When the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s inner and outer portions were bolted together at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, last November, one might imagine a collective sigh of relief from everyone involved. In the five years since receiving a green light from NASA, the mission has navigated a pandemic, a US government shutdown, and threats of budget cuts. Now the telescope will undergo final tests before being shipped to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch as early as the fall.
The concept that led to Roman was recommended in the 2010 decadal survey of astronomy and astrophysics. A decade earlier, scientists had discovered dark energy, which putatively pervades all space and is the leading explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe (see Saul Perlmutter’s 2003 PT article on dark energy ). The astronomical community was eager to develop a telescope that could further study the universe’s expansion and probe the nature of dark energy. It was also keen to continue the exoplanet hunt of the Kepler space telescope, which was retired in 2018.
Over the next 15 years, teams at NASA created a space telescope that could tackle those two tasks. Roman was designed with a much larger field of view in the near-IR than any of the agency’s previous large missions. And it was engineered to survey exoplanets that Kepler and other space-based technology could not detect.
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