1,000 times faster than Hubble: Up close with the NASA space telescope meant to unlock the cosmos - NBC News

GREENBELT, Md. — It’s go time for NASA’s next-generation space telescope.

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After nearly two decades of development, $4.3 billion and the labor of hundreds of scientists and engineers, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is less than three months from launch.

From a point roughly 1 million miles from Earth, the telescope is expected to survey the cosmos, capturing panoramas of hundreds of millions of stars and billions of galaxies. With this observatory, NASA hopes to unravel the secrets of dark matter and dark energy and discover thousands of planets beyond our solar system.

That’s because Roman will be able to survey and map more of the sky than ever before, at a pace hundreds of times faster.

Julie McEnery, the senior project scientist for the Roman telescope here at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said that in just one month of data collection, Roman will be able to peer at underexplored parts of the Milky Way to study stars across a deep slice of the galaxy, building an astronomical catalog far larger than any that exists today.

“In the mission’s first five years, it’s expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies,” she said.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after the woman who became NASA’s first chief of astronomy in 1959, will join roughly a dozen space telescopes that the agency has in operation focused on a range of science targets.

NBC News got a rare, up-close look at the telescope during its final days in the clean room, where NASA has assembled it piece by piece over the past decade. By the end of this month, the bus-sized observatory will have been packed up, transported to Baltimore, then barged to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of a targeted launch on Aug. 30.

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“It’s like the kids are going off to college,” McEnery said, her face pressed against a window overlooking the clean room to take in one of her final views of the telescope. “It feels almost emotional.”

Seeing more of the sky than ever before, 1,000 times faster

The scope of what the Roman telescope will observe during its mission is difficult for the mind to grasp.

“If we were to take a single image that is produced from our main survey and try to fully display it with a set of 4K TVs, you’d need more than half a million TVs,” McEnery said. “And just to give you a sense of the scale of that, if I was to lay out those 4K TVs, it would cover 45 city blocks. Or to pick something you actually look at, it would entirely cover El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.”

That main survey will take more than a year to complete, during which time the telescope will gaze through the Milky Way’s dense, star-packed center, known as the galactic bulge.

It’s one of three primary surveys planned; another calls for the Roman telescope to scan about 12% of the entire sky in under a year and a half. The resulting map of the cosmos will allow astronomers to measure how fast the universe is expanding — which could shed light on two of the most puzzling phenomena in the universe: dark matter and dark energy.

Scientists think dark energy is accelerating the universe’s expansion, while dark matter is thought to make up most of the matter in galaxies, but it’s invisible and can only be inferred by the gravitational effects it exerts.

“We know that Roman will give us the definitive data to help us understand the twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy,” said Dominic Benford, the Roman telescope’s program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The third survey will focus on supernova explosions that occurred up to 8 billion years ago. Peering back through this cosmic time machine will help astronomers trace how the universe has expanded over its history — offering further insight into dark energy.

The Roman telescope is often compared to the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990. The two are roughly the same size — about that of a semitrailer truck — and similarly barrel-shaped. But the new observatory should be able to survey the cosmos 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and each image will capture a patch of sky at least 100 times larger than one of Hubble’s, according to McEnery.

“To put this into context, one month of Roman observations would correspond to a century with Hubble,” she said.