NASA’s next telescope to search for dark matter has a flight on a SpaceX rocket.
The Roman space telescope will not be launched before 2026 aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket from California-based NASA announced (Opens in a new tab) Tuesday (July 19).
NASA will pay SpaceX $255 million for the launch service and “other mission-related costs,” agency officials said. The mission is scheduled to launch from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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While the Falcon Heavy is largely a new rocket — it has only launched three times, most famously with a Tesla ride-on-board mannequin in 2018 — the agency appears to have wanted the extra fuel that this missile could carry, atop SpaceX’s lighter Falcon crane. 9 horse used in farms.
That’s because Roman will fly into a distant orbit known as Lagrange 2, or L2, which is about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet. This orbit, which the James Webb Space Telescope also shares, is relatively far from Earth and therefore requires additional fuel to fly there directly.
Roman, formerly called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), features the same mirror size as the Hubble Space Telescope’s long-range telescope. Unlike Hubble, Roman has been improved to consider fields of view 100 times larger. This makes the new observatory ideal for large-scale surveys of the universe.
Operating in infrared light, Roman is set to conduct investigations into dark energy and dark matter that he believes make up a large part of the universe’s structure.
The telescope will also examine exoplanets using a technique called a microlensing, by examining minute “warps” in spacetime caused by planets orbiting their parent stars.
NASA said the wide-field telescope would be of value to the Exoplanet Surveyor for exploring worlds that Webb can see at a higher resolution, and which are farther from Earth than what a Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TES) can capture.
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