NASA’s next telescope to search for dark matter rides on a SpaceX rocket.
The roman space telescope As soon as possible in 2026 aboard a heavy hawk A rocket from NASA archyde news (Opens in a new tab) Tuesday (July 19).
NASA will pay SpaceX Agency officials said $255 million for the launch service and “other mission-related costs.” The mission is expected to be launched from NASA’s Launch Complex 39A Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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While the Falcon Heavy is pretty much a new rocket – it’s only been launched three times, the most famous of which is the Tesla doll On board in 2018 – the agency appears to have wanted the extra fuel this rocket could carry, compared to SpaceX’s lighter lift Falcon 9 Workaholic.
This is because Roman will be flying into a distant orbit known as Lagrange 2, or L2, which is about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet. This orbit that James Webb Space Telescope Arrows evenly, relatively far from the ground, and therefore requires additional fuel to fly there directly.
Roman, formerly called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), has the same mirror size as the long-range Hubble Space Telescope. Unlike Hubble, the Roman language is optimized to display fields of view 100 times bigger. This makes the new observatory ideal for large-scale studies of the universe.
Working in infrared light, Roman must do research about dark energy And black matter which are believed to constitute a large part of the structure of the universe.
The telescope will also check outer planets using a technique called micro lensesThe study of subtle “distortions” in spacetime caused by planets surrounding their parent stars.
NASA said the wide-field telescope would be a valuable tool Exoplanet Surveyor To search for worlds that Webb can see in high resolution, that are farther from Earth than he sees Transiting exoplanet study satellite Can resume (TESS).
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