Via NBC, we're about to see a whole lot more of outer space than we've ever witnessed before:
After nearly two decades of development, $4.3 billion and the labor of hundreds of scientists and engineers, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is less than three months from launch.
From a point roughly 1 million miles from Earth, the telescope is expected to survey the cosmos, capturing panoramas of hundreds of millions of stars and billions of galaxies. With this observatory, NASA hopes to unravel the secrets of dark matter and dark energy and discover thousands of planets beyond our solar system.
This is no little Walmart telescope, y'all. Here's some NASA-furnished artists' depictions of this bad boy, imagined as it will look in space:
(And yes, I guess technically you don't call a telescope a "bad boy" if it goes by the name "Nancy." But we're not going to call this thing a "bad girl," so stop asking.)
NBC says the scope "will be able to survey and map more of the sky than ever before, at a pace hundreds of times faster," and NASA told the news network that "in just one month of data collection, Roman will be able to peer at underexplored parts of the Milky Way to study stars across a deep slice of the galaxy, building an astronomical catalog far larger than any that exists today."
Here's a pre-launch video put out by NASA (I really, really love how it's as amped-up as an old-school WWF preview):
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, of course, has already been busy for a few years snapping crazy shots of the universe from its vantage point a million miles away from Earth:
Roman has lower resolution than Webb but a much larger field of view, meaning it can more continuously monitor a huge patch of the sky relative to the Webb scope.
Meanwhile, compared to the Hubble telescope — which we all know and love — Roman is an absolute beast:
The two are roughly the same size — about that of a semitrailer truck — and similarly barrel-shaped. But the new observatory should be able to survey the cosmos 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and each image will capture a patch of sky at least 100 times larger than one of Hubble's, according to McEnery.
"To put this into context, one month of Roman observations would correspond to a century with Hubble," she said.
The Roman telescope is meant to function in part as a sort of big net, scooping up huge patches of the sky and identifying points of interest that Webb and Hubble will be able to study more closely. The telescope is also meant to conduct large-scale surveys on both dark energy and "exoplanets," or planets outside our solar system.
The scope is planned to launch later this summer, and you can tell NASA is amped for it:
So am I, for that matter!
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