Science Friday - A space telescope launch + Alvin submersible check-up

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled for an early launch at the end of August. It will rest about a million miles from Earth at Lagrange point 2, where forces of gravity and motion balance out, allowing it to orbit the sun in sync with the Earth. The Roman Telescope is designed to collect masses of data that could inform questions about dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets. Jackie Townsend, project manager for the mission, joins Host Flora Lichtman to discuss the telescope’s backstory, and what scientists hope it will do. Then, turning from deep space to deep oceans, Anthony Tarantino of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution joins Flora to describe the recent maintenance and recertification process for the famous Alvin deep-sea submersible. It’s more than an oil change: The process involves disassembling the vehicle down to the bare frame.  Guests: Jackie Townsend is project manager for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission. She’s based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.  Anthony Tarantino is program manager for the Alvin Group at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Other episodes you may enjoy: Mars Rover, Move Over: Making A Rover To Explore The Deep Sea Listening for the cosmic ‘dark ages,’ from the lunar far side Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi, I'm Flora and you're listening to Science Friday. Big news. New space telescope is dropping. The Nancy Grace Roman scope is scheduled to launch at the end of August, amazingly for a space mission ahead of schedule. The telescope will rest about a million miles from Earth at Lagrange Point 2 where the sun and Earth's gravity balance out. Here to give me the lowdown on what the telescope is, what scientists hope to do with it,

And the backstory of the mission is Jackie Townsend. She's project manager for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission. Hey, Jackie. Hi, Flora. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. How excited are you right now? Oh, very excited.

We, in our team, we all talk about the various analogies. I've decided it's closer to watching your toddler take their very first steps, right? It's been all of this work to get this far and it's about to take. take its steps and launch into orbit and then deliver some truly amazing science. And then it has a whole lifetime ahead of it. Exactly. Introduce us to this telescope. How does the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope fit in with the family tree of space telescopes

we know and love like Hubble and JWST? So Roman is a survey machine. It was designed to image a large fraction of the night sky. We'll do things with it like create a 3D math. of our own Milky Way galaxy, as well as image billions of other galaxies stretching back towards the Big Bang. And in doing so, it's going to create humanity's largest catalog of the night sky at this depth. If I opened the telescope catalog, what are the special features on this scope that would make an astronomer want to add it to their part? So Roman does two things

exceptionally well. The first thing is we have an incredibly wide field of view based on our 18 state-of-the-art 4K-by-4K detectors, making it a 300-megapixel camera, 200 to 300 times bigger than what Hubble could do. But there's a second part of what we do that's amazing, and that is Roman is the most stable telescope that NASA has ever built, and that means that it can maintain our exquisite focus, even as we rapidly scan across the sky and then stop on a dime in order to take the next image. So when you add those two things together, Roman can image the sky about a thousand times faster than Hubble. So it's not that we're doing competitive science with Hubble or doing Hubble or web science better, right? They appear deeper and in a more focused way on specific targets, whereas Roman is going to look at

for the things that go bump in the night. I mean, is there specific scientific subject matter that the scope is designed to interrogate? Yeah, our surveys are designed to explore science ideas that need a large enough sample for meaningful statistics. So those are dark energy, that's what is driving the expansion rate of the universe, dark matter, that is what mass explains the structure and dynamics that we see and how the galaxies interact with each other. and the third is exoplanets. Human beings have identified about 6,000 of them to date. Roman is expected to come back with 50,000, up to perhaps 100,000 exoplanets

that Hubble or Webb might be asked to follow up on. Is Roman going to actually use its big camera to take pictures of those exoplanets or will it infer that they're there? Excellent question. So the survey that I just talked about will be inferring that they are there. It's not going to be imaging them. However, we are also carrying something called a coronagraph, which is a technology demonstration instrument that was developed out at our partners at JPL out in California.

And that has special masks and data processing so that it can actually dim the light of the primary star so that you can see in a couple of pixels the light from the planet that's next to it. Now, it's a technology demonstration. So it's the first time that we've actually tried to do this in a system on orbit. So it's not going to be like right out of the gate. We're going to go be imaging Earth-like planets around other stars. But we are going to demonstrate the ability to dim down the light from that primary star by six to eight orders of magnitude.

So it's going to do some amazing things. You know, I'm surprised, amazed that the telescope is on target to launch early. That seems unusual in the space missions world. Am I right? You are correct. We are the first time that a flagship mission, that's what we call these big, great observatories like Hubble or Web, more recently. We're the first time that we have delivered ahead of schedule and we're actually coming in under budget. Jackie, you're the project manager. What is your secret?

So delivering ahead of schedule and under budget means essentially that every team member made really good decisions day after day for more than a decade. Those decisions were often to just give a little extra bit to notice when a teammate was struggling with something and offer to help or to stay maybe. 20 minutes extra tonight to position the morning shift to get something done sooner or more efficiently. And more often to double check this week to make sure everything is done that needs to be done to be ready for next week's work. Because sometimes we can pull that work in early or it just makes sure that we will continue to execute on time. There were some occasions that required something heroic. And I can give examples of that if you're interested. Love a heroic story. Yeah, tell us.

Well, so our project was baselined, which in NASA terms means we were given the set of requirements and the set of money and the schedule. And that key decision point meeting happened in February of 2020. And I'll bet your listeners remember what happened in March of 2020. We all went home for the pandemic, right? And more significant to us was the supply chain problems that came with the pandemic, right? So we were, if you wanted to buy plastic, if you wanted to buy wires, there was kind of a nine-month period in the early days of the pandemic where you just couldn't get those things. And this was at the peak of when we needed to be buying these parts. So we all went home and our resources people built a system to track all of those parts every day as we were buying them and noting immediately when there was a block and then we pivot.

Let's go find another source. Let's change our integration flow if we have to because that part is now coming in six months later. That ability to stay really engaged with what is going on and in tune with the moment by moment flow. and then also not be, you know, fist clenching your plan because it's not going to go. You have to be ready to adapt. That's a good life lesson. Don't hang on too tight to your plan. Be ready to adapt.

Make good plans and then plan to adapt. I read that the mirror was actually manufactured for a spy satellite. Is that true and did that help? That's a great example of balancing constraints. So, yes, we got the mirror and several associated parts to go with it, but it was not designed to operate, say, cold enough to make infrared science easy. It wasn't designed to reflect exactly at the wavelengths that we were planning to make our observations. So it was useful to get this, but we also had to strip it down. re-polish it, figure it to our needs.

So it was a lot of work. However, once we knew we were going to be receiving this mirror, it really necked down the trade space so we could make really good decisions early about how we were going to design and build this telescope. If we had not received that, we might have gone longer before we neck down and made the tough choices to say,

this is what this observatory is going to do, and this is how we're going to build it. Is it stressful to launch the telescope? Like, what's that like for you? So I have had the privilege of working a couple of the Hubble servicing missions in the past, and I can tell you it is utterly thrilling that moment and also a little bit terrifying

because launching is among the biggest risks that we take. So it is, it is, it is, it's like a roller coaster, right? It's thrilling and terrifying and exciting and wonderful and amazing all at the same time. After it launches, how long till it's up and running and we start getting data? So the transition into science operations happens probably at the first of the calendar year. So the first images will likely come down in December. and then we transition into real-time science data being downlinked and made available to the public daily in January. I can't wait. Thanks, Jackie.

Me too. Jackie Townsend is project manager for the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Mission. After the break, from exploring deep space to exploring the deep sea. Stay with us. If you want a car, you probably know the headache of keeping up with scheduled maintenance, inspections, routine care. But what if that vehicle isn't driving to the store, but bringing people thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean? The famous deep sea submersible Alvin recently underwent a scheduled refitting and recertification process and has returned to service. Here to tell us about that deep ocean oil change is Anthony Tarantino.

he's an electrical engineer and program manager for the Alvin Group. Anthony, welcome. Hi, Flora. Great to be here. Thank you for joining us. What does it mean to be recertified? The vehicle itself is owned by the Office of Naval Research, and the National Science Foundation essentially allows us to operate and pays our bills. But as a vehicle that's owned by the Navy, part of the rules are,

to make sure that every five years we come into Woods Hole, we take the vehicle completely apart, do a structural check of the personnel sphere and the frame and all of the other associated systems. And then when we put it all back together again, there's a Navy observer who comes with us. We do a deep dive, and we're essentially recertified to dive

to our max operating depth without operational limit. You said you have to take Alvin fully apart. I mean, do you mean fully apart, like every bolt and screw? Yeah, we exactly have to do that. We literally take the vehicle completely apart piece by piece because you can't really inspect certain parts of it if it's assembled. So we don't stop until it's bare frame. Bear Sphere and a pile of components on the shelves.

Are there parts that you automatically swap out, like my air filter? Yeah, yeah. And that honestly constitutes a big part of the work. We have a lot of filters, mostly oil filters, not so much air filters. But we do have a life support system as well that has oxygen filters. So we swap out some things like that. A lot of O-rings. We do actually do an oil chains.

But the majority of the parts and components are reused because they're durable. And that's kind of the goal when we start to design a vehicle like Alvin and subsystems. We want to make sure that they're durable and that they're going to last for a long time. Do you ever do any upgrades? Like now's the time to put in that better stereo system. We always are doing upgrades. This overhaul was what we would consider a regular and scheduled maintenance period, but the last two overhauls we did, one completed in 2022 and the other completed in 2013,

were actually two stages of a major upgrade to the vehicle where we replaced the actual personnel sphere. It's where the people go, basically. So in 2013, we replaced the sphere and we replaced a lot of other. components. The next overhaul, which completed in 2022, we completed that major upgrade, replaced all of those legacy 4,500 meter rated components with 6,500 meter components, and eventually got recertified to operate at 6,500 meters. So that's a big jump for us. Typically during a normal and regular overhaul, we do minor upgrades. not quite as big as what we did over the last two.

But yeah, we're always looking for ways to improve. We want to keep the vehicle fresh. We want to keep it, you know, as cutting edge, if you will, as it can be. And we want to be able to serve the scientific community as best we can. Do you have a wish list, Anthony? Like, oh, next time we do a major upgrade, I really want to add this awesome robotic arm or, you know, whatever it is. Well, as the technical program manager, part of my job is to look ahead and see what we can do to make bigger improvements. And one of the big things that we're looking at for the next overhaul is to install a better energy storage system, so better batteries.

And personally speaking, I would love to just reconfigure the entire vehicle and make it a lot more hydrodynamic, make it a little bit smaller, and get rid of some of the constraints that we had to deal with because of the fact that we did a two-stage upgrade to 6,500 meters. So my biggest wish would be to be able to just take all the components, get a brand new frame, and reconfigure the whole thing and make it look a little bit different than it does today. It must be very cool to pilot a vessel in these unexplored parts of the world that you built yourself with your own hands.

The best part is really working with the people. You know, we consider ourselves stewards of a very special piece of gear. And we're entrusted with a lot of responsibility to keep people healthy and safe and to do great science. So that means a lot to me. And that's what I'm passionate about, as opposed to, you know, working for a four, profit, you know, company making somebody else money. I think this is so much better being able to say that, you know, at the end of the day or at the end of my career, maybe we were able to help humanity in some way. Anthony Tarantino is program manager for the Alvin Group at the

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Thank you for being with me today. Oh, thanks. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Before we go, I need your help. I spend so much of my day in front of screens, like many of you perhaps. And I want to know, do you have a creative solution for getting yourself moving, you know, for interrupting the scroll cycle? And how did you know you hit screen time rock bottom? Call us and tell us your story. Look, I know about the app blockers.

I want your most creative hack for getting off your device. Jumping jacks off camera in meetings? I don't know what it is. You call us and tell us 8774.5.4 is our number. That's 877. for SciFri. This episode was produced by Charles Burquist, and if you appreciate Science Friday's Deep Dives, please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts, even if that's at the bottom of the sea. I'm Flora Lichten. We'll see you soon.