A space telescope launch + Alvin submersible check-up
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, I'm Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. Big news. New space telescope is dropping.
When and where will the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launch and orbit?
The Nancy Grace Roman Scope is scheduled to launch at the end of August. Amazingly, for a space mission ahead of schedule. The telescope will rest about a million miles from Earth at Lagrange Point 2, where the sun and Earth's gravity balance out. Here to give me the lowdown on what the telescope is, what scientists hope to do with it, and the backstory of the mission is Jackie Townsend. She's project manager for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission. Hey, Jackie. Hi, Flora. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. How excited are you right now?
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.
And then it has a whole lifetime ahead of it. Exactly. I mean, introduce us to this telescope. How does the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope fit in with the family tree of space telescopes we know and love like Hubble and JWST?
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.
If I opened the telescope catalog, what are the special features on this scope that would make an astronomer want to add it to their cart?
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.
I mean, is there specific scientific subject matter that this scope is designed to interrogate?
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. Roman is expected to come back with 50,000 up to perhaps 100,000 exoplanets that Hubble or Webb might be asked to follow up on.
Is Roman going to actually use its big camera to take pictures of those exoplanets or will it infer that they're there?
Excellent question. So the survey that I just talked about will be inferring that they are there. It's not going to be imaging them, however. We are also carrying something called a coronagraph, which is a technology demonstration instrument that was developed out at our partners at JPL out in California. And that has special masks and data processing so that it can actually dim the light of the primary star so that you can see in a couple of pixels. the light from the planet that's next to it. Now, it's a technology demonstration. So it's the first time that we've actually tried to do this in a system on orbit. So it's not going to be like right out of the gate. We're going to go be imaging Earth-like planets around other stars.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–0:11
2
When and where will the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launch and orbit?
0:11–6:53
3
How does the Roman Telescope differ from Hubble and JWST in survey capability?
6:53–10:37
4
What special instruments and detectors make Roman a 300-megapixel survey camera?
10:37–16:52
5
Which scientific questions will Roman tackle: dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets?
16:52–18:13
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Science Friday
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