Astronomy Picture Of The Day: NASA’s next flagship telescope is about to leave Earth!

 

NASA, #Space, #astronomy, #διάστημα

This morning, Florida’s Launch Complex 39A is supposed to send a school-bus-sized observatory a million miles from home. At 7:26 a.m. Eastern — 14:26 Moscow time — a SpaceX Falcon Heavy is scheduled to lift NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope toward the Sun–Earth L2 point. If the weather holds, one of the most ambitious sky surveys of the decade will finally leave the pad. Roman is not a replacement for Hubble or James Webb. It is their wide-eyed partner. Hubble peers through a keyhole. Webb stares with exquisite infrared vision at small, carefully chosen patches. Roman kicks the door open: Hubble-class sharpness across a field of view more than a hundred times larger, scanning the sky in visible and near-infrared light. The observatory carries two instruments. The Wide Field Instrument, built around a roughly 300-megapixel infrared camera, will map enormous stretches of the cosmos. Its main jobs are to weigh the influence of dark energy, watch distant supernovae, and hunt planets and compact objects by gravitational microlensing — the brief brightening that happens when one star’s gravity magnifies another.

The second instrument is a high-contrast coronagraph, a technology demonstration designed to blot out starlight so faint nearby worlds can be seen directly. It will not photograph Earth-size planets. What it can do is reveal gas giants, dusty disks, asteroid belts, and perhaps distant analogs of the Oort Cloud around other stars. Direct images of alien planetary systems have been rare. Roman is built to make them less so. The journey will not be instant. After launch, the telescope needs about three months to reach its parking spot at L2, unfold, cool down, and calibrate. First science images are not expected before early 2027. The prime mission is five years, with hardware designed to last longer. Named for NASA’s first chief of astronomy — the scientist often called the “Mother of Hubble” — Roman arrives nearly nine months ahead of its original readiness date. That is unusual for a multi-billion-dollar flagship. The payoff, if the instruments perform, is a statistical census of the dark universe and a new catalog of worlds that no previous telescope could survey at this scale. For now, the story is simpler: a heavy rocket, a dawn window over the Florida coast, and a telescope built to look farther and wider than the ones that came before it.