NASA announced on Tuesday (July 28) that it has officially fueled-up the Roman Space Telescope — a magnificent new observatory expected to generate over 500 terabytes of cosmic data per year. By comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope, in its 35 years of service, has created over 400 terabytes in total.
At present, the Roman Space Telescope‘s launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to occur on Aug. 30 at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). And considering the project is sort of the gold-standard for telescope-building, as the team says it’s nine months ahead of schedule and under budget, hopes are high that this launch date will stick.
Fueling of the observatory took place on Saturday (July 25) and involved pumping it up with what’s known as hydrazine fuel. Hydrazine fuel is a classic sort of fuel used in NASA spacecraft as it’s highly efficient; however, because its extremely toxic and unstable, there have been attempts to move away from this sort of fuel and replace it with something less hazardous.
The Roman Space Telescope’s inauguration into NASA’s fleet of observatories will mark a pretty big moment for the advancement of astronomy.
Roman’s specs are quite impressive; thanks to that showy data-generation figure discussed above, the telescope is expected to further our knowledge of intriguing phenomena like dark matter, dark energy, supernova explosions and even the hunt for habitable exoplanets.
It will work as a complement to other major telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). For example, while Roman can’t see as far as the JWST, it does have the same sort of infrared vision that enables such deep space probing. What it can do that the JWST cannot, though, is see a much wider swath of space at once.
One of Roman’s instruments, named Wide Field Instrument (WFI), will be able to create images of the infrared universe 50 times wider than the JWST’s images. This means that while the JWST is zooming in on a particular object of interest, Roman could meanwhile be compiling future targets for the JWST or catching anything fleeting that the JWST would’ve missed due to its highly narrow view.
As another example, to help with dark universe studies, this ultra-wide view should allow Roman to study lots of galaxy movements at once. That’s great because the only way we even know dark matter and dark energy exist (aka one of the best ways we have of studying the two) is by the way they affect galaxy movements.
“So we’re going to see thousands of supernovae, and some of these are going to be further away than any supernovae we’ve ever seen before,” Dominic Benford, program scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope previously told Space.com.
To accomplish all of these goals though, Roman will have to use its new fuel supply to get to its designated station in space: Lagrange point 2. This is a sought-after spot for spacecraft as it’s a gravitationally stable point about a million miles from Earth. That stability means spacecraft have to use less fuel to stay put.
“Roman will use its propellant to power two types of thrusters that help it stay in its planned orbit around L2 and ensure the solar array panels face the sun, which is the observatory’s main source of power throughout the mission,” NASA explained in a statement.
It’s where the JWST is right now — if all goes to plan, we’ll really have a nice tag-team operation happening over there.