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The 7.9-foot-diameter polished primary mirror for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was originally built for a US government spy satellite.<\/p>\n
\n Credit:
\n NASA\/Chris Gunn\n <\/p>\n
\n The 7.9-foot-diameter polished primary mirror for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was originally built for a US government spy satellite.<\/p>\n
Credit:<\/p>\n
NASA\/Chris Gunn<\/p>\n
Nicky Fox, head of NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate, calls Roman the Swiss Army knife of telescopes. It will survey 12 percent of the sky, and while that may not sound like a lot, it is far more than the 0.1 percent observed by Hubble over its 36 years in orbit.<\/p>\n
\u201cRoman\u2019s large field of view and fast survey speeds will reveal untold cosmic objects while shining a light on dark energy and dark matter,\u201d Fox said. \u201cDuring its mission, Roman will discover tens of thousands of new planets, billions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae, and tens of billions of stars. And it will do all of that at a speed about 1,000 times that of Hubble\u2026 So to put it into context, what Roman can do in a month would take Hubble a century.\u201d<\/p>\n
Who is the fairest one of all?<\/p>\n
Cosmologists are eager to learn more about dark energy, an unseen force that, according to the Standard Model of the Universe, makes up about 70 percent of the cosmos and is responsible for accelerating the Universe\u2019s expansion. Dark matter makes up a little more than a quarter of the Universe. The rest of the cosmos is made of regular atoms and molecules that we can see and touch.<\/p>\n