Since July of last year the telescope James Webb reveals the beauty and mystery of the cosmos, but a new mission is at work on its successor.
The launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope it will usher in “a new era for astronomy”, one of the scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA) involved in the project told Euronews Next; it will collect more data than any other NASA mission launched thus far and will attempt to answer some of the biggest questions in astrophysics.
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Expected to launch by 2027 at the latest, the new space telescope will be able to capture “a more panoramic view of the universe and allow for more statistical studies,” he explained. Marco SirianniScience Operations Development Manager dell’Esa.
Despite being a NASA-led mission, ESA is contributing some of the technology and expertise to the mission, in exchange for access to the unprecedented amount of data it will provide.
Here’s what to expect from NASA’s next big space telescope.
How will Roman differ from Hubble and James Webb?
While Hubble and Webb are extremely good at zooming in, getting a detailed look at small parts of the sky, Roman will have a much larger field of view.
It will be able to produce infrared images 200 times larger than Hubble, while providing the same in-depth levels of detail. So, in addition to producing the perfect images that Hubble and Webb have accustomed us to, it will primarily be “a dedicated survey telescope,” Sirianni said.
“To look for the stellar population in a nearby galaxy, which is very large for Hubble’s field of view, we have to stitch together and mosaic very different shots. With Roman, we can take a picture of the whole galaxy in one shot,” he said. explained.
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For example, a recent “mosaic” of the nearby Andromeda galaxy was composed with 400 individual images taken by Hubble. Roman will be able to render the same large image, and with the same level of detail, with just two large images that will pack an unprecedented amount of data.
“Just to give you an idea, in 30 years of Hubble operation we have collected something like 170 terabytes of data,” Sirianni explained. “For Webb, we expect to have 1,000 terabytes in five years. And over the 5-year nominal life for Roman, we expect to have 20,000 terabytes.”
Eventually, it will collect data on billions of galaxies to create a “3D model of the universe.”
Answering cosmic mysteries
With this panoramic view of the universe, NASA and its partners hope to answer some of the most important questions facing astrophysics.
One goal is to test Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which is well tested at the scale of our solar system, for example, but less so at larger cosmological scales.
According to the theory, visible matter within the universe should slow its expansion, so scientists attribute the universe’s expansion rate to a mysterious component – dark energy – which they say makes up about 68 percent. .
Roman will provide data that can accurately measure the position and distance of millions of galaxies and help understand the expansion rate of the universe in different areas.
Exoplanet census
Another of Roman’s main goals is to locate thousands of new exoplanets within our galaxy, using a technique called “gravitational microlensing”.
Since Roman will count billions of stars, it will provide a “very good census of how many stars exoplanets will have,” Sirianni said.
Not only will it detect new exoplanets, but it will carry a second main instrument, called a ‘coronagraph’, which aims to view exoplanets close to their parent star. The coronagraph on Roman will attempt to capture large Jupiter-like planets directly, making corrections in real time to improve image quality.
It will be a demonstration tool and, if it works, it will form the basis for the technology to be used in future space observatories that attempt to visualize
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ESA’s contribution to Roman
ESA is contributing three key technologies to the mission, in exchange for access to the data.
The space agency will provide: small telescopes in the spacecraft that constantly determine its position in the sky by following the stars; batteries to help power the spacecraft before its solar arrays are deployed; detectors for the on-board coronagraph.