November 10, 2024 – In a significant step forward for space exploration, NASA engineers and scientists have successfully attached a key piece of technology to the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This advanced device, known as the Roman Coronagraph Instrument, was integrated in a sterile clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Designed to block intense starlight, the coronagraph will allow scientists to capture the faint glow of planets orbiting stars far beyond our solar system.
Credit: NASA
The completion of this installation marks a crucial milestone for the Roman Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in May 2027. Equipped with a field of view over 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, the Roman mission aims to tackle some of astrophysics’ biggest mysteries, including the nature of dark energy, the search for exoplanets, and advances in infrared astronomy.
This revolutionary observatory will utilize two core tools: the Wide Field Instrument for primary scientific observations and the Roman Coronagraph Instrument. While the coronagraph is officially considered a technology demonstration, its capabilities are a stepping stone toward future missions, including the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory—a mission that would represent the first telescope explicitly designed to search for potential signs of life on exoplanets.
“In order to get from where we are to where we want to be, we need the Roman Coronagraph to demonstrate this technology,” explained Rob Zellem, deputy project scientist for communications on the Roman mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We’ll be applying those lessons learned to the next generation of NASA flagship missions that will be explicitly designed to look for Earth-like
planets.”
A technician working underneath the Instrument Carrier for Roman during the integration of the Coronagraph in a clean room at NASA Goddard. Image credit: NASA/Sydney Rohde
Roughly the size of a baby grand piano, the Roman Coronagraph is a sophisticated system of masks, prisms, detectors, and adaptive mirrors. Together, these components work to block a star’s bright glare, making it possible for astronomers to detect orbiting planets that would otherwise remain invisible.
Current methods for studying exoplanets, like the “transit” technique, rely on measuring slight dips in starlight as planets cross in front of their stars. While this approach has led to numerous discoveries, it is limited, as only a fraction of planets can be observed this way. Planetary transits are brief, infrequent, and only visible if the planet’s orbital plane aligns with Earth’s viewpoint. This leaves many exoplanets undetectable through transit photometry alone.
As direct imaging technologies advance, most telescopes have focused on capturing larger planets that still emit residual heat and light from their formation, making them relatively easier to detect. However, the Roman Coronagraph Instrument is designed to push this boundary by capturing images of planets that are up to 100 million times fainter than their stars—a capability 100 to 1,000 times more sensitive than any previous space-based coronagraph.
The coronagraph’s attachment to the telescope’s Instrument Carrier, a critical support structure positioned between the telescope’s primary mirror and its spacecraft bus, represents another step closer to launch. “You can think of [the Instrument Carrier] as the skeleton of the observatory, what everything interfaces to,” said Brandon Creager, lead mechanical engineer for the Roman Coronagraph at JPL. The Instrument Carrier will also hold Roman’s Wide Field Instrument, the primary scientific tool for the mission, scheduled for integration later this year.
In the coming months, NASA engineers will conduct extensive tests on the coronagraph and continue with the integration of additional telescope components. “It’s really rewarding to watch these teams come together and build up the Roman observatory. That’s the result of a lot of teams, long hours, hard work, sweat, and tears,” said Liz Daly, who leads the integrated payload assembly at Goddard.
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