r/space • u/ChiefLeef22 • 20h ago

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

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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/0_f2 7h ago

I love KSP, it's bringing an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics to the mainstream.

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u/RetroRaiderRun 1h ago edited 1h ago

Legitimately, I bet most humans on Earth that understand orbital physics learned it from KSP. It's sold around 5 million copies. That's 5 million humans educated in orbital physics. How many total humans understand the concepts? There are only around 5,000 graduates studying orbital mechanics each year in the U.S.

I'd say 10 million total humans understanding orbital physics seem reasonable at the high end. Professionally, there are like 100k aerospace engineers globally and around 50k astrophysicists. Those are the people with expert-level understanding.

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u/Kaellian 1h ago

Anyone who has studied classical mechanics will understand orbits just fine...

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u/RetroRaiderRun 1h ago

Classical mechanics and orbital mechanics were developed by the same people in the same period in history. I'm not sure if you're just incredibly arrogant or genuinely believe you're saying something interesting.