Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

About Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

• Launch: It has been launched by NASA.
• Named After: The telescope is named in honour of NASA’s first chief astronomer Nancy Grace Roman.
• Destination: It is set to travel to a region about one million miles (1.6 million kilometres) away from Earth, the same neighbourhood where the James Webb Space Telescope currently operates.
• Lifespan: It has a five-year primary lifespan, with a goal to operate for 10 years.
• Objective: It is to settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and astrophysics.
  • Scientists hope to use its vast dataset to understand dark energy and dark matter.
  • It will help scientists find hidden exoplanets.
  • By observing how massive objects bend light over immense distances, researchers will test whether Albert Einstein’s laws of gravity hold on a cosmic scale.
• Instruments
  • Wide Field Instrument (WFI): This is the telescope’s camera. 
    • It features a massive 300-megapixel near-infrared focal plane array consisting of 18 individual detectors. 
    • These detectors collect photons of light that are decoded into crisp cosmic panoramas.
  • Coronagraph Instrument (CGI):
    • Advanced Imaging: It serves as a technology demonstrator for high-contrast imaging and spectroscopy of nearby exoplanets.
    • Focused Galactic Survey: The Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will use infrared vision to penetrate dust clouds obscuring the dense central region of the Milky Way.
  • Expansive Field of View: It possesses a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble’s infrared instrument, allowing for broader sky coverage in less time.
  • Galactic Survey: It aimed at measuring light from a billion galaxies throughout the mission.
  • Exoplanet Search: It will conduct a microlensing survey of the inner Milky Way to discover approximately 2,600 exoplanets.
• Observational Strategy:
  • Frequent Imaging: It will take images every 15 minutes continuously around the clock for about two months.
  • Extended Mission Timeline: This imaging cycle will be repeated six times throughout the five-year primary mission, amounting to over a year of total observation time.