Visiting the Roman Space Telescope - as It's Being Assembled (msn.com) 15
"The next great space telescope will study distant galaxies and faraway planets from an orbital outpost about a million miles from Earth," writes the Washington Post. "But first it has to be put together, piece by piece, in a cavernous chamber at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland."
One long-time NASA worker calls it "the largest clean room in the free world," and the Post notes everyone wears white gowns and surgical masks "to keep hardware from being contaminated by humans. No dust allowed. No stray hairs. One wall is entirely covered by HEPA filters." The place is known as the Clean Room, or sometimes the High Bay. It is 125 feet long, 100 feet wide, 90 feet high, with almost as much volume as the Capitol Rotunda. NASA boasts that in the Clean Room you could put nearly 30 tractor-trailers side by side on the floor and stack them 10 high... About two dozen workers clustered around towering pieces of hardware, some twice or three times the height of a typical person. When stacked and integrated, these components will form the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
The assembly of the telescope ramped up this fall, with 600 workers aiming to get everything integrated and tested by late 2026. NASA has committed to launching the telescope no later than May 2027. The telescope will be roughly the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, but not quite as long (a "stubby Hubble," some call it). What the astronomy community and the general public will receive in exchange for the considerable taxpayer investment of nearly $4 billion is an instrument that can do what other telescopes can't.
It will have a sprawling field of view, about 100 times that of the Hubble or Webb space telescopes. And it will be able to pivot quickly across the night sky to new targets and download tremendous amounts of data that will be instantly available to the researchers. A primary goal of the Roman is to understand "dark energy," the mysterious driver of the accelerating expansion of space. But it will also attempt to study the atmospheres of exoplanets — worlds orbiting distant stars...
The main element, informally referred to as "the telescope" but officially called the "optical telescope assembly," showed up this fall. It was originally built as a spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office. That's right: It was built to look down at Earth, rather than at the rest of the universe. The NRO decided more than a decade ago that it didn't need it, and gave it, along with another, identical spy satellite, to NASA. Roman's wide-angle view of deep space, its maneuverability and ability to download massive amounts of data makes it optimized as a dark energy telescope. And it will also study the effects of dark matter, which comprises about 25 percent of the universe but remains a ghostly presence.
One long-time NASA worker calls it "the largest clean room in the free world," and the Post notes everyone wears white gowns and surgical masks "to keep hardware from being contaminated by humans. No dust allowed. No stray hairs. One wall is entirely covered by HEPA filters." The place is known as the Clean Room, or sometimes the High Bay. It is 125 feet long, 100 feet wide, 90 feet high, with almost as much volume as the Capitol Rotunda. NASA boasts that in the Clean Room you could put nearly 30 tractor-trailers side by side on the floor and stack them 10 high... About two dozen workers clustered around towering pieces of hardware, some twice or three times the height of a typical person. When stacked and integrated, these components will form the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
The assembly of the telescope ramped up this fall, with 600 workers aiming to get everything integrated and tested by late 2026. NASA has committed to launching the telescope no later than May 2027. The telescope will be roughly the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, but not quite as long (a "stubby Hubble," some call it). What the astronomy community and the general public will receive in exchange for the considerable taxpayer investment of nearly $4 billion is an instrument that can do what other telescopes can't.
It will have a sprawling field of view, about 100 times that of the Hubble or Webb space telescopes. And it will be able to pivot quickly across the night sky to new targets and download tremendous amounts of data that will be instantly available to the researchers. A primary goal of the Roman is to understand "dark energy," the mysterious driver of the accelerating expansion of space. But it will also attempt to study the atmospheres of exoplanets — worlds orbiting distant stars...
The main element, informally referred to as "the telescope" but officially called the "optical telescope assembly," showed up this fall. It was originally built as a spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office. That's right: It was built to look down at Earth, rather than at the rest of the universe. The NRO decided more than a decade ago that it didn't need it, and gave it, along with another, identical spy satellite, to NASA. Roman's wide-angle view of deep space, its maneuverability and ability to download massive amounts of data makes it optimized as a dark energy telescope. And it will also study the effects of dark matter, which comprises about 25 percent of the universe but remains a ghostly presence.
Re:Why is it called Roman? (Score:4, Informative)
Because the person it is named for had the last name Roman. (Nancy Grace Roman)
Who's family came from Bavaria a few generations back [geni.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Hubble (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not the greatest joke, but the censor sock puppets have nothing resembling a sense of humor.
It's gonna be a long four years. If'n we last that long.
This morning's unpleasant thought of the day: Supervillains are too common and too successful, but superheroes don't exist in the real world. (The list of villains is huge and growing.) The chain of reasoning was twisted and mostly unrelated to the story, except that if things get bad enough this space telescope will never be launched. Consider the LA fires as t
Roman telescope (Score:5, Funny)
x, ix, viii, vii, ...
Stuck on the Launch Pad (Score:2)
This is cool, but (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I can't help wondering why the NRO decided they didn't need the satellite. Have they got something bigger now, or is their general snooping so much better that they can get better pictures by hacking cell phones and security cameras?
My guess is both.
Stubble (Score:2)
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope [...] will be roughly the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, but not quite as long (a "stubby Hubble," some call it).
Henceforth known as the "Stubble" space telescope!
NASA can't do MATH (Score:2)
> The place is known as the Clean Room, or sometimes the High Bay. It is 125 feet long, 100 feet wide, 90 feet high, with almost as much volume as the Capitol Rotunda. NASA boasts that in the Clean Room you could put nearly 30 tractor-trailers side by side on the floor and stack them 10 high..
A tractor-trailor in the US is about 72' (22m) long. That's 53' max length of the trailer and 19' max length of the cab. It also averages 8.5' (2.6m) wide, and it's maximum height is 16' (4.9m) high to successfull
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I don't get where they get tractor-trailers only about 4 feet wide and 9 feet tall. Still, if you ditch the side by side requirement, you can certainly fit more than you're saying. For starters, while there might be a 16 foot maximum, it is pretty unusual for one to actually be 16 feet high. That's more like an oversized load on a flat bed. A typical tractor-trailer is more like 13.5 feet high. We'll just call it 14. So that you could stack 6 high. Also, if you're putting them side by side, then you w
NASA Unit Conversions (Score:2)