All the key elements of the Roman space telescope are in one building, and its development is keeping pace with schedule and cost. This was stated by Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division.
Roman is NASA’s new flagship telescope. It is designed to observe the large-scale structures of the Universe and study the effects of dark matter on galaxies, as well as search for supernovae and gravitational lenses. Roman is also planned to be used for searching and photographing exoplanets. For this purpose, the telescope will be equipped with a coronagraph.
NASA wants Roman to be ready for launch no later than May 2027, and the marginal cost of development will not exceed the $3.5 billion limit set by Congress. This is very important for the image of the organization, which was damaged by the epic with the James Webb telescope, the launch of which was repeatedly postponed. NASA hopes that if Roman does not run out of schedule, it will significantly strengthen confidence in the plans for future missions, such as the HWO Observatory. It will search for traces of life on Earth-like exoplanets whose orbits pass in the habitable zone.
According to Mark Clampin, NASA is currently managing to keep up with the established schedule. Recently, the Roman telescope unit was delivered to the Goddard Space Flight Center. There is already a spacecraft on which it will be installed, as well as two scientific instruments. Thus, for the first time, all the components of Roman were assembled under one roof. In the near future, NASA specialists will begin assembling them, after which it will be time for various tests that should certify the readiness of the telescope for space flight.
The only issue raised by the auditors regarding Roman is communication. The telescope is expected to send unprecedented data volumes to Earth, which will be measured in petabytes, and current communication systems may simply not cope with such flows. In this regard, they recommended NASA to evaluate the possibility of using the Deep Space Communication Network (DSN) as a backup option.
But NASA has already rejected this option, saying that the DSN will not withstand such volumes of data anyway, and it is too late to change the Roman design. So the main burden will fall on NASA’s Near-space communications network, which should receive an upgrade. NASA also hopes for help from Europe and Japan, which will help to accept part of the Roman data.
Provided by Spacenews
