NASA is preparing to send its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into space, with the launch now just two days away. The mission is being described as one of NASA’s major astrophysics projects following the James Webb Space Telescope.
The Roman telescope is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Its scientific observations are expected to begin in January 2027. Faculty members and students from the University of Arizona are also expected to be at Cape Canaveral to witness the launch.
Unlike the James Webb Space Telescope, which is designed to study smaller areas of the universe in great detail, Roman will focus on covering much larger sections of the sky in a shorter time. Both telescopes can observe infrared light, and scientists hope that combining data from the two missions will provide a better understanding of the universe.
Roman’s main mirror is 7.9 feet wide, roughly the same size as the mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope. The new observatory carries two major scientific instruments.
One of them, the Coronagraph Instrument, will help block and filter out the bright light coming from stars. This will allow astronomers to study exoplanets and the disks surrounding them.
The Wide Field Instrument, meanwhile, will be able to capture images of an area nearly 100 times larger than Hubble’s cameras while maintaining a similar level of sensitivity.
NASA says Hubble has observed only around 0.1% of the night sky during more than three decades of observations. Roman, on the other hand, is designed to survey the entire sky at a similar resolution, giving scientists a much broader view of the universe.