NASA launches Roman space telescope to study dark matter and exoplanets
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a $4 billion observatory with a 300-megapixel wide field instrument and a coronagraph, is set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy and travel to the Sun-Earth L2 point about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Roman will survey roughly 12% of the sky in infrared, mapping dark matter via weak gravitational lensing, measuring cosmic expansion with supernovae and galaxy clustering, and hunting exoplanets by microlensing while monitoring about 100 million stars expected to yield about 2,500 planets; its wide field equals 100 Hubble pictures per image.
Roman will survey 12% of the sky to map dark matter
Context
The telescope is ready to launch from the Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. After launch it will travel to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point and begin its surveys. Scientists will then analyze the large data sets Roman…
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