NASA’s Roman Space Telescope could find alien Earths—but not like you think

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch, with its primary instrument expected to significantly advance various areas of astrophysics. The telescope will be equipped with a specialized coronagraph, an experimental device designed to directly capture starlight reflected off a planet's surface for the first time. According to Vanessa Bailey, an astrophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, this technology will be tested in space for the first time, helping scientists understand what further work is needed.

The coronagraph is essentially a sunshade that blocks out a bright star's light, revealing a fainter object otherwise lost in the glare. This instrument has flown in space before, with both the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes carrying coronagraphs. However, the Roman Space Telescope's coronagraph is more sophisticated, thanks to adaptive optics technology that deforms the telescope's mirror to cancel out light distortions.

The Roman Space Telescope will spend over a quarter of its time observing the Milky Way's bulge, a star-packed central region that may be home to numerous small, rocky exoplanets. The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, the first chief astronomer at NASA and the agency's first female executive, who played a crucial role in establishing NASA's space astronomy program and enabling missions like the Hubble Space Telescope.

Brief written by urgent.news from Scientific American, Wired Science, Wired, Space.com, CBC News — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.