Four years before the planned launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, research groups have simulated what images the much-anticipated space telescope should deliver. The simulated image contains 33 million galaxies and 200,000 stars and should enable researchers to prepare work with the instrument and its data, explains the US space agency. Together with another simulation of the space telescope, the new data make it clear how powerful the space telescope is likely to be and how immense the difference to the Hubble Space Telescope will be. What will take the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope two months to do would take Hubble 85 years.
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Flight through the universe as seen by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. (Quelle: Caltech-IPAC/R. Hurt and M. Troxel )
Simulation of multiple gravitational lenses
(Bild: Caltech-IPAC/R. Hurt)
The last presented simulation includes a so-called deep-field image, i.e. the recording of a comparatively empty area in the sky where you can look particularly far – into the past. A fraction of the sky area that the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is designed to cover is modeled, the simulated data are available online. About one percent of the simulated area is as JPG file with an edge length of almost 8000 pixels can also be viewed directly. The enormous scope of the planned observations is at least somewhat comprehensible. An animation is also used to simulate gravitational lenses, which the space telescope will also see. The scientific publication will appear in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Area in the sky that the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope can image at once (yellow) and Hubble for comparison (white)
(Bild: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and A. Yung)
The second simulation was presented last week. It also shows how extensively the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is supposed to map the universe. While the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes are designed to examine individual astronomical objects close-up, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is designed to target and survey large areas. The simulation developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center shows what this could look like. It explains how and why the planned space telescope should explore the largest structures in the universe. The work was presented in a previously published specialist article.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be an infrared telescope originally developed under the name Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). In 2020 it was renamed and since then has been named after the US astronomer and NASA’s first person in charge of astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman. Because of her crucial role in the development of the space telescope, she is commonly referred to as the “mother of Hubble”. The space telescope is scheduled to be launched in May 2027 and will complement the already active James Webb Space Telescope. As early as three years ago, a research group determined that the instrument should also find dozens of lonely exoplanets with the mass of our Earth that do not orbit a star and drift alone through the Milky Way.
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