NASA introduced a groundbreaking telescope on Tuesday, designed to explore the vast reaches of the universe in search of planets beyond our solar system, while also delving into the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

The Roman Space Telescope is anticipated to uncover tens of thousands of new planets, potentially providing insights into the abundance of such celestial bodies.

“Roman will present Earth with a new atlas of the universe,” stated NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman during a press briefing at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the telescope was showcased.

This 12-meter telescope, equipped with expansive solar panels, is set to be transported to Florida in preparation for its launch aboard a SpaceX rocket, scheduled for as early as September.

The Roman Telescope, which has been over a decade and more than $4 billion in the making, is named in honor of astronomer Nancy Grace Roman. She earned the moniker “Mother of Hubble” for her pivotal role in the development of the iconic space telescope.

Over three decades since the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, which revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos, NASA aspires that the Roman Telescope will illuminate unresolved questions in the field of astronomy.

Boasting a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s, the telescope will sweep across vast regions of space from its position 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

The telescope will send 11 terabytes of data a day down to Earth, said Mark Melton, a systems engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center.

“In the first year, we’ll have sent down more data than Hubble will have for its entire life,” he told AFP.

The telescope’s wide-angle lens will allow NASA to conduct a census of the objects that make up our universe, said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

“Roman will discover tens of thousands of new planets outside our solar system. It will reveal billions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae and tens of billions of stars,” she said.

This wealth of information will enable NASA to tease out areas of interest that can then be investigated by complementary telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope.

Study the invisible

But Roman will also study the invisible — dark matter and dark energy, whose origins remain unknown but which are thought to constitute 95 percent of our universe.

Dark matter is believed to be the glue that holds galaxies together, while dark energy pulls them apart by making the universe expand faster and faster over time.

Thanks to its infrared vision, the telescope will be able to observe light emitted by celestial bodies billions of years ago, effectively looking back in time to hopefully discover more about the two phenomena.

Complementing the work of Europe’s Euclid space telescope and the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, Roman will probe “how the dark matter structures itself throughout cosmic time” and “calculate how fast galaxies are moving away from us,” Darryl Seligman, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University, told AFP.

These discoveries could fundamentally change our understanding of the structure of our universe, said astrophysicist Julie McEnery, who led the Roman project.

“If Roman wins a Nobel Prize at some point, it’s probably for something we haven’t even thought about or questioned yet,” said Melton.

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