Using a donated Hubble-class mirror originally built for a spy satellite, NASA's Roman Space Telescope is poised for launch Sunday on a $4.3 billion mission to open a new window on the universe, taking wide-angle, ultra-sharp images that would require a half million 4K TVs to show in full.Put another way, officials say a single full-resolution image from Roman's 300-megapixel wide-field camera would cover 45 city blocks or the entirety of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. And it will collect that data faster than any previous NASA spacecraft.
An artist's impression of NASA's $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on station a million miles from Earth. Launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is targeted for 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday.
The Hubble Space Telescope has beamed back about 172 terabytes of data over 30 years while Roman will downlink a staggering 2,500 terabytes over its five-year primary mission.Put yet another way, Roman's sensitive wide-field camera and advanced detectors will scan broad swaths of the cosmos 1,000 times faster than Hubble, collecting as much data in one month as its older cousin could manage in a century.A "sheer powerhouse" of a telescopeThe flood of data is expected to shed new light on the nature of "dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe itself and accelerate the ... discovery of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman."Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe," he added.NASA science chief Niki Fox described the telescope as "a sheer powerhouse" and "literally a speed machine."
