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A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
This Sunday, NASA’s latest space telescope is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The $4.3 billion observatory is expected to reveal information about the nature of the universe and discover a multitude of planets orbiting distant stars. Joe Palca has this preview of the Roman telescope’s mission.
JOE PALCA, BYLINE: The telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer. One of its goals is to find more exploding stars, called Type Ia supernovas. Cosmologist Daniel Scolnic of Duke University says this will help validate the accepted model that explains why the universe is expanding as fast as it is.
DANIEL SCOLNIC: In the last few years, there have been measurements saying that model might be wrong. And that’s something that Roman will absolutely nail – whether the model’s right or wrong.
PALCA: Another goal of the new observatory is to spend a month surveying all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Julie McEnery is a Roman project scientist. She says even though Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as the currently orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, its design lets it do things much faster.
JULIE MCENERY: So that one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble.
PALCA: Roman is designed to make catalogs of large swaths of the sky. This should result in the discovery of 100,000 new planets using a technique based on something called gravitational microlensing. Scott Gaudi is an astronomer at the Ohio State University.
SCOTT GAUDI: We’re looking for planets that are just completely undetectable by any other method, including planets that are at the center of our galaxy and planets that are very analogous to our own solar system planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
PALCA: In addition to new planets, Roman should also reveal new galaxies, helping astronomers to get a better idea of the large-scale structure of the universe. But predicting what will be Roman’s greatest accomplishment is a tricky business. Wendy Freedman is an astronomer at the University of Chicago.
WENDY FREEDMAN: The history of astronomy really has shown when you get a new capability, and especially survey capability, you learn something new, something unexpected.
PALCA: After it leaves Earth, it will take Roman about three months to cruise to its planned observing location about a million miles from Earth. For NPR News, I’m Joe Palca.
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