NASA launches its powerful Roman telescope, studying dark matter and dark energy

From Houston Public Media:

NASA launched one of its most powerful telescopes in history, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, on Sunday morning. Scientists say the telescope, which can capture a larger field of view than the Hubble telescope, will help study dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets.

The telescope launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on Sunday at 6:26 a.m. CDT from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

“Roman is exactly the kind of success story we want to see across NASA,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a press release. “Delivered ahead of schedule and on budget, this mission reflects more than a decade of dedication from the NASA workforce and our industry partners. Now, Roman will give us a new atlas of the universe, push the boundaries of discovery, and demonstrate what is possible when America’s space program pairs bold ambition with disciplined execution.”

The Roman telescope is expected to spend five years in space, with the possibility of an additional five-year extension. It will orbit the Sun at a distance of one million miles away from the Earth, in a position that allows it to stay lined up with the blue planet.

NASA anticipates it will begin releasing new images from the Roman telescope by early 2027.

Roman, which is launching nine months earlier than had previously been anticipated, is expected to study some of the deepest mysteries of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy. In doing so, Julie McHenry, one of the scientists working on Roman, said the telescope’s findings could disrupt our understanding of the universe.

“We’re probably not going to confirm a standard model of how the universe works,” she said. “We’re 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?”

How does the Roman telescope work?

The Roman telescope is designed to take pictures with a wider field of vision than other telescopes. It’s equipped with a “Wide Field Instrument,” which, at 300 megapixels, has the same resolution as the Hubble telescope but has a field of view about 100 times larger. Roman is also equipped with a coronagraph, which will block the glare from stars, allowing for the photography of celestial bodies near them.

The telescope will also gather data up to 1,000 times faster than Hubble, according to NASA. Roman is expected to send approximately 1.4 terabytes of data every day to stations in New Mexico, Australia, and Japan.

“One month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble,” McHenry said in a press conference last month.

The Roman telescope will orbit at roughly the same distance from Earth as the Webb telescope, which launched in December 2021. The two telescopes complement each other in different ways; NASA has compared it to the difference between wide-angle and zoom lenses. Webb uses a narrower but more powerful vision for detailed observations; Roman can capture a broader field of vision to contextualize parts of space that Webb can capture singular objects in.

In total, Roman weighs about 18,000 pounds and measures 42 feet long when fully deployed. NASA predicts that fuel, or a lack of it, will be the primary factor in the mission reaching its end. The telescope is designed to be refueled but only when it returns to Earth.

What happened on launch day?

Roman arrived at the SpaceX hangar at the Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday, where it was attached to the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket ahead of launch.

Within hours of the launch, the rocket boosters and main stage separated, followed soon after by the second stage and nose cone. At that point, Roman will separate from the launch vehicle, and the solar panels and sunshade will deploy.

In the days and weeks after launch, both the coronagraph and wide field instrument will be activated. NASA teams will test those features over the next few months in preparation of the first official Roman photographs in early 2027.

Who is Nancy Grace Roman?

The telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and the first female executive in the agency. She worked at NASA from some of its earliest days in 1959 to her retirement in 1979.

“Dr. Roman was a brilliant astronomer, and she realized how much power we would have if we could get telescopes up above Earth’s atmosphere, which otherwise gets in the way of our observations from the ground, and how it could complement the astronomy we can do from the ground,” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, NASA’s astrophysics division director, said in a press conference last month. “She had the technical acumen to detail those arguments, and the leadership and political capability to explain that to her peers and to stakeholders.”

Roman, who died in 2018, is often labeled the “mother of the Hubble Space Telescope.” She lobbied Congress to approve the initiative, which eventually launched in April 1990. As NASA tells it, Roman was once asked what she thought the most interesting discovery from Hubble was. Dark energy, she said.

Now, three-and-a-half decades since Hubble’s launch, a telescope named after Roman will study just that.

What will the Roman telescope study?

“Roman is poised to conduct revolutionary surveys that will impact every area of astronomy,” McHenry said. “We’ll perform an extraordinary census of planets around other stars and may confirm the current hints that our standard model of the universe is incorrect — and set us on the path to figuring out what’s right … One month of Roman observations could survey our own Milky Way, resulting in the detection of up to half the stars in our own galaxy.”

That includes, as McHenry said, “unlock[ing] the fundamental nature of dark matter and dark energy.” Across the universe, scientists have found celestial bodies moving so quickly that they should shoot off in one direction, but they remain gravitationally bound to something invisible to scientists.

This is dark matter, called so because it can only be detected by the movement of other matter in the universe. There are several theories as to what dark matter is, and Roman is expected to narrow down the list by creating “the most comprehensive 3D map of the distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters across the universe,” according to NASA.

Similarly, Roman will study dark energy. In the past, scientists have predicted that the universe’s expansion will gradually slow down in the aftermath of the big bang. Instead, galaxies are moving at an increasing pace, while still being held together, a power which scientists call dark energy.

Roman is expected to study dark energy in several different ways. The 3D map of dark matter that Roman will develop will also help study dark energy because the two seem to counter one another; if dark matter pulls, NASA says, dark energy pushes. Roman will also look at exploding stars, comparing their light to their distance in the galaxy to determine how quickly they’re moving.

The telescope is also expected to capture and study billions of celestial bodies, including exoplanets, supernovae, black holes, stars, and other galaxies.

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