Half of the nearly completed Roman space telescope has been successfully tested in a vacuum chamber. This happened amid an attempt to cancel the projects by the White House.
Roman is NASA’s new flagship telescope. It is designed to observe large-scale structures of the Universe in the infrared and investigate the effects of dark matter on galaxies, as well as search for supernovae and gravitational lenses.
The new telescope is also planned to be used to search for and photograph exoplanets. For this purpose, the telescope was equipped with a coronagraph, which has a diameter of 1.7 meters. It is equipped with a complex set of masks and active mirrors that will outshine the stars, which in theory will make it possible to get direct images of the exoplanets orbiting around it.
Unlike the James Webb Telescope, whose construction was seriously delayed and costly, the construction of Roman is on schedule. Recently, the instrument passed an important milestone in the form of successful thermal tests. They involved the telescope’s outer shell, designed to keep the telescope at a stable temperature and protect it from stray light. It is 5 meters high and 4 meters wide. It is made of two types of carbon fibers mixed with reinforced plastic and connected with titanium fittings. The test showed that the design should successfully handle the temperature variations that will occur during its time in space.
Meanwhile, the other half of Roman (telescope and payload unit) is preparing to undergo its own series of tests. These include vibration tests as well as vacuum chamber tests.
After the tests are complete, technicians plan to join the two halves of the telescope together. This is expected to happen in November. After final checks, Roman will be delivered to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where preparations for launch will begin in the summer of 2026. Roman is still scheduled to launch in May 2027, and the team aims to send it into space even earlier, as early as autumn 2026.
Particular drama of the whole situation gives the fact that the draft of the new NASA budget proposes a radical reduction in science spending, which will actually put an end to the Roman telescope. But apparently, mission officials hope the nearly completed telescope can be salvaged during upcoming hearings in Congress, which is responsible for actually allocating money to NASA.
According to NASA
