New Delhi, April 22 (IANS). US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has unveiled the ‘Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’. This is a special kind of telescope, which will discover the outer planets (exoplanets) of the solar system and will help in understanding the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
“The Roman Telescope will give Earth a new map of the universe,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a press conference at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
This 12-meter long silver-colored telescope is built with large solar panels and can be launched from Florida on a SpaceX rocket in September.
This telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, who is known as the ‘Mother of the Hubble Space Telescope’.
According to NASA, its field of view will be about 100 times larger than that of the Hubble Telescope and it can measure the light of one billion (billion) galaxies in its lifetime.
This telescope will be able to block starlight and see exoplanets and planet-forming disks directly. It will also generate big data on the number and types of planets in our Galaxy and will help in finding answers to many important questions related to dark energy, exoplanets and infrared astrophysics.
The Roman Telescope took more than 10 years to build and cost more than $4 billion. It will be installed in space about 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, so that it can study large parts of the universe.
It will be placed at a special location in space, the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), where gravitational forces are balanced and objects can remain in stable orbit at low energy.
Being at L2 will provide the telescope with temperature stability, resulting in data quality about 10 times better than Hubble.
According to Mark Melton, system engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center, this telescope will send about 11 terabytes of data to Earth every day.
–IANS
DBP
