NASA launches Roman telescope: in one month, it will collect as much data as Hubble did in a century

On 30 August, NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope: the Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 07:26 Eastern Time — 14:26 Cyprus time. The $4.3 billion observatory is heading to the L2 Lagrange point, approximately 1.5 million km from Earth, the same destination where the James Webb Space Telescope operates.

Roman’s main instrument is a 300-megapixel wide-field infrared camera. According to NASA’s estimates, it surveys the sky roughly 1,000 times faster than Hubble: in one month, the new telescope will collect as much data as its predecessor would have accumulated in a century. Over thirty years of operation, Hubble transmitted around 172 terabytes to Earth; Roman is expected to transmit 2,500 terabytes during its five-year primary mission.

The 2.4-metre-wide mirror was given to NASA for free. It was manufactured for a classified project of the US National Reconnaissance Office, and after the programme was cancelled, it was handed over to scientists. It is the same size as Hubble’s mirror, but it was polished for a different optical design, so the new observatory has a much wider field of view at the same resolution.

The scientific programme focuses on dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets. Astronomers currently know of around 6,200 planets beyond the Solar System; Roman is expected to find more than 100,000 during 18 months of observations. A separate instrument, the coronagraph, will block the star’s light to reveal planets that are 100 million times fainter.

The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, who advocated for the construction of space observatories and took part in the creation of Hubble. She is known as the “mother of Hubble” and died in 2018.

The first images will take some time: three to four months are allocated for calibrating the instruments and checking the systems, after which routine scientific operations will begin.