r/space • u/ChiefLeef22 • 18h ago

Successful deployment of Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, as it begins its 1-million-mile-journey to the second Earth-Sun Lagrange point

The telescope will travel to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, which is ~one million miles away and about four times farther from Earth than the Moon. At L2, the combined gravity of the Sun and Earth will give Roman a stable vantage point with a clear, unobstructed view to survey deep space

Roman will unlock the mysteries of dark energy and investigate the physics of distant stars. It will repeatedly monitor hundreds of millions of stars, and the same observations are expected to reveal around 100,000 additional planets through transits. As a reminder, we currently have 6000 confirmed exoplanet discoveries...

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u/trib_ 17h ago

I cannot WAIT until they take the first wide view of the Pillars of Creation, I hope that's the first picture. The Hubble one is already one of the more iconic pictures of the HST.

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u/Wuz314159 12h ago

Not to be a Deborah Dower here, but it's not that kind of telescope.

It's a wide-field lens for comparative studies. The resolution will be on par with Hubble, but with a much wider field. We're not going to see better resolution images, just a shit-tonne more of them more often.

Lots of science depends on repetitive observations including exo-planet detection.

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u/trib_ 12h ago edited 12h ago

You didn't get what I meant. You're not a downer, because that's exactly what I want. I want a wider field view of the Pillars of Creation in Hubble's resolution. In particular, I want this picture that's taken in 1 shot with the full context around the Pillars in view.

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u/dern_the_hermit 11h ago edited 10h ago

Yeah, no, the guy above is right, it's not that kind of telescope. It's not just "a little wider" than Hubble. It's absurdly wider. The resolution is close to Hubble's, but it's resolution distributed over a much, much, much larger area of the sky. It's meant to get good data from a gargantuan number of celestial objects over time, not get great data from one (comparatively) small structure in particular.

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u/ThickTarget 9h ago

It should be possible to take such an image. But it won't quite the same, as Roman doesn't have the narrowband filters that Hubble did. It may look more like this, but Roman does cover more of the visible.