Integrated telescope and instruments of the Nancy Grace Roman mission

Dec. 12 () –

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has successfully integrated the mission’s telescope and two instruments into the instrument carrier, which marks the completion of the payload.

Now, the team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will begin attaching the payload to the spacecraft, a job that is expected to be completed before the end of the year. These milestones keep the observatory on track to be completed in fall 2026 and launched no later than May 2027.

Engineers first integrated the Coronagraph instrument, a technology demonstration designed to image exoplanets (worlds outside our solar system). by using a complex set of active masks and mirrors to obscure the glow of the planets’ host stars.

The team then integrated the optical telescope assembly, which includes a 2.4-meter primary mirror, nine additional mirrors, and their supporting structures and electronics. The telescope will focus cosmic light and beam it to Roman’s instruments, revealing billions of objects spread across space and time.

Roman will be the most stable large telescope ever built, at least 10 times more than the James Webb Space Telescope and 100 times more than the Hubble Space Telescope. This will allow scientists to make measurements with levels of precision that can answer important questions about dark energy, dark matter, and worlds beyond our solar system.

With those components in place, the team added Roman’s main instrument. Called Wide Field Instrument, This 300-megapixel infrared camera will give Roman a deep, panoramic view of the universe.. Through Wide Field Instrument studies, scientists will be able to explore distant exoplanets, stars, galaxies, black holes, dark energy, dark matter and more. Thanks to this instrument and the efficiency of the observatory, Roman will be able to capture images of large areas of the sky 1,000 times faster than Hubble with the same sharp and responsive image quality.

“It would be quicker to list the astronomical topics that Roman will not be able to address than those that he will,” he said. in a statement Julie McEnery, principal scientist for the Roman project at NASA Goddard. “We’ve never had a tool like this before. Roman will revolutionize the way we do astronomy.”

The telescope and instruments were mounted on Roman’s instrument holder and precisely aligned in Goddard’s largest clean room, where the observatory is being assembled. Now, the entire assembly is being connected to the Roman spacecraft, which will carry the observatory into orbit and allow it to function once there.

At the same time, the mission’s deployable aperture cover (a visor that will protect the telescope from unwanted light) is being attached to the outer barrel assembly, which serves as the exoskeleton of the telescope.