The ‘Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’, whose field of view toward space is 100 times wider than that of existing flagship space telescopes currently in use by humanity, will launch in August this year. Using this telescope will, in effect, bring to space the wide-angle shooting function found on smartphone cameras. Because a wide observing field enables many celestial objects to be captured in a short time, there are expectations that it will become an important opportunity to rapidly expand human knowledge of space science.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officially announced on the 3rd (local time) that it will launch the Roman Space Telescope on August 30 this year. As component preparations progressed smoothly, the launch date was moved up by eight months from the original schedule.

That day, NASA revealed the Roman Space Telescope undergoing checks in an assembly building at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The Roman Space Telescope is comparable in size to a large trailer. It measures 12ｍ in length and 4ｍ in width.

Its most important feature is the inclusion of a high-performance camera with a very wide field of view toward space. It is 100 times the field of view of the Hubble Space Telescope, the flagship space observatory currently used to image celestial objects. Put simply, where the Hubble would have had to take 100 shots to obtain an image of a given area, the Roman Space Telescope can obtain it in a single exposure. A space telescope with such a wide field of view has not existed before.

The diameter of the primary mirror, the key light-collecting element, is 2.4ｍ on both telescopes. Thus, although the Roman Space Telescope has a much wider imaging field, the resolution of the resulting astronomical images is the same as that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA stated that it is packaging the Roman Space Telescope for transport to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After it arrives at Kennedy, NASA plans to verify that various instruments are operating normally. The agency also intends to load 1100ℓ of the attitude-control fuel ‘hydrazine’ into the telescope body.

Once this work is complete, the Roman Space Telescope will be loaded into the payload bay of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. After launch, it will travel to a point in space 1.5 million㎞ (four times the distance between the Moon and Earth) from Earth and begin its mission of observing distant celestial objects.

NASA explained that the planned mission duration is five years, but it expects the telescope could operate for up to ten years, and that it will be used to study not only exoplanets outside the Solar System but also stars, galaxies, black holes, and dark matter.