This Sunday: One Telescope, A Billion Galaxies
- Vero Minute
- 11 minutes ago
- 1 min read
Set your alarm!
Sunday, Aug. 30, 7:26 AM
Three boosters of a Falcon Heavy ignite at once from Kennedy Space Center, a bigger show than anything we've seen leave the Cape lately, and NASA's biggest observatory since the James Webb.
Here's what makes it worth the early wake-up. The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope carries a mirror the same size as Hubble's, but its camera takes in roughly 100 times more space in a single frame. Where Hubble picks off one target at a time, Roman sweeps whole regions of the universe in a single pass, the difference between squinting through a keyhole and swinging a door wide open.
Over its mission, it's expected to map around a billion galaxies, work that could finally put real research behind dark matter, while watching crowded star fields near our galaxy's center for hidden planets.
It's also arriving early and under budget, a rarity for a flagship NASA telescope. Fitting that Nancy Grace Roman was NASA's first chief astronomer, the person largely credited with getting Hubble built in the first place. Her telescope, in other words, was built to see well beyond the one she fought for decades ago.
