NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on August 30. The telescope, equipped with infrared vision and a wide field of view, is designed to study the early Universe, dark energy, and, notably, exoplanets.
Julie McEnery, the senior project scientist on Roman, stated that one month of observations with the Roman telescope would take the Hubble Space Telescope approximately a century to complete. Scientists anticipate Roman will discover as many as 40 times more exoplanets than have been inventoried to date, potentially finding around 100,000 planets using a method that detects dips in a star’s brightness as planets pass in front of it. Approximately 6,000 exoplanets have been confirmed so far.
Jessie Christiansen, chief scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute in Pasadena, California, explained the importance of a large-scale survey, stating, “We find individual planets and study them as much as we can. But a single planet only ever gives us a snapshot. To see a movie, we need a huge survey of stars in all these different environments.” Christiansen also noted, “Whatever Roman tells us will probably be different and more interesting than whatever we came up with. We always discover that nature is more imaginative than we are.” The telescope will employ three planet-observation strategies, with the ‘transiting’ approach expected to yield the majority of its exoplanet discoveries. Roman will observe hundreds of millions of stars every 12 minutes.
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