Ellen Fiddian

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105 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 11 Sep

Ellen Fiddian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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The Science Show · AI boost for people with dyslexia and how algorithms shape what we read · 11 Sep 2026 podcast

So the Roman

Space Telescope has another instrument on it called a coronagraph, which helps to block out light from stars so that you can see really faint objects around it.

Lots of space telescopes have them, lots of ground telescopes have them, but the Roman coronagraph is one of the most delicate instruments ever built.

And it's going to help us find a lot more exoplanets around other stars.

So it's going to be carrying out these huge exoplanet surveys.

It's not quite powerful enough to see exo-Earths, so really small planets like the Earth, but it will be useful for seeing things like exo Jupiters, so gas giants that are a long way away from their stars, whereas most of the time most of the exoplanets we're finding at the moment are really big and very, very close to their stars that they're orbiting.

Yeah, that's the idea.

And one of the astrophysicists I talked to compared the delicacy of this coronagraph to looking for a luminescent bacterial cell on a lighthouse from several kilometers away.

So you've really, really gotta have something very, very powerful to be able to do this.

What's its origin story?

It's a really weird one, actually.

So it's one of two space telescopes that was donated by the US National Reconnaissance Office, the NRO, to NASA in 2012.

And they basically just announced it one day, said, Hey, we have these two space telescopes.

They're the same size as the Hubble.

They're, you know, as powerful as the Hubble.

Do you want these?

It's a very weird origin.

origin story.

We know the NRO was interested in these satellites for Earth observation.

They were presumably going to be using them as spy satellites, but the projects got too expensive for them.

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