NASA has a new “eye in space”: The “Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope,” which was launched on August 30, is currently on its way to its destination, the Lagrange point L2, 1.5 million kilometers from Ede. From there, the telescope will map galaxies and dark matter, but will also find and examine Earth-like exoplanets. For this purpose, the telescope, which primarily works in the infrared range, has two main instruments on board, a wide-angle camera and a coronagraph.
“First Light” for the Wide Field Instrument
As NASA reports, both instruments of the Roman Space Telescope survived the launch well and were successfully activated. The Wide Field Instrument camera sent a first test image to Earth over the weekend. The Wide Field Instrument consists of 18 detectors that together can record 300 million pixels at once – 100 times more than the Hubble Telescope’s camera.
For the first test image, the camera’s 18 individual detectors were still in their starting configuration and not calibrated. Therefore, the first image is still blurry and shows the stars shown as blurred dots surrounded by aperture effects. Nevertheless, the project scientists consider this a great success: “After years of effort to build this instrument and test it on Earth, we now have confirmation that it works in space. This is a huge milestone,” says Josh Schlieder from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We are on the path to groundbreaking science.”
This image is the first image from the Roman Space Telescope’s 300-megapixel camera. The arc-shaped arrangement of the 18 detectors is clearly visible. Below is an enlargement of one of the fields of view. — © NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Tyler Desjardins (STScI)
The coronagraph is already awake too
Before NASA could turn on the Roman telescope’s wide-angle camera, the sensitive instrument first had to be dried and decontaminated for ten days. To do this, the detectors were heated to minus 65 degrees. Only then did the engineers begin to cool the system to its working temperature of minus 183 degrees Celsius. This cold is necessary to create sharp infrared images without disturbing thermal radiation.
A few days earlier, NASA had also activated the space telescope’s second instrument: the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI). Its system of masks, mirrors, sensors and adaptive optics is designed to image faint objects around bright stars in visible light. This allows astronomers to detect exoplanets that are rather small, Earth-like and orbit similarly close to their star as Earth.
Position of the Roman Space Telescope on September 21, 2026. — © NASA
The space telescope is currently almost a third of the way to the Lagrange point L2. As the flight continues, the NASA ground team will use the time to calibrate the instruments and conduct further testing. The Roman telescope is scheduled to begin scientific operation at the beginning of 2027.
Source: NASA