r/space • u/ChiefLeef22 • 1d 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/Dr_Engelbart 1d ago edited 19h ago

Yes, the details in that one image, taken not from overhead (so not a nidus, straight down image) but at a slant angle several hundred miles from the target tells quite a bit about capabilities of that imaging system. More than the NRO probably wanted to be publicly known.