The US space agency, NASA, has unveiled a new telescope that will scan the vast regions of the universe in search of planets outside our solar system and study the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
The Roman space telescope is expected to find tens of thousands of planets and potentially shed light on how many might be out there.
“Roman will give Earth a new atlas of the universe,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at a press conference at the Goddard Space Center in Maryland where the telescope was unveiled.
The telescope is 12 meters long and covered with the same size solar cells. It will be transported to Florida before being launched into space on a SpaceX rocket, which is scheduled for September at the earliest.
Named after “Hubble’s Mother”
Roman, which cost more than $4 billion (about 488 billion ISK) and was more than a decade in the making, is named after astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who was called “the mother of Hubble” for her role in developing the historic space telescope.
Thirty-six years after the launch of Hubble, which revolutionized stargazing, NASA hopes Roman will help shed light on questions that remain unsolved.
The telescope will transmit 11 terabytes of data to Earth per day.
AFP
With a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble
The telescope, which has a field of view at least 100 times wider than Hubble, will scan vast areas of space from its position 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
The telescope will transmit 11 terabytes of data to Earth per day, according to Mark Melton, a systems engineer at the Goddard Space Center.
“In the first year, we will have sent more data than Hubble has done in its entire lifetime,” he told AFP.
The telescope’s wide lens will allow NASA to conduct a census of the objects that make up our universe, said Nicky Fox, NASA’s deputy director for science.
“Roman will discover tens of thousands of new planets outside our solar system. It will reveal billions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae and tens of billions of stars,” she said.
This wealth of information will allow NASA to identify areas of interest that can then be studied with other telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope.
Roman will also study the invisible – dark matter and dark energy, whose origins are unknown but which are thought to make up 95 percent of our universe.
AFP
Also investigates the invisible
But Roman will also study the invisible – dark matter and dark energy, whose origins are unknown but which are thought to make up 95 percent of our universe.
Dark matter is thought to be the glue that holds galaxies together, while dark energy pushes them apart by causing the universe to expand faster and faster over time.
Thanks to its infrared vision, the telescope will be able to observe light emitted from celestial bodies billions of years ago, effectively looking back in time in hopes of discovering more about these two phenomena.
