NASA finalizes the launch of the Roman telescope, one hundred times wider than Hubble

The observatory, weighing about 8,200 kilos, will be able to study billions of galaxies, investigate dark energy and discover thousands of exoplanets thanks to its wide vision.

The telescope arrived at the Florida spaceport on June 21 from NASA’s Goddard Center in Maryland, where it was assembled and tested.

Moved to a clean preparation room, technicians placed it upright on June 25 and began final testing before takeoff.

NASA estimates that throughout its useful life the telescope, about 12.7 meters long and 4.4 meters wide once deployed, could measure the light from a billion galaxies.

Mission will track dark matter and dark energytwo of the great enigmas of cosmology.

To do this, it will carry two instruments: a 288-megapixel wide-field camera and a coronagraph capable of capturing direct images of exoplanets, worlds located beyond the solar system.

Its primary mirror, 2.4 meters in diameter, is the same size as Hubble’s, but weighs 80% less, an advance that NASA presents as an example of new telescope technology.

The telescope will operate for at least five years in an orbit around the L2 Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, located about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity balance to create a region of great stability that allows Roman, like other space telescopes, to remain in orbit with minimal fuel consumption.

NASA will make all its data public, without a reservation period, for astronomers around the world.

Telescope honors Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer whom the agency describes as “the mother of the Hubble telescope” for her efforts in carrying out that project.