“Roman is going to change the way we look at the Universe.” Those were the lofty expectations set by NASA Admin-
istrator Nicky Fox on the day of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope’s launch on 30 August.
Named after the first woman to serve as an executive at NASA, their latest telescope will go on an initial five-year mission where it will observe the universe from a vantage point around one million miles away from Earth. Its goal is to gather data pertaining to one of the universe’s greatest mysteries, dark energy.
Utilising its 300-megapixel camera (a high-quality iPhone can only provide 48-megapixel images), Roman will snap the likes of planets, star clusters and galaxies. NASA’s famous Hubble telescope has identified over 100m astronomical objects since its launch in 1990. Roman’s camera can capture an area around 100 times larger and within the initial five-year mission, will survey more than 50 times as much sky as Hubble managed in over 30 years.
But NASA did not spend $4b for Roman to just go on a sightseeing tour. Its telescope will provide one of the
most thorough investigations of dark energy ever conducted. Dark energy is by most regards a placeholder in cosmology— an evenly distributed universal energy to describe the accelerating expansion of the universe that we observe. It cannot be directly observed, making it very hard to solidify any facts about. For being such an important ingredient to the evolution of the universe, it can be infuriating to know so little about it. Roman will hopefully provide scientists with important data to aid in the future of dark energy studies.
“Nancy Grace Roman with Buzz Aldrin” by NASA Hubble is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
