The following is an extract from our Lost in Space-Time newsletter. Each month, we dive into fascinating ideas from around the universe. On 30 August, NASA launched its latest flagship space observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
It is an incredible piece of technology: it is the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope but with a far broader field of view. Over the course of its five-year primary mission, Roman is expected to observe about 12 per cent of the sky in incredible detail, peering into the distant reaches of the universe. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s a giant leap from its predecessors – Hubble observed only 0.1 per cent of the sky over 35 years.
This wider view will allow Roman to catch cosmic events as they evolve in real time, and observe an astounding variety of both new and already-known objects in space. But the pièce de résistance will be what it can do for our studies of dark matter and dark energy, the mysterious stuff that makes up about 95 per cent of the universe. Indirect observations tell us that both of these enigmatic components of the cosmos exist, but we know little to nothing about what they actually are or how they work.
Roman may be the key that finally unlocks some of their mysteries. Roman’s powerful 300-megapixel camera was activated two weeks after launch, opening its eyes to the universe as part of the telescope’s commissioning process. The first photons of starlight it took in created fuzzy green rings, an expanse of out-of-focus stars.
Kristen McQuinn, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and the head of the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission office, tells me this is only the beginning. The next steps are to focus the camera, turn on the guidance systems and find out what astonishing things this new observatory will teach us about the universe. Leah Crane: So, first things first: how was it to finally see that first image?
Kristen McQuinn: It’s extremely intense. The teams are on duty 24/7, so there are a lot of people on shifts around the clock. These first images were taken in the middle of the night, but the run-up to this had been going so incredibly well.
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