NASA's newest space telescope launches on a quest to explore the hidden universe
The bus-sized telescope — named after the late Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer — will take more than three months to reach its destination.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a $4.3 billion project, has been launched into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The telescope, named after NASA's first chief astronomer, will take over three months to reach its destination, a point in space about a million miles from Earth called Lagrange Point 2.
The Roman Space Telescope is designed to investigate cosmic enigmas such as dark energy and dark matter, while also testing gravity at vast scales and searching for exoplanets. According to CBS News, it will use a Hubble-class mirror and a wide-field 300-megapixel camera to map the large-scale structure of the cosmos and search for clues about dark energy and dark matter.
The telescope's mission is planned for five years, though it may have enough fuel for five additional years. During its mission, Roman is expected to catalog some 20 billion stars, 2 billion or more individual galaxies, tens of thousands of supernova blasts, and countless transient events. It will also help discover thousands of new exoplanets, with the goal of increasing the current number of 6,200 exoplanets to over 100,000.
Brief written by urgent.news from CNBC World, CBS News, Business Recorder, Winnipeg Free Press, CNA - Business — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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