NASA on Tuesday unveiled a new telescope to scan vast swathes of the universe in search of planets beyond our solar system and to explore the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, UNN reports with reference to AFP.
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The Roman Space Telescope is expected to discover tens of thousands of planets, possibly clarifying how many there might be.
"Roman will give Earth a new atlas of the universe," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman at a press conference at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, USA, where the telescope was unveiled.
The 12-meter silver device with massive solar panels will be delivered to Florida before being launched into space aboard a SpaceX rocket, scheduled no earlier than September.
Roman, which took more than $4 billion and over a decade to build, is named after astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who was dubbed the "Mother of Hubble" for her role in developing that iconic space telescope.
Thirty-six years after Hubble's launch into space revolutionized astronomical observations, NASA hopes Roman will help shed light on questions that remain unanswered.
With a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble's, the telescope will cover vast areas of space from its position 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
The telescope will send 11 terabytes of data to Earth per day, said Mark Melton, a systems engineer at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
"In the first year, we will send more data than Hubble will receive in its entire lifetime," he told AFP.
The telescope's wide-angle lens will allow NASA to conduct a census of the objects that make up our universe, said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
"Roman will discover tens of thousands of new planets beyond our solar system. It will detect billions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae, and tens of billions of stars," she said.
This vast amount of information will allow NASA to identify interesting areas that can then be explored with additional telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope.
But Roman will also study the invisible – dark matter and dark energy, whose origins remain unknown but are believed to make up 95 percent of our universe.
Dark matter is thought to be the glue that holds galaxies together, while dark energy stretches them apart, causing the universe to expand faster and faster over time.
Thanks to its infrared vision, the telescope will be able to observe light emitted by celestial bodies billions of years ago, effectively looking back in time to, hopefully, learn more about these two phenomena.
Complementing the work of the European Space Telescope Euclid and the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, Roman will explore "how dark matter is structured throughout cosmic time" and "calculate how fast galaxies are moving away from us," Darryl Seligman, associate professor of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University, told AFP.
These discoveries could fundamentally change our understanding of the structure of our universe, said astrophysicist Julie McEnery, who led the Roman project.
"If Roman ever wins a Nobel Prize, it will likely be for something we haven't even thought about or questioned yet," Melton said.
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