Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope - pushing the boundaries of astrophysics and exoplanet science

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

NASA Goddard space center held a press conference about the state of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and it’s impending launch (in September).

The incredible cutting edge telescope is all set and ready before schedule and under budget!

I have to admit, it flew a bit under my radar.
But what the people in the press conference told and highlighted about it’s capabilities, made me really excited for what is to come.

Unprecedented high resolution images a thousand times faster than Hubble!

More science data than anyone could process in several lifetimes.

Expectations of solving the lambda-cmd problem, telling us once and do all of our standard cosmological model is right or wrong.

Dark matter science.

Detection and direct imaging of exoplanets.

Mapping of billions of stars and galaxies.

And dare I say it… unlimited space porn!

 

[Santaman]

We'll see what this telescope can do when it's up there.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

With the announced cutback of nearly 50% in NASA's budget, let's hope it still has the money to contribute to ongoing operations even if the telescope is launched. The Trump administration wanted to cancel the project altogether, even though that would shaft the other nations that have contributed.

While the main mirror is the same diameter as that of the HST, the optics allow the field of view to cover 100 times the area - 0.28 square degrees or 85 μsr - slightly more than the solid angle subtended by the Moon as seen from Earth (66 μsr).

 

[XCV330]

getting close to launch time. I hope this telescope finds some Dyson Spheres. Or one. Or a big giant space ring.. I'm not picky.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I'm excited about the Roman, too. It's going to deliver big new science on exoplanets and unusual stars, as well as settle or at least constrain certain mysteries of the cosmos. The images and data sets from Roman will be so huge, only Machine Learning platforms will be able to search them for exceptional targets to be flagged for human review. [Note the these ML tools are not to be confused with Large Language Models, the chatbots that basically just plagiarize for you and hallucinate when convenient. That's a whole different thing.]

I asked Google AI a couple of dumb questions about the James Webb and Roman telescopes to see what it would say. It's AI, but what I got back (condensed and rephrased here by me) sounds credible:

1) There is no risk of a collision with JWST when both telescopes are stationed at L2. They will generally be separated by hundreds of thousands of kilometers, in huge orbits around the Lagrange point. It's not like two telescopes vying for the same parking spot. The L2 region is vast.

2) It will not be possible for either JWST or NGR to take a picture of the other when they are both "at" L2. The large distance between them, their small size, their angular resolution specs, high relative speed of target, and the need to avoid looking back toward the sun at all costs will make it utterly impossible.