About Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope:
- It is NASA’s flagship orbital observatory.
- It is designed to settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics.
- Scientists by using this telescope will focus on three main topic areas: dark energy, exoplanets, and dark matter.
- It will provide one of the deepest-ever views into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.
- It will orbit around a special place in space called the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2.
- 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.
- It will have two instruments:
- Wide Field Instrument:
- It is a 300-megapixel infrared camera.
- 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 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 Survey will focus on the Milky Way.