An illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. Credit: Courtesy of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio via NASA’s website.
A new revolutionary telescope that NASA is scheduled to launch on Sunday was made with the help of Ohio State students and faculty over the span of a decade.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will explore areas of dark energy, covering a large area of the sky with an enormous camera. It is expected to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 a.m.
“If what you want to do is survey the universe, either to understand why the expansion of the cosmos is speeding up, or to discover planetary systems like our own, or to map the Milky Way galaxy, then Roman Space Telescope is like having several 100 Hubble Space Telescopes all working for you at the same time,” said David Weinberg, distinguished Ohio State professor of astronomy who had a large involvement in designing the telescope’s surveys. “So, that’s really its power.”
The telescope will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex, according to NASA. It aims to discover large astrophysics topics, such as how the universe evolved, its fate and if we are alone in the universe.
Weinberg said that 20-30 people from the Ohio State community were involved, with around 10 undergraduate students, five faculty members and the remainder being postdocs and graduate students.?
“In terms of universities, Ohio State actually has a bigger footprint in this mission than any other university, and that’s because we’ve had multiple people who have been involved in designing the telescope and its mission from very early on,” Weinberg said.
According to Weinberg, a mission of this size breaks down into a variety of tasks that Ohio State was able to work on.
“If the telescope has taken several overlapping images, how do you combine those and add them up to make one combined image?” Weinberg said. “That, in itself, turns out to be a big, complex mathematical problem that several students and postdocs here have worked on for several years.”
Hubble Space Telescope is NASA’s most iconic telescope, according to Weinberg. Launched in 1990, it orbits 300 miles above Earth’s surface.?
Weinberg said that it is the telescope’s large size that makes it groundbreaking, comparing it to the hypothetical work of many Hubble telescopes put together.?
“I like to think of it as if you get one of those beautiful images from the Hubble Space Telescope, you can display it on your computer screen at almost complete resolution,” Weinberg said. “If you want to take one image from the Roman Space Telescope and display it, with all of its information, you could do it with 36 4K televisions. So if you just imagine having a giant wall covered in 4K televisions, that is one pointing of the Roman Space Telescope.
Weinberg hopes that the telescope will make a large impact on students, and he is hoping to bring in images and findings from the telescope to share with his future students.
“If you’re an Ohio State student, you should feel proud that you are really able to learn, and if you get involved in undergraduate research to participate in stuff that is right at the cutting edge of science,” Weinberg said.
The telescope will use its powerful 2.4-meter mirror and 300-megapixel infrared camera to map how matter is structured and distributed throughout the cosmos and measure how the universe has expanded over time, according to NASA. It will observe galaxies going back to when the universe was half-a-billion years old – only 4 percent of its current age.
“Roman will do this through multiple observational strategies, including surveys of exploding stars called supernovae and galaxy clusters, and mapping out the distribution of galaxies in three dimensions,” NASA’s website states. “Measuring the brightness and distances of supernovae provided the first evidence for the presence of dark energy. Roman will extend these studies to greater distances to measure how dark energy’s influence increased over time.”
