NASA is about a month away from launching a telescope so powerful it could photograph more of the universe than any camera ever built.
If you’ve ever looked up at the night sky and wondered what’s really out there, this is a mission worth watching. NASA says the telescope could capture images of more than a billion galaxies over its lifetime. It might also help answer some of the biggest questions in all of science.
Meet NASA’s Newest Space Explorer
The telescope is called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It’s named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, a woman often called the “Mother of Hubble” for the work she did to get that famous telescope built. Launch is set for August 30, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman will ride into space on a SpaceX rocket called Falcon Heavy. It’s heading up nine months earlier than NASA originally planned.
Once it lifts off, Roman will travel about a million miles from Earth. It’s headed for a spot in space where the pull of the Sun and Earth balance out. That lets the telescope stay in place without burning through fuel, so it can keep working for years.
What makes Roman special is its camera. It can capture a view of the sky 100 times bigger than Hubble’s in a single shot. It does this without losing any sharpness. Where Hubble might need hundreds of photos to cover an area of sky, Roman can do it in one. That means scientists can study huge chunks of the universe far faster than ever before.
What Roman Will Actually Look For
Roman has two big jobs once it’s up and running. The first is hunting for planets circling other stars, similar to how Earth circles the Sun. The second is studying dark energy. That’s the name scientists give to the mysterious force that appears to be pushing the entire universe apart, faster and faster every year. Nobody fully understands what dark energy actually is yet, and Roman was built to help change that.
The telescope will also send back a staggering amount of information. NASA expects Roman to beam down about a terabyte of data every single day. Scientists have compared that to streaming a million songs at once. Except those songs would be coming from a million miles away in space.
Roman is expected to lift off the morning of August 30. If everything goes smoothly, NASA says the first images could start arriving within its first year in orbit. That would give all of us a brand new look at parts of the universe nobody has ever seen before.