Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

May 15, 2024

NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is poised to embark on a groundbreaking mission of hunting for primordial black holes dating back billions of years to the Big Bang.

About Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope:

  • It will provide one of the deepest-ever views into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.
  • Objectives:It will monitor hundreds of millions of stars in search of tell-tale flickers that betray the presence of planets, distant stars, small icy objects that haunt the outskirts of our solar system, and isolated black holes.
  • Instruments of Telescope:
    • Wide Field Instrument:It will have a field of view that is 100 times greater than the Hubble infrared instrument, capturing more of the sky with less observing time.
    • It will measure light from a billion galaxies over the course of the mission's lifetime.
    • It will perform a microlensing survey of the inner Milky Way to find ~2,600 exoplanets.
    • Coronagraph Instrument: It is a technology demonstration which will perform high contrast imaging and spectroscopy of individual nearby exoplanets.
  • Its Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Surveywill focus on the Milky Way. For this, it will use infrared vision to peer through clouds of dust that can potentially block the view of the crowded central region of our galaxy. 
  • This telescope plans to capture this by taking an image every 15 minutes around the clock for about two months. This process will be repeated six times over Roman's five-year primary mission, which will total more than a year of observations.