NASA presents its Roman telescope with a view to creating an “Atlas of the Universe” | EUROtoday

A modern era telescope which “will offer the Earth a new Atlas of the universe”. These have been the phrases of NASA chief Jared Isaacman to qualify, Tuesday April 21, the brand new telescope of the American area company. More than 12 meters excessive, this silver machine outfitted with immense photo voltaic panels – named Roman – will now be transported to Florida with a view to being despatched into area aboard a SpaceX rocket, initially of September on the earliest.

Developed for greater than a decade at a value exceeding $4 billion, it was named in honor of one of many biggest American astronomers, Nancy Grace Roman, nicknamed the “mother of Hubble”, after the identify of one other flagship NASA telescope. More than 35 years after the latter was put into service, which notably taught us that our universe was increasing sooner than we thought, the Roman Space Telescope shall be answerable for answering questions that remained unanswered.

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With its huge area of view, greater than 100 instances better than that of Hubble, it’s going to comb giant areas of the sky from a privileged vantage level, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. “It will send us 11 terabytes of data per day, which means that in the first year alone, it will have provided us with more data than the Hubble telescope will have collected in its entire life,” factors out Mark Melton, Roman’s techniques engineer with AFP.

Thanks to this wide-angle lens, NASA will be capable to perform an unlimited census of the objects making up our universe, explains Nicky Fox, head of NASA’s scientific actions, who thus expects to “discover tens of thousands of new planets” and even “thousands of supernovas”, that’s to say large stars on the finish of their life.

“Study how dark matter is structured over cosmic time”

So a lot data which can permit NASA to find out areas of curiosity which might then be analyzed by complementary telescopes just like the well-known James Webb. But Roman additionally goals to check the invisible: darkish matter and power, the origins of which we have no idea however which we expect signify 95% of our universe.

Thanks to his infrared imaginative and prescient, he’ll be capable to observe the sunshine emitted by celestial objects billions of years in the past and thus return in time to higher perceive these two mysterious phenomena. The first is perceived as a type of gravitational glue and the second as a repulsive drive concerned within the well-known growth of our universe.

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Complementing the work of the Rubin Observatory in Chile and the Euclid probe of the European Space Agency (ESA), it’s going to permit us to “study how dark matter is structured over cosmic time”, but in addition to calculate “the speed” at which sure “galaxies move away from us”, explains to AFP Darryl Seligman, teacher-researcher in astronomy on the University of Michigan, who doesn’t cover his enthusiasm for this new telescope.

These observations may certainly revolutionize our present understanding of the construction of the universe, says Julie McEnery, astrophysicist answerable for the Roman telescope. “Current observations suggest that our standard model of the universe is incorrect. Roman will be able to confirm this and put us on the path to understanding what is right,” she analyzes.

The biggest worth of this new telescope thus lies on this a part of the unknown, insist the specialists: what it’s going to permit us to find and which right now just isn’t even conceivable. “If Roman ever wins the Nobel Prize, it will probably be for something we haven’t even thought of yet,” smiles Mark Melton.

With AFP