Roman Telescope launches with German precision optics to hunt dark energy

NASA's €3.9 billion ($4.3 billion) Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on Aug. 30 aboard a Falcon Heavy, carrying critical components built by Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. The observatory will survey dark matter and dark energy with a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble, and test an advanced coronagraph to directly image Jupiter-like exoplanets.

Bottom line — The €3.9 billion observatory is expected to discover over 100,000 exoplanets and map billions of galaxies in five years.

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• The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy supplied six flight-model Precision Alignment Mechanisms (PAMs) for the coronagraph, ensuring optics tilt by no more than 40 milliarcseconds over eight hours, per Phys.org.
• ESA contributed detectors for the coronagraph, star trackers, batteries, and built a new 35-metre antenna in Australia to handle the telescope's 1.4 terabytes of daily data, according to NASA.
• The telescope's primary mirror is a 2.4-metre replica of Hubble's, donated by the National Reconnaissance Office, reports the Associated Press.
• Roman will survey the sky 1,000 times faster than Hubble, said NASA's Julie McEnery, per CNN, and its wide-field instrument will scan the galactic centre for microlensing events.
• The coronagraph uses shape-shifting mirrors with hundreds of tiny pistons to cancel starlight, making it the first 'active' coronagraph in space, according to Space.com.
• Roman will complement ESA's Euclid mission, with both telescopes observing from the L2 Lagrange point about 1.6 million km from Earth, notes Earth.com.
• US President Donald Trump called the launch 'another great success' during a post-launch press conference, per CBS News, though his administration had previously attempted to cut Roman's funding.

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