This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: On Sunday, Aug. 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is expected to launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory will join the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, and the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, in scanning the vastness of space and potentially finding answers to longstanding mysteries of the universe.
Known as Roman, the new telescope will be able to block the starlight that hides distant exoplanets and reveal distant disks of dust and particles that eventually give rise to new planets. Roman's goals include completing a statistical census of planetary systems in the Milky Way and a historical analysis of how dark matter and energy—particles and forces that aren't entirely understood—influenced the formation and evolution of the normal matter making up the universe. In this Q&A, Christopher Palma, teaching professor of astronomy and astrophysics in Penn State's Eberly College of Science, spoke about Roman, satellites much closer to home and what's obscuring space observations from Earth's surface.
The telescope has some similarities to both Webb and Hubble, but it is unique in many ways. Telescopes are described by what type of light they can detect. Hubble is sensitive to ultraviolet, visible and infrared light; Roman to visible and infrared light; and Webb only to infrared light.
These different types of light can provide insight into completely different cosmic phenomena and objects because different objects stand out more or less in one type of light versus another. The size of the observatory's mirror also determines how sensitive the telescope is to detecting faint objects. Hubble and Roman have identically sized mirrors, about eight feet in diameter, while Webb has a much larger mirror at about 21 feet in diameter.
What really makes Roman stand out is that it is designed for wide-field imaging. The cameras on telescopes can often detect objects in only a very small patch of sky. If we use the size of the full moon in the sky as our guide, Hubble's field of view is often smaller than that—meaning each picture it takes is of a patch of sky smaller than the full moon.
Webb's fields of view are often even smaller than Hubble's. Each picture taken by Roman, however, will be larger than the full moon, allowing it to survey more of the sky much faster than Hubble or Webb. To set the scale, the moon is about 250,000 miles or 400,000 kilometers from Earth.
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