NASA’s Roman telescope will see 100 times more sky than Hubble

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch within two days, will be the agency's next major astrophysics mission following the James Webb Space Telescope. University of Arizona faculty and students will be present at Cape Canaveral to witness Roman's journey toward science operations, which are slated to commence in January 2027.

Unlike Webb, which focuses on studying small regions of the universe in great detail, Roman is built to rapidly survey large areas of the sky. Both telescopes can detect infrared light, allowing astronomers to compare and combine their observations. When used together, Roman and Webb could provide astronomers with a wealth of new insights about the universe.

Roman boasts a 7.9-foot primary mirror, identical in size to Hubble's, along with two primary scientific instruments. The Coronagraph Instrument blocks and filters starlight, enabling scientists to study planets and their surrounding disks. Meanwhile, the Wide Field Instrument, designed to match Hubble's camera sensitivity while imaging an area 100 times larger, is expected to survey the entire sky over a 30-year period, more than 100 times the amount observed by Hubble.

With this vast view, Roman will be able to discover a wide array of celestial objects, ranging from dying stars, newly discovered planets, and galaxy clusters to other rare cosmic phenomena. University of Arizona researchers will contribute to several key areas of Roman's scientific objectives. Among these efforts is the Arizona Cosmology Lab, led by Professor Elisabeth Krause.

The lab will develop a cosmological measurement technique called kinematic lensing, using Roman's images alongside spectroscopic data to study dark matter and dark energy more precisely than previously possible. Additionally, a separate team will lead the Maximizing Cosmological Science with the Roman High Latitude Imaging Survey, tasked with interpreting Roman's cosmological observations.

This work will require significant computational power, which the NASA Roman Project has allocated to Professor Tim Eifler's laboratory, including $800,000 for new high-performance computing resources and $2.4 million over five years for the science project.

Roman's Coronagraph Instrument will employ masks, prisms, detectors, filters, and self-flexing mirrors to directly image nearby planets and disks that would otherwise be challenging to observe. By reducing the overwhelming glare of host stars, astronomers can study these planets and their atmospheres, which has never been possible before.

This coronagraph is expected to detect planets 100 million times fainter than their host stars, performing 100 to 1,000 times better than current space-based coronagraphs. The findings from Roman's Coronagraph Instrument will be crucial for future telescopes, such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory, designed to search for signs of life in other solar systems.