In this clip, engineers are testing the the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s Deployable Aperture Cover. This component is responsible for keeping light out of the telescope barrel. It will be deployed once in orbit using a soft material attached to support booms and remains in this position throughout the observatory’s lifetime. Credit: NASA’s Goddard … Read more
Your browser does not support the audio element. Today, enormous stretches of space are crystal clear, but that wasn’t always the case. During its infancy, the universe was filled with a “fog” that made it opaque, cloaking the first stars and galaxies. NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will probe the universe’s subsequent transition … Read more
Rebekah Hounsell is an assistant research scientist working on ways to optimize and build infrastructure for future observations made by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The mission will shed light on many astrophysics topics, like dark energy, which are currently shrouded in mystery. Rebekah also works as a support scientist for the TESS (Transiting … Read more
Bente Eegholm is an optical engineer working to ensure missions like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope have stellar vision. When it launches by May 2027, the Roman mission will shed light on many astrophysics topics, like dark energy, which are currently shrouded in mystery. Bente’s past work has included Earth-observing missions and the James … Read more
With NASA contributions, the mission will complement dark energy studies to be made by the agency’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The Euclid mission, led by ESA (the European Space Agency) with contributions from NASA, has released five new images that showcase the space telescope’s ability to explore two large-scale cosmic mysteries: dark matter … Read more
Today, Ken Carpenter is a scientist for NASA’s Hubble and Roman space telescopes, but in 1967 he was just a teenager at his local library out to fact-check a “Star Trek” episode. Name: Kenneth G. CarpenterTitle: Operations Project Scientist for Hubble Space Telescope; Ground System Scientist for Roman Space Telescope; and a NASA Innovative Advanced … Read more
Astronomers have discovered black holes ranging from a few times the Sun’s mass to tens of billions. Now a group of scientists has predicted that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could find a class of “featherweight” black holes that has so far eluded detection. Today, black holes form either when a massive star collapses … Read more
Engineers at L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York, have combined all 10 mirrors for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Preliminary tests show the newly aligned optics, collectively called the IOA (Imaging Optics Assembly), will direct light into Roman’s science instruments extremely precisely. This will yield crisp images of space once the observatory launches. “This … Read more
Guessing your age might be a popular carnival game, but for astronomers it’s a real challenge to determine the ages of stars. Once a star like our Sun has settled into steady nuclear fusion, or the mature phase of its life, it changes little for billions of years. One exception to that rule is the … Read more
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has announced plans for an unprecedented survey of the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. It will peer deeper into this region than any other survey, mapping more of our galaxy’s stars than all previous observations combined. “There’s a really broad range of science we can explore with … Read more