NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now just two days from launch, marking the arrival of the agency's next flagship astrophysics mission after the James Webb Space Telescope. University of Arizona faculty and students will be watching from Cape Canaveral as Roman begins its journey toward science operations, which are expected to start in January 2027. Unlike Webb, which was built to study relatively small regions of the universe in extraordinary depth, Roman is designed to survey vast areas of the sky quickly.
Both observatories can detect infrared light, giving astronomers the ability to compare and combine their observations. Used together, the two missions could reveal far more about the universe than either telescope could on its own. A Hubble-Sized Mirror With a Much Wider View Roman has a 7.9-foot primary mirror, the same diameter as the Hubble Space Telescope's, along with two major scientific instruments.
Its Coronagraph Instrument will block and filter the light from stars so astronomers can study exoplanets and disks around them. Its Wide Field Instrument is designed to match the sensitivity of Hubble's cameras while imaging an area 100 times larger. Over more than 30 years, Hubble has observed roughly 0.1% of the night sky.
Roman, by comparison, has the potential to survey the entire sky at the same resolution. That wide view will allow Roman to find rare objects both close to Earth and across enormous cosmic distances. Scientists expect it to capture dying stars, newly discovered worlds, galaxy clusters and many other targets.
University of Arizona researchers will contribute to several major areas of Roman science. One of Roman's main scientific goals is to investigate dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious components that account for nearly all of the universe. Dark matter exerts gravity but does not give off light, while dark energy is associated with the accelerating expansion of the universe.
NASA selected the U of A's Arizona Cosmology Lab to support two efforts aimed at better understanding these phenomena, including one wide-field science team and one project infrastructure team. Elisabeth Krause, a professor of astronomy and physics, leads the wide-field science team "Kinematic Lensing with the Roman Space Telescope." The group received $2 million to develop a cosmological measurement technique known as kinematic lensing. By combining Roman images with spectroscopic measurements, the researchers hope to study dark matter and dark energy with greater precision than has previously been possible.
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