[Music throughout]
The universe, for all have learned about it,
we have only just begun to reveal its secrets.
What are dark matter and dark energy? How common are
planetary arrangements like our own? And how many planets
in our galaxy have the potential to harbor life?
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help answer these fundamental
questions. Formerly known as WFIRST, the Roman
Space Telescope is similar to Hubble, but with the benefit of 30
years of technological improvement. Each image from its
Wide Field Instrument will have the depth and clarity of Hubble’s best,
but capture a sky area 100 times larger.
The Roman Space Telescope will take the lead in exploring
dark energy and dark matter. We only know they exist
by their effects on observable matter, yet these two mysterious
components make up 95% of the universe.
The Roman Space Telescope’s powerful 2.4 meter
mirror and enormous field of view will also help us in the search
for planets beyond our solar system, or exoplanets.
It will watch for gravitational microlensing events, caused when a
planet and its host star pass in front of a background star.
Such events are rare, so catching them requires watching large
swaths of the sky. To deepen its study of
exoplanets, the Roman Space Telescope will house a beyond state-of-the-art
coronagraph that will directly image and analyze
Neptune-size planets in orbits slightly larger than Earth’s —
a dramatic improvement over current capabilities.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help us answer
many of the biggest cosmic questions. Its wide-field view and
coronagraph will complement missions like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope,
and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS.
The Roman Space Telescope will be an indispensable
part of space science during the next decade and beyond.
Explore: solar system & beyond
NASA