Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Starting point is 00:00:00 Assuming everything goes well, sometime in late 2026, NASA's next major space observatory will launch, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Assuming the launch and the deployment go well, it will map large areas of the universe to understand why cosmic expansion is accelerating and how galaxies and dark matter evolved. It will also survey the stars to discover thousands of planets, including cold and free-floating worlds, while testing technology for the direct imaging of planets around other stars. Learn more about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and how it could revolutionize astronomy on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming.

Starting point is 00:01:05 What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. To understand the development of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, we have to go back over 25 years. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, cosmology was entering a transformative period with the discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. This finding, based on observations of distant supernova, raised fundamental questions about the nature of dark energy and whether I Einstein's theory of gravity worked on cosmic scales. At the same time, astronomers increasingly

Starting point is 00:01:55 recognize that answering these questions would require a very large data set rather than small numbers of exquisitely detailed observations of single objects. Ground-based surveys were growing rapidly, but atmospheric limitations made it challenging to achieve the precision and stability needed for weak gravitational lensing and infrared measurements at cosmological distances. At the same time, exoplanet discovery was exploding. Early discovery showed that planetary systems were far more diverse than expected, but most known planets were close to their stars due to observational limitations. Astronomers realized that understanding how planetary systems form and evolve

Starting point is 00:02:37 would require a census of cold distant planets, including those beyond the point in a solar system where water froze, and even planets that weren't bound to any star. gravitational microlensing offered a way to do this, but only with a wide-field space-based telescope capable of monitoring tens of millions of stars simultaneously. Gravitational microlensing occurs when a foreground star's gravity briefly magnifies the light of a more distant background star. It's using gravity at a cosmic level in the same way that glass would bend light. These needs came together in the 2010 U.S. National Academy's Decadal Survey, which set priorities for astronomy and astrophysics.

Starting point is 00:03:21 The survey identified a wide-field infrared space telescope as its top large mission recommendation for the decade. The concept emphasized three pillars, dark energy studies, exoplanet microlensing, and general-purpose infrared surveys. At this stage, the mission was known as W-First, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. It was envisioned as a modestly sized observatory designed to deliver survey-scale science at a fraction of the cost of earlier flagship space telescopes. A turning point came in 2012, when the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that manages spy satellites, turned two unused 2.4-meter space telescope optical assemblies over, to NASA. These telescopes were comparable in size to the Hubble's mirror, but had been built

Starting point is 00:04:14 for entirely different purposes. Their availability dramatically changed the mission's potential. NASA revised W-First to use one of these larger mirrors, enabling much higher resolution and sensitivity while preserving the wide-field survey concept. This single event elevated the mission from a medium-scale survey telescope into something much closer to a flagship observatory in scientific capability, without requiring the cost of building a large mirror from scratch. As the mission matured through the 2010s, it absorbed additional ambitions while navigating budget pressures and technical challenges. The addition of a high-contrast coronagraph, that being an optical instrument that blocks or suppresses a star's light so that much fainter objects

Starting point is 00:04:59 nearby could be seen, was intended primarily as a technological demonstration. It reflected NASA's longer-term goal of eventually being able to directly image Earth-like exoplanets. At the same time, the mission had to be carefully managed to avoid the cost overruns that had plagued earlier large space telescopes. This led to repeated design reviews, descoping discussions, and a strong emphasis on keeping Roman focused on survey science, rather than trying to be all things to everyone. In 2020, NASA renamed the mission in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, often called the Mother of Hubble. The renaming was more than symbolic.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Roman had been instrumental in establishing space telescopes as a core part of NASA's scientific identity, and had championed the idea that space observatories should serve broad scientific communities rather than narrow interests. The assembly of the telescope has been led by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with contributions from numerous industry partners. The telescope passed its critical design review in September of 2021, with flight hardware fabrication completed by state. 2024, followed by mission integration. The project faced significant challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in an estimated

Starting point is 00:06:14 $400 million impact and schedule delays. On November 25, 2025, technicians joined the inner and outer segments of the telescope in the large clean room at the Goddard Space Flight Center, marking completion of the observatory's assembly. The spacecraft now enters its final testing phase before moving to Kennedy Space Center in the summer of 2026 for launch preparation. So how exactly will the Roman telescope work and achieve its goals? And what makes this different from other space telescopes? For starters, the Roman telescope was deliberately designed with a very wide field of view, because many of the questions it's

Starting point is 00:06:54 meant to answer are statistical in nature and can't be tackled by narrow field observatories, no matter how sharp they are. The wide field instrument it carries, will have a 300-migixel, multi-band, near-infrared camera, with a field of view at least a hundred times larger than that of Hubble, covering 0.28 square degrees. The wide-field instrument operates across wave lengths of 0.48 to 2.3 micrometers, spanning the visible to near-infrared light spectrum. It includes eight imaging filters,

Starting point is 00:07:27 a grism for a spectroscopy, and a low-resolution prism. Roman's wide field of view allows it to observe, enormous areas of the sky quickly and repeatedly, combining the space-based image quality of a telescope with the survey scale coverage of a sky survey in a way that no previous telescope has ever achieved. Most flagship space telescopes, especially the Hubble and James Webb, are optimized for depth rather than breath. They excel at studying individual objects or small regions of the sky in extraordinary detail, but they're slow at building large uniform surveys. Roman flips the script.

Starting point is 00:08:06 Its field of view is about 100 times larger than Hubble's infrared view, while maintaining comparable resolution, which means that it can map large cosmic volumes efficiently, rather than stitching together thousands of tiny pointings over many, many years. This wide field is essential for Roman's dark energy mission. Understanding why the universe's expansion is accelerating requires measuring subtle patterns across millions, or even billions of galaxies.

Starting point is 00:08:36 Weak gravitational lensing, one of Roman's key techniques, depends on averaging tiny-shaped distortions across vast galaxy samples to overcome noise and systematic errors. A narrow-field telescope cannot collect those samples fast enough or uniformly enough to achieve the required precision. Roman's wide field lets it build consistent maps of cosmic structures over large fractions of the sky, which is critical for testing whether dark energy is a new form of energy, or a sign that gravity behaves differently on the largest of scales. The wide field

Starting point is 00:09:12 is equally important for Roman's exoplanet work. Its primary planet survey uses gravitational microlensing, which relies on rare brief alignments between foreground stars and background stars in the dense star field of the Milky Way's bulge. To catch enough of these events, Roman must monitor tens of millions of stars continuously. A narrow field telescope would miss most events simply because it couldn't watch enough stars at once. Roman's wide field allows it to act like a planet census machine, detecting populations of cold distant planets and even free-floating planets not orbiting stars that other methods would struggle to find. To achieve this, it'll carry the coronagraph instrument. It's a technology demonstration system designed to directly

Starting point is 00:10:00 image exoplanets by blocking starlight achieving parts-per-billion suppression. Operating in the 575 to 825 nanometer range, it will test technologies for future missions, such as the Habitable World's Observatory, which might be launched sometime around 2041. Roman survey power also enables science that's difficult or impractical for other telescopes, even when it's not the primary mission. It'll create deep, wide, infrared maps that serve as reference databases for astronomy, revealing rare objects such as distant quasars, early massive galaxies, faint dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way, and transit events such as supernova across large cosmic distances.

Starting point is 00:10:46 These are discoveries that depend on coverage and statistics rather than zooming in on a single thing. The primary mirror on the Roman telescope is approximately the same size as that of the Hubble Space Telescope, but it's about 25% lighter due to design improvements. However, the amount of data returned will be staggering, much larger than what the Hubble produces. It's estimated to gather 20,000 terabytes or 20 petabytes of data during its primary mission. The primary mission will be for five years with a potential five-year extended mission. Unlike some infrared telescopes that rely on a coolant, the Roman telescope doesn't require cryogenic cooling for its primary operations, so fuel is the only limiting factor. And the observatory has been designed to support robotic

Starting point is 00:11:37 refueling in space, enabling the operation to extend beyond the planned 10-year total mission duration if NASA chooses to pursue that option. Unlike the Hubble, the Roman will not be in Earth orbit. The Roman Space Telescope will operate near the Earth Sun's second Lagrange point, known as L2, because this location provides a uniquely stable and efficient environment for precision space astronomy. L2 lies about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth directly opposite the direction of the sun, where the combined gravity of the Earth and the Sun allows the spacecraft to orbit the Sun in step with the Earth, while maintaining a near constant relative position. What makes L2 special is geometric stability rather than perfect gravitation,

Starting point is 00:12:25 balance. From Roman's perspective, the Earth, sun, and moon all remain relatively clustered in roughly the same direction of the sky. This allows the telescope to keep its sun shield-orientated consistently, protecting its instruments from heat and stray light while maintaining a very stable thermal environment. And that is why the Roman doesn't need extra coolant. Thermal stability is critical for the Roman telescope because tiny temperature changes can distort optics and detectors, degrading the precision needed for weak gravitational lending measurements and infrared surveys. While we can't know the future, NASA has a good track record for missions that go well

Starting point is 00:13:07 beyond their original planned length. The Hubble mission, for example, has been going for 35 years, and it's still an operation. We obviously don't know what will be discovered until the mission actually starts. However, assuming everything goes well, scientists anticipate that the Roman telescope will measure light from approximately one billion galaxies, discover tens of thousands of supernova, find thousands of exoplanets through microlensing, and map billions of stars and galaxies with unprecedented detail. I'm sure there will be some spectacular images released from the Roman telescope, but that's not the primary goal of this mission. to gather data. Lots of data. And with it, we'll be able to better develop a map of our galaxy

Starting point is 00:13:56 and develop a better understanding of our universe. Hopefully, sometime in late 2026, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope will launch and be deployed. So pay attention to news developments, because they should be interesting around that time. And perhaps someday in 2027, I'll be able to do another update on what we've learned from the Roman mission and how our knowledge of the universe has changed. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. I have several short reviews today. The first comes from listener AV Geek A340 on Spotify. They write, Hi, love the show. When I'm doing stuff for school, I see if you have an episode about it.

Starting point is 00:14:43 Thanks for the best show. The next is from Your Neighbor in Iowa, from Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, completionist club. Great show. Love the Variety. Today I joined the completionist club, yay. And finally, podcast lover 1234 on Apple Podcasts writes, great show, it's just good. Five stars,

Starting point is 00:15:02 easily, mic drop. Well, thank you all of you. The comments are always appreciated. And remember, if you leave a review on any major podcast platform, you too can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.