NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could take images about 30% sharper than expected and remain operational more than twice as long as initially planned, Live Science reported, based on post-launch commissioning results and NASA Goddard statements.
The $4 billion observatory, more than 42 feet (12.7 meters) long, launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Aug. 30 and is now about 85% of the way to Lagrange point 2, more than 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, where it will join the James Webb Space Telescope and Europe's Euclid. Live Science said the rest of the trip should take less than two weeks, after which Roman should be ready to take its first in-depth images. During the cruise, mission scientists have been switching on instruments remotely; so far the commissioning "has gone off without a hitch," the report said.
"It is fantastic to learn that Roman is not just reaching its design goals but exceeding them," Eamonn Kerins, an astronomer at the University of Manchester who will help lead one of Roman's major surveys, told Live Science.
Fuel in the tank, and a hair's-width tweak
Two major engine burns after launch were precise enough that each saved up to four years' worth of fuel, Jamie Dunn, director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a Sept. 14 statement quoted by Live Science. The spacecraft was also lighter than budgeted, so engineers filled the tanks to capacity, adding about four more years, according to Alison Rao, Roman's propulsion lead at Goddard. In total, those savings could give Roman an additional 12 years of fuel and more than double a planned 10-year lifespan, meaning it could still be observing in 2048. Live Science cautioned that engineers often find ways to stretch missions further — Hubble is decades past its original plan — so even that figure is not a hard ceiling.
Kerins noted that Roman can collect data up to 1,000 times faster than Hubble. "With a 20-year Roman lifetime, we could, in theory, do over 20,000 years of Hubble survey work," he said. The extra years would also let astronomers compare the same objects decades apart.
Roman's Wide Field Instrument pairs a 288-megapixel camera with a 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) mirror and is designed for a field of view roughly 100 times larger than Hubble's. After the car-sized mirror was realigned by just one-sixteenth the diameter of a human hair, engineers found the survey images should be about 30% sharper than predicted. "All of the images from Roman's cosmic surveys will be even sharper than we expected," Alden Jurling, a senior optical engineer at Goddard, said in an Oct. 14 statement. Maxime Rizzo, a WFI systems engineer, compared the calibration to tuning an instrument "and then leave the settings alone so it performs consistently."
The mission is expected to search for a host of cosmological targets, including an estimated 100,000 new alien worlds. Kerins, who leads an exoplanet working group on a Roman transit survey, told Live Science the sharper images are exciting but "do not necessarily guarantee that Roman will find more exoplanets than initially predicted." Those are early commissioning results, not a completed science mission.