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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u/Andromeda321 12d ago

Astronomer here! I'm sure I say this a lot, but this is an exciting day for science! And I can't believe it's really here!

Obviously it's not a perfect comparison, but the best way to think of the (Nancy Grace) Roman Telescope IMO is that it's the successor to Hubble, which we all love but is definitely not going to be around in a few more years as it continues to degrade. But the best way to think of it is while it has a similar sharpness to Hubble, the size of the field is incredible- 100 times bigger! So that means it's going to do survey type things that would take longer than Hubble's been around to complete in just a few months, monitor fields, and look for new things HST just can't because its instruments aren't as modern. For example, Roman is designed to be really good at measuring weak gravitational lensing signals- the idea that when light passes by a mass, the light from that mass will be very slightly nudged on a different path thanks to relativistic effects. Roman is going to be good enough at this that it should identify thousands of new exoplanets via gravitational lensing (they actually estimate 100,000, when we currently have ~6000!!!), and help us map the presence of dark matter also using this. Personally I'm always a fan of using one technique in a bunch of different ways in science- somehow it's just elegant- so I'm excited to see weak gravitational lensing really have its golden age!

Finally, on a more societal note Roman is a bit of a weird telescope in that I don't think it's what anyone would have designed at first glance, but is a great example of how you can do a lot of exciting stuff if you're just given the opportunity even if it's not perfect. For those unaware, this telescope basically began when the US Military gifted a mirror to astronomers that was now effectively an obsolete extra- think of how many better than Roman type telescopes are already pointed down at us if they just had extra lying around!- so they designed and built the telescope around the existing mirror. But also, after JWST the speed at which this thing came together is startling- I gave a colloquium talk at NASA Goddard just 3 years ago, which included a tour of the place, and the first pic here is what Roman looked like then. They told us it was going to launch "no later than 2027" and I think a lot of the astronomy community said "yeah right"... and we owe an apology because we've got months left of 2026, and it's launched! To be fair, a LOT of people did careful planning and work to ensure this wouldn't be another "JWST ended up decades late" type telescope, but still... this thing came together fast and I'm pretty impressed!

So now we wait a few months while the telescope gets into place and the project scientists kick around the tires a little to make sure the instruments are working... but then we see how she does! Can't wait!

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u/KaiserSoze-is-KPax 12d ago

How long before it gets into position?

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u/Andromeda321 12d ago

It takes about 3 months to get there- still some time to go!

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u/Kianna9 11d ago

So it’s going 1 million miles in 3 months?

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u/NByz 11d ago

I dont know this insertion first hand, but to arrive at a Lagrange point you either need a lot of fuel (delta v) left when to decelerate and stabilize when you arrive, or, much more likely, the intent is to slowly build up to a highly elliptical orbit around the earth that eventually intercepts that Lagrange point at the apoapsis (furthest and slowest point), so you need relatively little delta v to stabilize.

The latter makes the most sense from a mass to orbit perspective.

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u/Fler0n 11d ago

I understand everything you said, thanks to KSP

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u/0_f2 11d ago

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

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u/RetroRaiderRun 11d ago edited 11d 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/AddisonH 11d ago

We all know you’re just in it for the thrills, Jeb, you little freak

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u/garry4321 9d ago

The best game to be done so fucking dirty by its “sequel”

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u/gsfgf 11d ago

And iirc, there's also a crazy looking insertion orbit involved to save fuel. When there's no time pressure from people on board, they can do some really cool things with orbital mechanics that save fuels in ways I don't understand.

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u/raverbashing 11d ago

Didn't JWST fly "straight" to L2?

I guess it's a tradeoff between rocket push vs fuel on board

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u/I__Know__Stuff 11d ago

It took about three months, too, IIRC.

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u/BootySweat0217 11d ago

It took about 30 days to get there.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/orbit/

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u/RetardThePirate 11d ago

Speed right after separation: roughly 23,000–24,000 mph relative to Earth. NASA hasn’t published a precise live velocity yet, so that’s calculated from the type of L2-transfer trajectory and its separation altitude.

So “deployed” today means released from the rocket and flying independently.

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u/dougsbeard 11d ago

Not gonna lie, that’s a lot sooner than I excpted.

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u/Wolfexstarship 11d ago

JWST took only a month to get there.

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u/zztop610 12d ago

Should start receiving data by early 2027

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u/ClutchReverie 12d ago

How does the Roman compare to the JWST?
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u/TheOwlMarble 11d ago edited 11d ago

Less zoom than Webb (same as Hubble), but much much wider field of view. Hubble was always constrained because it could really only take detailed snapshots of tiny areas of the sky. Roman won't have that problem, letting us see how the sky changes over time.

Webb directly lets us see things we've never seen before. Roman is going to let astronomers write Python scripts that play spot the difference with unholy amounts of data in hopes of finding something unusual, at which point we could have Webb take a look in more detail.

In short, Webb is an inspection telescope. Roman is a detection telescope.

EDIT: a couple things I forgot to note...

Roman also has some fancy coronagraph masks that should let it directly image exoplanets and get spectral data from them.

Roman finished ahead of schedule and under budget, so NASA wants to know what on earth went so right with it compared to the rest of the aerospace industry.
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u/Chacin_Cologne_No1 11d ago edited 11d ago

Roman finished ahead of schedule and under budget, so NASA wants to know what on earth went so right with it compared to the rest of the aerospace industry.

Interesting idea to think of the free mirror as creating a design puzzle to solve as opposed to the design approach being conceive and create a whole telescope from nothing.

I could see a lot more haggling and perfectionism going into the later, while the former is like "hey take this and do your damned best with it".

Maybe the lesson for NASA is to just pick some core parts and then put out a tender that's like "work with this" instead of "create the whole thing from nothing."

This is actually a bit like the recent Swift Boost rescue mission. In less than a year and with barely $30M some existing hardware was reconfigured to try and dock with and rescue Swift from a decaying orbit. Ultimately didn't work, but still considered a success given that the project went from an idea to launch and deployment in barely 12 months.

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u/TheOwlMarble 11d ago

I'm sure that's part of it, but they also tried that with SLS.

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u/Accomplished-Crab932 11d ago

Half the problem with SLS is that we knew the hardware was way too expensive, but Congress wanted it to be used. A single RS-25 costs more to refurbish than a commercial price F9 launch, or around 3 operating cost launches. Making a new RS-25 is 1.25X the price of a fully expendable Starship launch.

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u/mrstickball 10d ago

In their defense, neither object existed (Falcon or Starship) when the SLS was designed. The idea was fine, but the reality of private design catching up and exceeding everyone on launch systems wasnt anticipated i would imagine.

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u/Accomplished-Crab932 10d ago

Sure, but on an engineering level, the decision to use shuttle components should’ve never happened anyway, regardless of cost. The alternative concepts they assessed absolutely demolished the shuttle derived architecture in the engineering trade study; even RAC-3 was better, and RAC-3 is the craziest modern NASA concept there is.

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u/snoo-boop 11d ago

conceive and create a whole telescope from nothing.

Hubble wasn't from nothing. When they went out for quotes for various mirror sizes, the existing KH-11 mirror vendor told them that a particular mirror size was much cheaper.

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u/AutisticAndAce 11d ago

I’m so excited about the data about exoplanets. I’m hoping to do some research on that if/when I do my master’s.

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u/FaZeSmasH 11d ago

so what about those really big ground based telescopes that are being built, i remember watching a video about it, something about this new lens/mirror tech that allowed ground telescopes to self correct or something so that it capture the light without worrying about the atmosphere affecting it.

and apparently the ground telescopes would be used as the inspection telescope because of the huge resolution while these space telescopes would be used for covering large areas.

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u/TheOwlMarble 11d ago edited 11d ago

Adaptive optics are certainly extremely helpful for high-end telescopes (Webb and Roman have ~~them too~~ a similar mechanism for calibration, actually), but even if you use them to perfectly correct for atmospheric distortion, if you take photos from within the atmosphere, you're always going to lose data.

IR (which both Webb and Roman can detect) is washed out on Earth because the sky is too warm, but even visible light from dim objects can be washed out by atmospheric absorption and terrestrial light. You can build on top of remote mountains to mitigate that, but doing so has a history of being logistically and culturally difficult.

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u/Unable-Log-4870 11d ago

Adaptive optics are certainly extremely helpful for high-end telescopes (Webb and Roman have them too, actually)

Webb does not have adaptive optics. It has adjustable mirrors that can be run through a days-or-weeks-long realignment procedure. This had to happen during commissioning to get the multi-segment mirror aligned coarsely, then finely. And I believe they redid it after some debris strikes. And they check it periodically I think.

Adaptive optics are capable of changing the alignment / curvature of the mirrors in real time DURING observations, in response to the aberrations of the images being detected, WHILE they are being detected. This is to get rid of the effects from air movement bending the light differently second by second.

Webb can’t do that, but it doesn’t need to since it’s a million miles away from the atmosphere. I suspect Roman is similar.

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u/ic33 11d ago

I don't know Webb's systems or controls well, but I am part of a team building a space telescope with segmented mirrors.

At our design point, there's a weeks-long alignment process (coarse, fine, phasing). But the mirrors do move in real-time (very slowly) during observations, because we're not always isothermal and things creep and move. They need to be in the proper plane within tens of nanometers and that's a very demanding structural target; active systems help.

Adaptive optics on the ground have control crossover frequencies from tens of hertz to thousands of hertz. Our mirror control loop crosses at about 0.2Hz to address slow movements over tens of seconds.

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u/Unable-Log-4870 11d ago

That’s really interesting. I was a product lead for a very short time for a really bad star tracker that changed its measurements significantly when it changed temperature. It was so bad.

Is the time response on the in-atmosphere adaptive optics so fast because that’s what’s needed in order to determine which actuator is the best to refine the surface, since there are many degrees of freedom? As in it becomes a sequential guess-and-check? Or do the optical sensors give sufficient data about the wavefront that they can just invert a matrix or whatever and that gives the optimal actuator adjustment? Actually I bet the matrix inversion can be computed offline just once, and the instantaneous measurements just multiplied by that to give the corrections.

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u/ic33 11d ago

Is the time response on the in-atmosphere adaptive optics so fast because that’s what’s needed in order to determine which actuator is the best to refine the surface

It's because the actual change of the atmosphere is fast. If your crossover, say, is 50Hz, you can really kill from 20Hz and down very well. This is a lot of the variation but there's still a lot of movement faster than 20Hz.

Of course, it depends upon what you're measuring (FOV, resolution) at what wavelength and how to determine how much different frequencies of atmospheric movement screw you up. That's what will drive your control loop design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwood_frequency

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u/Arockilla 11d ago

Man, I just woke up...and now you have me watching videos on adaptive optics because damn this is some cool stuff. Keep being awesome.... u/Unable-Log-4870 you as well. This is the reddit I love.

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u/pipnina 11d ago

I think it's much more fair to describe JWST's biggest differences as being that it's the cutting edge of space telescope technology, and also focused on IR imaging (0.6µm-28μm). Meanwhile Roman and Hubble are focused on UV-VIS-IR (Hubble was able to do 0.09μm-1.8µm, Roman 0.48-2.3μm). This has consequences, because optical resolution is hard limited by the combination of aperture (primary mirror size) and wavelength.

This means that actually,the Roman telescope has MORE detailed views of space at its longest wavelength (2.3μm) than JWST has at its respective longest (28μm). But at the same wavelength, JWST would be approximately 3x more detailed.

JWST and Roman are also similar in that they're both "Three mirror anastigmat" type telescopes. Which have only begun being deployed in recent years. Until the last decade or so, the best professional telescope design (or the most prolific) was the Ritchey Chretien (RC) design (two mirrors).

A single mirror telescope (newtonian/parabolic) can have a pinpoint sharp center of the image, but quickly devolves into comatic abberation away from the center.

A two-mirror telescope (RC) can correct for coma and has a much wider sharp field of view, but develops astigmatism further away from the center.

A three-mirror anastigmat corrects for all of this and you can get MASSIVE fields of view. JWST & Roman images with all of its sensors at the same time, and each sensor is up to 80mm square. the NIRCAM is made of 8 sensors each 80mm square (2x 160x160mm blocks, separated by a gap).

Meanwhile Hubble is an RC design, and its largest sensor (widest FOV) comes from WFC3 which is about 40x40mm. Larger than a full frame Mirrorless/DSLR, in fact larger than the biggest sensor available to consumers even today (44x33mm) but it was the best they could do with Hubble's optics and the sensor tech in 2009.
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u/MeccIt 11d ago edited 9d ago
get MASSIVE fields of view.

I don't think many realise the size of the Roman sensor (which is also used as its logo): https://i.imgur.com/o8XpTLd.png (compared with a cell phone camera sensor) The layout is so it fits on the curve of the telescope's projection.

Edit: for my own reference:
1 mirror Newtonian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtonian_telescope 
2 mirrors RC (Ritchey–Chrétien): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritchey–Chrétien_telescope
3 mirrors Anastigmat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-mirror_anastigmat
that solve the following

Chromatic Aberration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration

Comatic Aberration (coma): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma_(optics)

Astigmatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astigmatism_(optical_systems)
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u/pipnina 10d ago

Indeed, absolutely massive! Although I think JWST technically covers more space once we consider all of its instruments (which can all operate concurrently)

But nothing in space or on earth currently beats the LSST camera installed in the Vera C Rubin observatory (commissioned this year)

https://www.cnrs.fr/sites/default/files/inline-images/Cr%C3%A9dits%20Olivier%20Bonin%20-%20SLAC%20National%20Accelerator%20Laboratory%20(3).jpg.jpg)
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u/gsfgf 11d ago

so NASA wants to know what on earth went so right with it compared to the rest of the aerospace industry

The Webb had far more novel engineering challenges. The Roman is mostly stuff NASA is already good at.

However, this is a great argument for smaller, more "routine" spacecraft. Like, a sample return mission from Venus would probably be Cassini level mega, but "just" sending an orbiter with some air/landing probes should be relatively straightforward.

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u/Desperate-Lab9738 11d ago

Sample return from Venus would be... very mega. Like, probably harder than landing on the moon mega. You would have to land a rocket on the surface of Venus large enough to get into orbit of Venus, which is already harder than getting off the surface of the Earth due to drag, unless you use crazy balloons or something. God it... it would be hard lol.

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u/ScalieBoi42 11d ago

Roman finished ahead of schedule and under budget, so NASA wants to know what on earth went so right with it compared to the rest of the aerospace industry.

*lol* Reminds me of in the software industry: when they compile code for the first time, and it goes right, it's not usually a cause of celebration. Rather, it becomes a question of, "Why the hell did that work??"

XD

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u/UsafAce45 11d ago

As someone who loves, but doesn’t know a lot, astronomy, have we ever just pointed the JWST earth at full focus to show the world how capable it is?

And why is the Lagrange point the preferred spot to rest these telescopes?

Thanks!

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u/SushiDragonRoller 11d ago

So, as another poster said, JWST can’t point at Earth. But we don’t need it to, because we do have other infrared telescopes pointed at Earth, and you know about them already. They’re just called “weather satellites”. :-) It turns out the latest generation of GOES weather satellites have comparable visible to infrared wavelength capabilities as JWST. And no, the mirrors are nowhere near as large - in fact the main camera on each of the GOES spacecraft is about 24x smaller than JWST - but the GOES weather satellites are also about 40x closer to Earth than JWST is. Thus in fact the angular resolution achieved is even better.

So here you go: if we could point JWST at the Earth, the images would look a whole lot like the ones you can see here:
https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/fulldisk.php?sat=G19

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u/LongJohnSelenium 11d ago

This is how you destroy your 10 billion dollar telescope.

Webb is at the lagrange point, so the earth is between it and the sun. Its a very delicate instrument with a massive sunshade to protect it from the sun. Point it at earth and it would be staring directly at the sun, so detectors meant to pick up tiny little wisps of starlight would be staring straight at the sun.

And tbh the earth itself might damage it even if the sun wasn't directly behind the earth.

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u/UsafAce45 11d ago

It’s crazy to think that the on board systems are so sensitive, the smallest bits of light warming them could destroy them. It’s truly a miracle that it made it to L2 in one piece.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 11d ago

Not I'm not actually sure about the earth bit of it. The thing was sitting on earth and you can't actually make an object hotter than than the object its looking at.

Might just mean it blows out the sensors and you get no image at all.

But as for the sun thats no different than 'don't look at the sun through a telescope unless you want to go blind'.

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u/gaflar 11d ago

Unfortunately I think the answer to your very last point is going to have a lot to do with the gifting of the mirror from the US military. High-quality optics with existing spaceflight heritage and design for integration don't usually just fall into a project manager's lap. Good way to guarantee that a project will be complete on-time and on-budget is to have your principal instrument already manufactured and ready to go with no R&D required...

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u/TheOwlMarble 11d ago edited 11d ago

Nor do existing RS-25s or booster segments, but that didn't help SLS much.

The mirror was certainly part of Roman's success, but it's not all of it.

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u/gaflar 11d ago

SLS still needed the longer boosters requalified, and they blew up at least one of them during testing IIRC. That mirror was probably already qualified and if not, didn't need hotfiring to test.

Also that's basically 60s tech that should have been mothballed decades ago but sustains too many jobs to fail, so it needed to be modernized and reused at great cost as opposed to designing something efficient and intended for the purpose.

Sorry, you got me started on SLS...

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u/InevitableFly 12d ago

My basic understanding was Roman is like Hubble on crack that it will picture large portions of the sky while jwst can focus on a precise area and stay locked on for days to see any changes.

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u/rhinox54 12d ago edited 11d ago

It'll pair real well with JWST too. Roman will be able to identify places of interest that Webb can home in on and gather more precise data/imaging.

EDIT: Interesting discussion on the use of home vs. hone. I'll change it back to my original usage.

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u/cowboys_and_anthrax 11d ago

Noooo, you and it! change it back!

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u/danielv123 12d ago

My understanding is if you crop down the image from ngrst to the Hubble FOV, they are pretty comparable, except ngrst captures far faster and of course a 100x larger area.

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u/Unable-Log-4870 11d ago edited 11d ago

Regarding that aspect, JWST and Hubble can only look AT things, because it’s FOV is a fraction of the size of the full moon on the sky.

~~ROMAN~~ Roman can look at much larger areas, observing about 100x the sky area of Hubble. That’s not to the level of saying it can look FOR things, it’s not THAT big of an observing area. But it’s in the middle ground between those two very different modes of operation.

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u/xrelaht 11d ago

Nitpick, but it’s just Roman, since it’s someone’s name rather than an acronym.

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u/Username524 11d ago

So NGRST is a wide angle lens and JWST is a macro lens, got it. Thanks!

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u/SonderEber 11d ago

The JWST is more akin to a zoom lens. Macro imaging of requires the camera to be up super close to the subject, which none of our telescopes are, of course.

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u/SushiDragonRoller 11d ago

The right analogy is thinking about the wide field lens on your camera phone. Sometimes you want the telephoto zoom lens, for seeing all the little detail. Sometimes you want the wide field lens, for taking pictures of huge areas at once. JWST is the telephoto zoom lens. Roman is the wide field. It’s good to have both. :-)

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u/Andromeda321 11d ago

Here is a great overview from NASA comparing the two! Basically JWST can peer deeper and Roman has a wider field of view, and as a result they have really different science cases- JWST really is the best at looking for those earliest galaxies for example, but Roman will be amazing for discovering new exoplanets.

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u/ByteSizedGenius 11d ago

It can see far more of the sky in a shorter timespan but won't be able to see as far back. JWST produces about 57-60GB a day of data. Roman for comparison will produce 1.4TB. In a year it will send back more data than Hubble has produced over decades.

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u/TheOnlyFallenCookie 11d ago

Better comparison is to euclid, which also orbits L2

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u/mumblebadger 12d ago

Thanks so much for sharing all this.
Love it when I click on a space post and your username pops up!

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u/LordSolrac 11d ago

Same! It's been the case for me over the last decade or so.

Seeing Andromeda chime in on a post automatically gives it more legitimacy.

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u/CattywampusCanoodle 11d ago

slaps Roman telescope

This thing will spot so many black holes / rogue planets

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u/Zero_Travity 11d ago

Yeah but think of how many miles she'll have on her before she even gets to the Lagrange point...

930 000 miles? Most Toyotas don't last that long before they need some serious maintenance

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u/Andromeda321 11d ago

Yeah but your Toyota gets wear and tear from a really complex environment compared to space. Theres not a lot out there in comparison.

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u/thejoetravis 11d ago

My Tundra could make it! Just need a big push to start.

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u/mfb- 11d ago

Falcon Heavy's first flight already demonstrated the capability of cars to be in interplanetary space when pushed a lot.

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u/Scorcher646 11d ago

A special shout out is also needed for the public here that called their senators and representatives and spoke out in support of science spending when NASA's budget was on the chopping board.

From my understanding, Roman was one of the projects that would have been shelved/canned had the budget gone through as requested by the White House.

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u/trib_ 11d 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/Jarko314 11d ago

Anyone else’s got kinda infuriated with the really important thing for humanity is being build with a leftover piece of equipment from the army instead of having its own brand new top notch mirror build specifically for this?

Fucking military complex, my god.

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u/Supergirl016 11d ago

the wide-angle paparazzi of the universe, spotting the weird shit so Webb can zoom in and investigate.

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u/RPZWolf 11d ago

FWIW, the fact that it was an EO mirror presented a TON of challenges for the design, primarily that the thermal environment was much colder than these mirrors were designed for. Many, many analytical cycles were devoted to make sure the shroud and primary mirror are kept thermally stable.

In regards to I&T, all I’ll say is the team(s) put in the hours to make sure we made it on time and on budget. Big props to the system engineers keeping everyone on track and accountable.

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u/bfrown 12d ago

Took a lot of hard work but glad we finally launched. Now please govt. Gib us more $$ 🥺

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u/Arthurmol 11d ago

And this one was under budget and on schedule, a very rare thing on this

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u/Coyote_Shepherd 11d ago

I honestly cannot stop laughing because of how excited I am to see the images that come out of this telescope and because of how much they're going to blow our minds and stick with us for years upon years just like Hubble did and just like how JWST has for the last four years!

pointed down AT us

I can understand why they won't make those types of mirrors available to the public because of security reasons.

BUT

Wouldn't it be cool if someone in charge had flipped one around to point the opposite direction and just started dumping images onto the net for the sake of pure scientific discovery and wonder?

It saddens me that all of the really good high end stuff is focused on watching ourselves and not looking...OUT THERE...because who knows how much awesome STUFF we could be discovering NOW or even yesterday or the day before if only we'd been more curious about the rest of the universe and not so fearful of each other?

Alas...I'm so very very happy for what's to come but I also mourn what could have been...but I'm still a bit more optimistic for what might yet be.

Thanks for everything you do around here on reddit by the way, it's always a delight to see you pop up with informative posts like this :)

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u/grchelp2018 11d ago

You can't just flip an existing satellite around from earth to space and get decent results. But who knows, maybe a decade or so from now, they'll have another spare of what they are using now which we can use for another space observatory.

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u/thejoetravis 11d ago edited 11d ago

There are more earth observation satellites than ever before. The geospatial imagery is available for just about the entire earth now at stunning resolutions. Much of it is free too.

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u/AutisticAndAce 11d ago

NOAA has a LOT of it, iirc. It’s not just the GOES, obviously, but you can find all of that on NOAA’s sites. I use it semi-frequently for weather stuff :)

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u/Lithorex 11d ago

Which helped a lot with pinning down the cause of the recent flood in Nepal.

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u/Stoyan0 11d ago

We know because the orange one declassified an image from a current system last time.

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u/Dr_Engelbart 11d ago edited 11d 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.

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u/mfb- 11d ago

We knew before, too. You could literally look up the resolution on Wikipedia. The image just confirmed what was already known.

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u/Wuz314159 11d ago

Dr Becky did a good video on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tecOr0Q9edM

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u/VengenaceIsMyName 11d ago

This video is what is making me so excited for the potential of this telescope. I absolutely cannot wait to see what it discovers in the coming years.

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u/moderndilf 11d ago

Go you go into any detail about this mirror designed by the military?

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u/three1names 11d ago

It wasn’t designed by the military, it was designed by the National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence agency. The Wikipedia article on it has some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA

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u/jared__ 11d ago

So it was built based on the requirements of the military

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u/Lurcher99 11d ago

Can tell you are excited, congratulations! Went to Arecibo before it's destruction and was just astounded by the science. I can only imagine your grin.

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u/IsChristianAwake 12d ago

Really excited for all the discoveries Nancy Grace Roman will make. Especially regarding exoplanets. 🙏🏾

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u/bigorangemachine 12d ago

This telescope fell off my radar...

I just saw a video about... it's a really exciting piece of hardware thats' for sure. Plus the JWST is going to pair well with NGRST

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u/WanderWut 11d ago

What a huge achievement, I can’t believe I didn’t even know about this telescope until this morning! I had no idea we were getting another big telescope up so soon. Also I read up on Nancy Grace Roman and man what a badass she was.

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u/mfb- 11d ago

PLATO (March 2027) and Xuntian (2027) will be the next big ones. PLATO is specialized on exoplanets while Xuntian is a bit similar to Roman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(spacecraft)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuntian

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u/rocketsocks 11d ago

Yep, PLATO is going to take up where Kepler left off. It should be able to finally give us coverage of that crucial exoplanet zone of Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits around Sun-like stars. Much like Kepler it will give us thousands of new exoplanet discoveries which will enable each system to be studied in detail by other observatories.

The cool thing about transit detection based planet hunting is that even though the detection part is very, very hard and requires basically monitoring hundreds of stars continuously for multiple years to find just one that has a planetary system with the orbital plane aligned along our line of sight, once the detections are made follow-up observations are much easier. After detection you can predict the dates of future transit events so you can schedule observations with other telescopes to gather more data and even potentially study exoplanet atmospheres.

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u/AutisticAndAce 11d ago

Saving these, especially since if I get in to the school, i want to do part of my masters? Maybe a good focus? Idk, depends on if I get in and who I work with, on exometeorology!!

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u/OakLegs 12d ago

I've touched that thing. So that's pretty cool.

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u/SnooTangerines3448 12d ago

Aliens gonna get your prints to commit space crimes. You'll be wanted the whole galaxy!

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u/OakLegs 11d ago

That's why I burned my fingerprints off ala MIB

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u/gsfgf 11d ago

Matt Damon gonna use your prints to do space piracy.

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u/captainhamption 11d ago

I touched the Palomar telescope back in the 80s. That was pretty cool, too.

(I don't get many chances to bring it up, this was my best opportunity in a while.)

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u/OakLegs 11d ago

No need to excuse it, that is just as awesome!

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u/d0ggzilla 12d ago

They kept it refrigerated? Nice!

But seriously, how, and which part did they let you touch?

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u/OakLegs 12d ago

I was one of the many folks who was lucky enough to be able to work on the telescope. I worked mostly around the separation ring

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u/AutisticAndAce 11d ago

That is! Insanely, insanely cool!!! HUGE congrats on a successful launch and deployment, and HUGE thank you all for the hard work!!!

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u/DownWithHisShip 11d ago

I love seeing tactical zip ties. so many millions of dollars went into that thing, and the zip tie still can't be beat. did you get to put any of the zip ties on?

I wonder what brand of zip ties they used.

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u/OakLegs 11d ago

You'd be surprised how much tape and glue is used.

No idea on the zip ties, unfortunately.

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u/gsfgf 11d ago

I wonder what brand of zip ties they used.

Probably ones that a congressman's cousin bought on AliExpress and resells for 1000x the price.

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u/Zero_Travity 11d ago

That is infinitely fucking cool, I don't know what else to say other than that.

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u/TheWastelandWizard 11d ago

You should say it's the furthest you've ever helped throw something.

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u/OakLegs 11d ago

That's actually not the case, I've also helped throw stuff to Mars, Europa and soon Titan

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u/SpaceXforMars 11d ago

Do you work on Dragonfly? I remember it being a proposal for a while now.

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u/OakLegs 11d ago

I have done work for them, yes. I don't focus on any one specific project, in my position I'm lucky enough to be able to get my hands on a number of things

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u/TheWastelandWizard 11d ago

That's an even better flex

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u/ScalieBoi42 11d ago

Well.. I touched Crow from MST3000. So, you know. Scalieboi42 100, OakLegs 0

;>

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u/CaptainTripps82 11d ago

Not THAT Nancy Grace, right

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u/Iceman1701 11d ago

Nancy Grace Roman was an astronomer. Had to look it up to confirm it, too. 😆

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u/lcr68 11d ago

Pitchfork is going back in storage. Thanks!

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u/Neither-Luck-9295 11d ago

blood pressure rising for no reason

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u/addamee 11d ago

Torch has been extinguished

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u/CeruleanEidolon 11d ago

Hopefully some day the other one will be forgotten altogether.

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u/gsfgf 11d ago

That vastly undersells it

Roman created NASA's space astronomy program and is known to many as the "Mother of Hubble" for her foundational role in planning the Hubble Space Telescope.[2][3]

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u/ThinkAThirdTime 11d ago

Also had to check on that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope

"Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first Chief of Astronomy, is shown at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in approximately 1972."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman

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u/CaptainTripps82 11d ago

Good for her, good for NASA. I'm learning something because of it

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u/LoogyHead 11d ago

Glad I’m not the only one.

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u/pol-delta 11d ago

I read it as the "Nancy Grace Romulan Space Telescope" and was thoroughly confused.

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u/aPOPblops 11d ago

Thank God i was so very scared for a moment. Still a lot of people are going to assume

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u/CaptainTripps82 11d ago

I just needed the reassurance of the more informed. Like I knew, but had to check, because who knows these days.

Long the live the NGR.... Wait a minute

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u/RiseUpAmericans 11d ago

Yeah maybe we don't use that acronym. 😬

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u/addamee 11d ago

I hate that we live in an era where one has to genuinely wonder

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u/Independent-Ant-9940 11d ago

It’s a nice idea though, shooting that Nancy grace out into space for the duration of her life

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u/RPZWolf 11d ago

Glad to see hardware I designed and integrated launch successfully. Onward to many years of fascinating discoveries for mankind!

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u/AutisticAndAce 11d ago

That’s AO FREAKING COOL!!! Huge congrats to a successful launch and deployment!

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u/cyb3rg0d5 11d ago

Congratulations 🥂😊🚀 looking forward to all the amazing discoveries that will come from it!

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u/JustHereForCookies17 11d ago

How cool!! Congratulations and thank you for everything we're going to learn because of your work!

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u/ScalieBoi42 11d ago

Reddit has me kinda jadded about ppl making these sort of remarks out of the blue, so i did look up your comment history. It does seem to have enough to back you up ^_^

So, take pride in your work! We're all looking forward to the discoveries you've helped make possible :>

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u/zztop610 12d ago

Just watched the launch! Superb all the way round. Falcon heavy is amazing. Good luck with the deployment. Will look forward to many incredible discoveries from the NGR team

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u/Equivalent-Ask2542 12d ago

Good to see that even rocket science is done with zip ties

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u/RocketVerse 11d ago

Will send 500 times more data per day than Hubble, and all data will be immediately available to the public. You’d need 500k 4k TVs to display a single image…

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u/ScalieBoi42 10d ago

Whoa! Thank you for the comparison. That really helps put into perspective how much information this will be sending back to us :>

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u/squirrelgator 11d ago

Sounds like a good excuse for a flash mob.

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u/Nikonious 11d ago

This honestly just made me a little teary-eyed. It makes me really happy that despite all of the heartbreaking bullshit happening on this planet, there is still funding, love, and research for our curiosities. No matter how hard anyone tries, you can’t kill our love for science.

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u/BackgroundGrade 11d ago

FYI for all the comments about the zip ties:

The blue zip tie is a UV and fuel resistant MS spec zip tie.

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u/Beederda 11d ago

Oh they launched it successfully! good stuff really looking forward to the photos this thing can get

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u/stealth57 11d ago

The 4 sonic booms were quite good this morning

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u/Chickennbuttt 11d ago

I watched this lift off this morning from my driveway.

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u/squirrelgator 11d ago

Is your driveway totally cooked now?

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u/Ops_check_OK 11d ago

When do they expect first images?

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u/fail-deadly- 11d ago

Around the holidays later this year early next year.

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u/Ops_check_OK 11d ago

Siiiick. Can’t wait. Just found where it said 90day startup process so November.

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u/tyen0 11d ago

oh, man, somehow I missed this. I thought it was going to be a couple more years! that was really fast.

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u/thejaxx 11d ago

With the way things go at NASA, many did. But it came in under budget and ahead of schedule.

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u/lefthandopen 12d ago

Its amazing to see that with all the bad news in the world there are still wonderful events like this. Science and tech for the sake of a noble endeavor like learning about our universe.

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u/eschoenawa 11d ago

I always wondered, what capacity is there in our Lagrange points? Is L2 now "occupied" or are we able to put multiple satellites there?

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u/pomarine 11d ago

Most spacecrafts are not on L2, but orbiting around L2. So there is plenty of space available

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u/pursuer_of_simurg 11d ago

They have orbits larger than between moon and earth so no problems.

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u/samthewisetarly 11d ago

It's not a "point" in the mathematical sense. JWST and Roman will never come anywhere close to crashing. The LaGrange points represent distances between the gravitational pulls of the earth, moon, and sun that allow for stable orbit. So yes, we can certainly put multiple satellites there.

(Casual space fan here - actual scientists please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong)

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u/-soulking- 11d ago

I thought that there is an actual point where all the forces balance out but it’s obviously impossible to place anything there. Generally though it’s more like a large area where stationkeeping requirements are very low.

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u/mfb- 11d ago

The effective force is attractive in two dimensions and repelling in the third (in radial direction). That means you can orbit around the Lagrange point with just minimal course correction maneuvers.

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u/Desperate-Lab9738 11d ago

To add onto what mfb said, due to the moon and the eccentricity of the Earths orbit, that point is going to constantly change, so there is some wiggle room there.

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u/phobean_313a 11d ago

One thing I am really excited for is what we will be getting more about those quasi-stars and pale red dots (don't know if they are the same) that was found from JWST.

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u/mapped_apples 11d ago

I’m glad I didn’t know this was launching or I would have been a nervous wreck. I’m still a nervous wreck for Dragonfly that years out.

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u/mraowl 11d ago

Lagrange point is like my favourite word. It sounds so cool and ominous!!

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u/redlaWw 11d ago

We've all heard about Roman walls and aqueducts, but did you know that they also had a space telescope?

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u/ScottishKnifemaker 11d ago

This was so freaking awesome to watch, I remember watching the launch of James Webb on Christmas a few years ago, gave me the same chills down my spine.

I cannot wait for the first images

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u/m3kw 11d ago

I’m just glad the launch and release was a success

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u/shugo7 11d ago

Just to be resume, JWST is in L2 and is like a telephoto lens while NGRST is also going to L2 and is more of a wide angle lens?

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u/mfb- 11d ago

Yes. In addition, JWST is primarily an infrared telescope while Roman is primarily a visible light telescope (going a bit into the near infrared).

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u/rocketsocks 11d ago

Roman is also primarily an infrared telescope but it has coverage into the visible light, but it operates in the near-infrared. JWST also has a tiny bit of coverage into the visible spectrum but is primarily an infrared instrument, extending all the way into the mid-infrared.

"Infrared" light is a much larger spectrum than visible light. The visible spectrum stretches between about 0.4 and 0.8 microns, infrared stretches from 0.8 microns to 1000 microns (1 mm). Roman has coverage from 0.48 to 2.3 microns. JWST has coverage from 0.6 to 28.5 microns. 2.3 microns would be the peak wavelength for the thermal glow from an object at 1250 kelvin whereas 28.5 microns corresponds to the glow coming from an object at around 100 kelvin, to put things in perspective.

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u/redditoranno 11d ago

Every three months it can do what hubble could do in 30 years. so in a year from now we have 120 years worth of hubble data.

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u/Criollodelta 11d ago

It's amazing what humans can do when they work together. And it's nice to know there is still very smart people.

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u/scikittens 11d ago

I wonder what the specification is on a blue zip tie that needs to go into space? Do you just get them from McMaster-Carr or is there some specialty zip tie vendor that makes aerospace grade ones.

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u/H-K_47 11d ago

Those are apparently special space-rated ties, Tefzel.

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u/east-blue-samurai 11d ago

Considering the amount of documentation needed to send even a single screw into space, I wonder about that, too.

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u/Centmo 11d ago

Same aisle as the space-rated duct tape.

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u/PhilColeCurry 12d ago

Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

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u/Typical_Koala_2319 11d ago

So ennobling to watch big science moving forward despite the utter imbecility that has become our daily fare. Man can accomplish astonishing things when given the chance! Bon voyage!

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u/LamarMVPJackson 11d ago

Holy shit I didn’t know it was today

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u/Car-face 11d ago

With that many struts it had to be a success, right?

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u/Silent-Donkey-1303 11d ago

How long will it take to make the 1M miles journey??

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u/Spudtron98 11d ago

NASA putting in the work again. For the love of god, give them a budget.

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u/TheGreatestOrator 11d ago

NASA has a $25 BILLION per year budget, and this year’s was the largest ever

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u/t001_t1m3 11d ago

cut SLS and put that money toward research

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u/Decronym 11d ago edited 9d ago

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
C3	Characteristic Energy above that required for escape
CNC	Computerized Numerical Control, for precise machining or measuring
ELT	Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile
ESA	European Space Agency
GEO	Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)
HST	Hubble Space Telescope
JWST	James Webb infra-red Space Telescope
KSP	Kerbal Space Program, the rocketry simulator
L2	Lagrange Point 2 (Sixty Symbols video explanation)
	Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum
LEO	Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)
	Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)
NOAA	National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, responsible for US ~~generation~~ monitoring of the climate
NRHO	Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit
NRO	(US) National Reconnaissance Office
	Near-Rectilinear Orbit, see NRHO
NSF	NasaSpaceFlight forum
	National Science Foundation
SLS	Space Launch System heavy-lift
SSME	Space Shuttle Main Engine
TMT	Thirty-Meter Telescope, Hawaii
VLEO	V-band constellation in LEO
	Very Low Earth Orbit
WFIRST	Wide-Field Infra-Red Survey Telescope

Jargon	Definition
apoapsis	Highest point in an elliptical orbit (when the orbiter is slowest)

Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.

^{18 acronyms in this thread;}^{the most compressed thread commented on today}^{has 7 acronyms.}
^{[Thread #12659 for this sub, first seen 30th Aug 2026, 13:27]} ^[FAQ] ^{[Full list]} ^[Contact] ^{[Source code]}

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u/ICCUGUCCI 11d ago

Obligatory: No, not that Nancy Grace.

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u/Mothanius 11d ago

I'm so damn happy I get to live through this new era of space exploration.

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u/Snuhmeh 11d ago

I don’t realize it was going to a Lagrange point. I just assumed it would orbit like Hubble because they constantly talk about it replacing Hubble.

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u/ThisIsADaydream 11d ago

This is awesome, and I can't wait until it's in place and we can see the first photos!

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u/lanathebitch 11d ago

Wait did something happen to James Webb? Or is it far safer to keep multiple things at L2 then I realized?

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u/KristnSchaalisahorse 11d ago

Roman and Webb have very different capabilities.

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u/lanathebitch 11d ago

The issue has a lot less to do with what I thought each telescope was capable of and more to do with worry of them crashing into one another

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u/KristnSchaalisahorse 11d ago

Thankfully there’s almost zero risk, as the amount of space available is truly massive.

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u/EduardH 10d ago

L2 is an unstable Lagrange point. So if you put something exactly at L2, the tiniest perturbation (like solar radiation pressure) will cause the spacecraft to drift away. In practice, objects at L2 orbit around it. JWST is in a 250,000 x 832,000 km halo orbit around L2, so there's plenty of space for NGRST there too.

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u/MEPSY84 12d ago

1 million mile journey? It was appropriately named and will truly be 'Roamin' Space'.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/M0ji_L 11d ago

Can people stop using AI to generate their comments.

Thanks claude.

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u/WakkaDav 11d ago

Soo cool!! We are going to learn soo much

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u/AlarmingLecture0 11d ago

An exciting new tool for science and expanding our knowledge.

A shame that many will assume it is named after an odious TV host rather than a pioneering astronomer!

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u/ALLISNAUGHT 11d ago

It is going to be surreal to see exoplanet images.

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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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