Jackie Townsend

speaker

77 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 17 Jul

Jackie Townsend’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 Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · A space telescope launch + Alvin submersible check-up · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

Very excited.

In our team, we all talk about the various analogies.

I've decided it's closer to watching your toddler take their very first steps, right?

It's been all of this work to get this far, and it's about to take its steps and launch into orbit and then deliver some truly amazing science.

So Roman is a survey machine.

It was designed to image a large fraction of the night sky.

We'll do things with it like create a 3D map of our own Milky Way galaxy, as well as image billions of other galaxies stretching back towards the Big Bang.

And in doing so, it's going to create humanity's largest catalog of the night sky at this depth.

So Roman does two things exceptionally well.

The first thing is we have an incredibly wide field of view based on our 18 state-of-the-art 4K by 4K detectors, making it a 300 megapixel camera, 200 to 300 times bigger than what Hubble could do.

But there's a second part of what we do that's amazing, and that is Roman is the most stable telescope that NASA has ever built.

And that means that it can maintain our exquisite focus even as we rapidly scan across the sky and then stop on a dime in order to take the next image.

So, when you add those two things together, Roman can image the sky about a thousand times faster than Hubble.

So, it's not that we're doing competitive science with Hubble or doing Hubble or web science better, right?

They peer deeper and in a more focused way on specific targets, whereas Roman is going to look for the things that go bump in the night.

Yeah, our surveys are designed to explore science ideas that need a large enough sample for meaningful statistics.

So those are dark energy, that's what is driving the expansion rate of the universe.

Dark matter, that is what mass explains the structure and dynamics that we see and how the galaxies interact with each other.

And the third is exoplanets.

Human beings have identified about 6,000 of them to date.

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