Inside the Roman Space Telescope NASA Launches August 30

NASA launches the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on August 30, an observatory built to survey the sky at a width that no previous mission has attempted.

Its field of view is 100 times larger than Hubble's, so in five years it should cover more than 50 times the sky Hubble managed in 30.

Roman carries the same 2.4 meter primary mirror as Hubble, paired with a Wide Field Instrument of 18 detectors holding more than 16 million pixels each.

A coronagraph nicknamed Starglasses uses two deformable mirrors and thousands of actuators to cancel a star's glare and reveal the planets beside it.

The survey should map roughly 20 billion stars, measure light from more than a billion galaxies and turn up as many as 200,000 new exoplanets.

A Falcon Heavy will carry it to Lagrange Point 2, about 1.5 million kilometers out, where its real target is the nature of dark energy.

Roman flies on hardware built to look the other way. Space.com traces its 2.4 meter mirror to telescopes the National Reconnaissance Office handed NASA, each valued at 250 million dollars, though NASA still had to replace the electronics the spy agency stripped out, and whether the gift saved money is genuinely unclear. What it bought was aperture. The cost is patience: a survey telescope earns its keep in catalogs rather than single images, so the dark energy answer arrives years after the first pictures do. NASA has launch set for August 30.