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Simulated Image Demonstrates the Power of NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope
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By NASA
1 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Dr. Kenyon, far right, and three other umpires listen to the national anthem before the start of a baseball game.Credit: West Springfield Little League
As the director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Dr. Jimmy Kenyon is used to making important decisions at work. He also likes to call the shots on the baseball field as a volunteer umpire.
In July, Kenyon packed up his gear and traveled to Ankeny, Iowa, as part of a four-man umpire crew for the Little League Intermediate 50/70 Baseball Central Region Tournament. He was selected for this crew assignment in May, as the Little League season was getting underway.
Dr. Jimmy Kenyon in action as a volunteer umpire during a Little League baseball game. Credit: West Springfield Little League “Making the call is part of the job at NASA Glenn, but it’s also something I enjoy as a volunteer umpire for Little League Baseball and softball,” Kenyon said. “It allows me to share the excitement of baseball and NASA with young players, who may very well be part of our future workforce someday.”
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By NASA
This enormous piece of space hardware is NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s spacecraft bus, which will maneuver the observatory to its place in space and enable it to function while there. It is photographed here in the largest clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where engineers are inspecting it upon delivery. The bus rests atop an aluminum ring that will temporarily protect its underside. The two copper-colored flaps are Roman’s Lower Instrument Sun Shade –– deployable panels designed to help shield the observatory from sunlight.NASA/Chris Gunn The spacecraft bus that will deliver NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to its orbit and enable it to function once there is now complete after years of construction, installation, and testing.
Now that the spacecraft is assembled, engineers will begin working to integrate the observatory’s other major components, including the science instruments and the telescope itself.
“They call it a spacecraft bus for a reason — it gets the telescope to where it needs to be in space,” said Jackie Townsend, the Roman deputy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “But it’s really more like an RV because it has a whole assortment of functions that enable Roman to accomplish its scientific goals while out there too.”
Those goals include surveying wide swaths of the universe to study things like: dark energy, a mysterious cosmic pressure thought to accelerate the universe’s expansion; dark matter, invisible matter seen only via its gravitational influence; and exoplanets, worlds beyond our solar system.
The mission’s science wouldn’t be possible without a spacecraft to transport the telescope, point the observatory toward different cosmic targets, provide power, communicate with Earth, control and store instrument data, and regulate Roman’s temperature. Nearly 50 miles of electrical cabling are laced throughout the assembly to enable different parts of the observatory to communicate with each other.
The spacecraft will also deploy several major elements that will be stowed for launch, including the solar panels, deployable aperture cover, lower instrument Sun shade, and high-gain antenna. It’s also responsible for collecting and beaming down data, which is no small task for a space observatory that will survey the cosmos like Roman will.
“Roman will send back 1.4 terabytes of data per day, compared to about 50 to 60 gigabytes from the James Webb Space Telescope and three gigabytes from the Hubble Space Telescope,” said Jason Hylan, the Roman observatory manager at NASA Goddard. “Webb’s daily downlink is roughly comparable to 13 hours of YouTube video at the highest quality while Roman’s would amount to about 2 weeks.”
This top-down view shows NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s spacecraft bus from another angle. It rests atop an aluminum ring that will not be part of the observatory and is surrounded by an enclosure used in testing to ensure electromagnetic interference will not affect the bus’s sensitive electronics. The bus is covered in gray bagging material to prevent contamination –– even tiny stray particles could affect its performance.NASA/Chris Gunn A Goddard Grand Slam
This milestone is the culmination of eight years of spacecraft design work, building, and testing by hundreds of people at Goddard.
“Goddard employees were the brains, designers, and executors. And they worked with vendors who supplied all the right parts,” Townsend said. “We leaned on generations of expertise in the spacecraft arena to work around cost and schedule challenges that arose from supply chain issues and the pandemic.”
One time- and money-saving technique the team came up with was building a spacecraft mockup, called the structural verification unit. That allowed them to do two things at once: complete strength testing on the mockup, designed specifically for that purpose, while also assembling the actual spacecraft.
The spacecraft’s clever layout also allowed the team to adapt to changing schedules. It’s designed to be modular, “more like Trivial Pursuit pie pieces than a nesting egg, where interior components are buried inside,” Townsend said. “That’s been a game-changer because you can’t always count on things arriving in the order you planned or working perfectly right away with no tweaks.” It also increased efficiency because people could work on different portions of the bus at the same time without interfering with each other.
The slightly asymmetrical and hexagonal spacecraft bus is about 13 feet (4 meters) wide by 6.5 feet (2 meters) tall and weighs in at 8,400 pounds (3,800 kilograms).
While it may look small in this photo, the spacecraft bus for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is 8 feet (2.5 meters) wide by 6.5 feet (2 meters) tall and weighs in at 8,400 pounds (3,800 kilograms). In this photo, it rests atop an aluminum ring that will not be part of the observatory. The bundles of wires on top are part of more than 50 miles of cabling laced throughout the assembly to enable different parts of the observatory to communicate with each other.NASA/Chris Gunn One reason it doesn’t weigh more is that some components have been partially hollowed out. If you could peel back some of the spacecraft’s panels, you’d find superthin metallic honeycomb sandwiched between two slim layers of metal. And many of the components, such as the antenna dish, are made of strong yet lightweight composite materials.
When the spacecraft bus was fully assembled, engineers conducted a comprehensive performance test. Prior to this, each component had been tested individually, but just like with a sports team, the whole unit has to perform well together.
“The spacecraft passed the test, and now we’re getting ready to install the payload –– Roman’s instruments and the telescope itself,” said Missie Vess, a spacecraft systems engineer for Roman at NASA Goddard. “Next year, we’ll test these systems together and begin integrating the final components of the observatory, including the deployable aperture cover, outer barrel assembly, and solar panels. Then we’ll finally have ourselves a complete observatory, on track for launch by May 2027.”
To virtually tour an interactive version of the telescope, visit:
https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/interactive
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems, Inc in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940
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Last Updated Sep 17, 2024 EditorAshley BalzerContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By Space Force
Conceding that his future as secretary is connected to the outcome of November’s election, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall used a high-profile keynote address Sept. 16 to highlight achievements modernizing and reshaping the Air Force and Space Force while also emphasizing unfinished work and the urgency driving it.
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By Space Force
The United States Space Force has partnered with the Rochester Institute of Technology and University of Michigan to research Advanced Space Power and Propulsion under the USSF University Consortium/Space Strategic Technology Institute 3.
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By NASA
A galactic halo is a loose collection of stars that extends 15 to 20 times beyond the radius of the brightest part of the galaxy. One of the few galaxies with a well-studied stellar halo is our neighbor, Andromeda, depicted here in the graphic. The stellar halo is illustrated with exaggerated brightness and density to show how far it extends. When the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, it will be able to use its wide field of view to comprehensively image many more stellar halos of more distant galaxies.
NASA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) The universe is a dynamic, ever-changing place where galaxies are dancing, merging together, and shifting appearance. Unfortunately, because these changes take millions or billions of years, telescopes can only provide snapshots, squeezed into a human lifetime.
However, galaxies leave behind clues to their history and how they came to be. NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have the capacity to look for these fossils of galaxy formation with high-resolution imaging of galaxies in the nearby universe.
Astronomers, through a grant from NASA, are designing a set of possible observations called RINGS (the Roman Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey) that would collect these remarkable images, and the team is producing publicly available tools that the astronomy community can use once Roman launches and starts taking data. The RINGS survey is a preliminary concept that may or may not be implemented during Roman’s science mission.
Roman is uniquely prepared for RINGS due to its resolution akin to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and its wide field of view – – 200 times that of Hubble in the infrared – – making it a sky survey telescope that complements Hubble’s narrow-field capabilities.
Galactic Archaeologists
Scientists can only look at brief instances in the lives of evolving galaxies that eventually lead to the fully formed galaxies around us today. As a result, galaxy formation can be difficult to track.
Luckily, galaxies leave behind hints of their evolution in their stellar structures, almost like how organisms on Earth can leave behind imprints in rock. These galactic “fossils” are groups of ancient stars that hold the history of the galaxy’s formation and evolution, including the chemistry of the galaxy when those stars formed.
These cosmic fossils are of particular interest to Robyn Sanderson, the deputy principal investigator of RINGS at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She describes the process of analyzing stellar structures in galaxies as “like going through an excavation and trying to sort out bones and put them back together.”
Roman’s high resolution will allow scientists to pick out these galactic fossils, using structures ranging from long tidal tails on a galaxy’s outskirts to stellar streams within the galaxy. These large-scale structures, which Roman is uniquely capable of capturing, can give clues to a galaxy’s merger history. The goal, says Sanderson, is to “reassemble these fossils in order to look back in time and understand how these galaxies came to be.”
Shedding Light on Dark Matter
RINGS will also enable further investigations of one of the most mysterious substances in the universe: dark matter, an invisible form of matter that makes up most of a galaxy’s mass. A particularly useful class of objects for testing dark matter theories are ultra-faint dwarf galaxies. According to Raja GuhaThakurta of the University of California, Santa Cruz, “Ultra faint dwarf galaxies are so dark matter-dominated that they have very little normal matter for star formation. With so few stars being created, ultra-faint galaxies can essentially be seen as pure blobs of dark matter to study.”
Roman, thanks to its large field of view and high resolution, will observe these ultra-faint galaxies to help test multiple theories of dark matter. With these new data, the astronomical community will come closer to finding the truth about this unobservable dark matter that vastly outweighs visible matter: dark matter makes up about 80% of the universe’s matter while normal matter comprises the remaining 20%.
Ultra-faint galaxies are far from the only test of dark matter. Often, just looking in an average-sized galaxy’s backyard is enough. Structures in the halo of stars surrounding a galaxy often give hints to the amount of dark matter present. However, due to the sheer size of galactic halos (they are often 15-20 times as big as the galaxy itself), current telescopes are deeply inefficient at observing them.
At the moment, the only fully resolved galactic halos scientists have to go on are our own Milky Way and Andromeda, our neighbor galaxy. Ben Williams, the principal investigator of RINGS at the University of Washington in Seattle, describes how Roman’s power will amend this problem: “We only have reliable measurements of the Milky Way and Andromeda, because those are close enough that we can get measurements of a large number of stars distributed across their stellar halos. So, with Roman, all of a sudden we’ll have 100 or more of these fully resolved galaxies.”
When Roman launches by May 2027, it is expected to fundamentally alter how scientists understand galaxies. In the process, it will shed some light on our own home galaxy. The Milky Way is easy to study up close, but we do not have a large enough selfie stick to take a photo of our entire galaxy and its surrounding halo. RINGS shows what Roman is capable of should such a survey be approved. By studying the nearby universe, RINGS can examine galaxies similar in size and age to the Milky Way, and shed light on how we came to be here.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems, Inc in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
By Patt Molinari
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Media contact:
Claire Andreoli
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940
Ann Jenkins
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Aug 29, 2024 EditorAshley BalzerContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Dark Matter Galaxies Stars The Universe View the full article
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