror Gets Last Look
- This article references information from NASA: Wide Field Instrument
- This article references information from NASA: Building Roman
- This article references information from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: The Roman Coronagraph Instrument
