NASA unveils Roman space telescope to probe exoplanets, dark matter

New Delhi, April 22 (SocialNews.XYZ) US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) unveiled the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a wide‑field observatory designed to scan the universe for planets outside the solar system and probe the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said at a news conference at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland that “Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe.” The 12‑metre, silvery contraption with large solar panels will be moved to Florida for a launch into space by a SpaceX rocket in September at the earliest.

Named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, the ‘mother of the Hubble Space Telescope,’ the Nancy Grace Roman, the new telescope will have a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble's, potentially measuring light from a billion galaxies in its lifetime, NASA said.

This observatory will also be able to block starlight to directly see exoplanets and planet-forming disks, complete a statistical census of planetary systems in our galaxy, and settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics, it added.

The Roman telescope was built at a cost of over $4 billion in more than a decade and will be positioned 1.5 million kilometres from Earth to probe vast regions of space.

At this special place in space, called the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, gravitational forces balance to keep objects in steady orbits with very little assistance, the agency said in a blog post.

The thermal stability of an observatory at L2 will provide a ten-fold improvement beyond Hubble in much of the data Roman will gather.

It will send 11 terabytes of data a day down to Earth, said Mark Melton, a systems engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Source: IANS