NASA Activates Roman’s Primary Instrument, Checks Out Coronagraph
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has successfully activated the Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will allow scientists to explore wide swaths of the cosmos very quickly without...
Roman’s planet imager — the Coronagraph Instrument — also stretched its digital, electronic, and mechanical “limbs” as part of an initial test after waking up earlier this month.
These steps are part of a monthslong series of calibrations and tests, as Roman continues its million-mile journey to its destination at the second Lagrange point, L2.
Each image taken by the Wide Field Instrument, or WFI, will capture a patch of the sky bigger than the apparent size of a full moon with all the sharpness of space telescopes like NASA’s Hubble. Its sweeping cosmic surveys will help scientists discover new information about planets beyond our solar system , untangle mysteries like dark energy , and map how matter is structured and distributed throughout the cosmos. The mission’s broad, crisp view will also produce an exciting new resource for a wide range of additional scientific studies .
“After years of effort to build and test the instrument on the ground, we now have confirmation that it is operational in space. This is a huge milestone for the team at Goddard, our industry teams at BAE Systems, Inc. and Teledyne, and our science centers,” said Josh Schlieder, the Wide Field Instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “There is much to do, but we are on our way to groundbreaking science.”
Before the team could activate the WFI, they had to let it rest for 10 days to dry out and decontaminate with the detectors at a relatively warm (compared to their final operating temperature) minus 85 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 65 Celsius. On the morning of Sep. 11, they turned off the instrument heater and let the WFI cool down to minus 225 Fahrenheit (minus 143 Celsius), at which point they could activate Roman’s 18 infrared detectors, which combined have a sensing area about the size of a laptop screen.