NASA officials in Greenbelt, Maryland, presented the fully assembled Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to the press on Tuesday. The observatory is now prepared for its scheduled launch this September.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (NGRST), named after a key figure in the planning of the Hubble Space Telescope, is arriving eight months ahead of schedule and under budget.
Unlike predecessors such as the Hubble and Webb telescopes, the NGRST is designed around a massive imaging system and a wide-field view. This capability will allow the telescope to transmit 1.4 terabytes of data to Earth every day.
While infrared astronomy from Earth is hindered by atmospheric gases that absorb infrared wavelengths, space-based observatories can bypass this issue. Previous infrared-specific telescopes, such as the Spitzer, were part of the original suite of Great Observatories but were largely designed for high-resolution imaging of tiny slices of the sky.
There was a specific call for a survey telescope capable of imaging large swaths of the sky simultaneously. Such a mission could reveal the large-scale structure of the early Universe and catalog more asteroids orbiting Earth's vicinity.
NASA initially prioritized this mission under the name WFIRST, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. The project’s history became unique when NASA’s planning intersected with surplus hardware from the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
At the time, the NRO decided that two of its spy satellites were surplus to requirements and offered the hardware to NASA. NASA had already recognized that this hardware could be utilized for the WFIRST mission.
NASA's Mark Melton told Ars that original WFIRST designs utilized a 1.5-meter telescope, but the NRO hardware was almost twice that size. This required engineers to scale up much of the hardware for the project.
The resulting NGRST is large enough to extend past the second story of the building where it was presented.
