NASA is launching a telescope in October that will photograph 100x more sky than Hubble in a single shot. Most people have never heard of it.
Been going through the Roman Space Telescope specs this week and honestly the scale of what this thing is supposed to do is hard to wrap your head around.
Same size mirror as Hubble — 2.4 meters.
But the camera covers a field 100 times larger.
In one 6-minute exposure it photographs more sky than Hubble observes in a year. To survey the area Roman will cover in its first 12 months, Hubble would need over 1,000 years of continuous observation.
It's also designed to map dark energy across 2 billion galaxies — the first time we'll actually have data on what's accelerating the expansion of the universe. And it's going to find somewhere between 2,500 and 100,000 new exoplanets through gravitational microlensing.
The part that got me was the story of Nancy Grace Roman. She invented the concept of Hubble in 1969, wasn't invited to the launch, spent the rest of her career as a contractor at the same institution she built, and died in 2018 — two years before NASA named this telescope after her.
Launches October 2026 on a Falcon Heavy to L2.
Made a full breakdown of everything it's going to do and why the dark energy results might be the most important data we've ever collected
Anyone else been following this one?