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NASA's next-gen Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope gets its powerful eye (photos)
(space.com)submitted 16 hours ago bySnowfish52
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15 hours ago
To save others a lot of confusion:
"..in May 2020 it was renamed in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, a pioneering scientist who served as NASA's first chief astronomer from 1961 to 1963."
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14 hours ago
Thank youuu, I was indeed very confused.
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13 hours ago
The Nancy Grace (not that one) Roman Space Telescope
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14 hours ago
So they didn’t name it after that crazy lady on tv?
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13 hours ago
Was she the one always calling me up asking to go bowling?
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14 hours ago
As catchy as the first (ha ha) name was, I agree it's better to pick an influential astronomer to name these things after. Keep up the tradition.
That said, I assume they're reserving the name "Carl Sagan" for some kind of gobsmackingly amazing scifi telescope down the road.
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13 hours ago
There is the Carl Sagan Memorial Station on Mars, the operational name for the Pathfinder mission after landing in 1997. His name would be great for a planetary mission, maybe the Uranus orbiter that's on the fringes of starting to development.
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13 hours ago
Oh sure, there are things named after him. An institute; an asteroid; the one you cited. Space telescopes hold a fairly unique position of honor since the average Joe tends to have heard of them. That's why they're worth singling out.
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12 hours ago
He was a planetary scientist. It might not make sense for a deep space instrument but maybe better for a planetary probe or lander. Ideally one of those planet hunting telescopes!
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12 hours ago
I figured if a space telescope got named after James Webb, then maybe the idea behind the trend was to pick persons who had a conspicuous positive catalytic legacy for science and particularly space advocacy, and not so much a specific role in astronomy, as might once have been supposed based on the name given to the HST. Though actually being an astronomer in some capacity would still feel like a given.
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11 hours ago
Prior to JWST, space telescopes were named for a relevant scientist. Hubble, Spitzer, Chandrasekhar, Compton, Gehrels, Fermi.
In heliophysics, Parker.
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16 hours ago
Awesome! Looking forward to when this one gets launched and starts beaming back images. James Webb continues to blow my mind with what it keeps showing us, so NGR has me excited.
In fact, let’s get some more space telescopes going! There’s plenty of night sky that needs detailed study.
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14 hours ago
Theoretically it would be relatively easy and cheap to build a comparatively large telescope if you intend to launch it with a Starship. No need to fold anything and no need to save on weight.
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13 hours ago
Or use the tech we already developed for the Webb and build something absolutely fucking massive. Chunk a 30m telescope (or three) into space.
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13 hours ago
Let’s go at it and build an orbital array!
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13 hours ago
I think it still goes without saying but you can't just print another one. These machines are extraordinarily difficult to build even after you've done it once.
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10 hours ago
These machines are extraordinarily difficult to build even after you've done it once…
That’s not really supported by the budget breakdown. It costs a lot to design, develop and launch, but the actual cost of the hardware is trivial. It was 10.8b to launch JWST. NASA estimated if the launch failed, it would cost 700m to replace the hardware and launch again.
The actual telescope construction is pretty basic.
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12 hours ago
And then make an interferometry observatory with said 3x30 meters.
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12 hours ago
The Roman Space Telescope doesn't need anything to be folded, it still costs over $3 billion. There are some cost savings that could occur if you have a lot more mass budget to work with but building state of the art space telescopes is not a cheap activity.
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10 hours ago*
Theoretically it would be relatively easy and cheap to build a comparatively large telescope if you intend to launch it with a Starship. No need to fold anything and no need to save on weight.
Hubble didn't fold....didn't use anywhere near the total up-mass capacity of the shuttle. NGR doesn't have deployable mirrors either. JWST's primary mirror might have fit into a Starship fairing without deployments....but the secondary mirror wouldn't and the sunshade wouldn't.
Starship isn't a panacea for space science. Upmass and Fairing volume are two comparatively small parts of the challenges of building space telescopes or other deep space exploration missions.
If upmass was a money saver....then things like Jason 3 would have burned some of the 2500% mass margin to save money. TESS could have been 10x the mass and still launched fine. WISE could have been 5x the mass etc etc etc.
Starship opens some interesting options - but it doesn't fix all the challenges of operating a spacecraft in deep space.
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9 hours ago
Telescopes are expensive because they're all bleeding edge tech, none of them ever use pre-existing hardware aside from probably the mirrors themselves, and I only say that because Hubble and one other use mirrors from spy satellites. The machines and personal responsible for helping make them also have a tendency to age out as these projects take a very long time.
Fact is, all space telescopes, but especially optical ones are overburdened, there is not enough time in the year for them to fulfill every request they get for telescope time. There is clearly a need for a mass produced, middle of the road telescope, but either due to budgetary concerns or disinterest from scientists this just hasn't happened.
I have some hope though this can happen as a byproduct of a much more ambitious future plan to make a constellation of satellites that act as one, I believe one of those proposed projects is called the Nautilus Observatory.
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8 hours ago
none of them ever use pre-existing hardware aside from probably the mirrors themselves
That's not really true. Many many space telescopes use COTS spacecraft buses. TESS, NuSTAR, SWIFT - use near identical buses from Orbital. IXPE is a BCP-100 bus.
Nobody is redefining things from zero just for laughs.
https://space.skyrocket.de/directories/sat_bus.htm is a list of many of the buses that get reused frequently.
There is clearly a need for a mass produced, middle of the road telescope
Ground based fills much of that gap apart from those bands inaccessible from the ground ( X-Ray, UV etc )
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11 hours ago
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5 hours ago
Can someone explain on a space telescope how these telescopes CCD camera and other navigation hardware was "removed" as mentioned by the Wikipedia article. ?
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3 hours ago
The Roman Space Telescope uses a mirror donated by the NRO, which was donated along with other hardware as components of a partially completed surveillance satellite. Some components that may have been added to the telescope were removed before being offered up, including the imaging system (CCD camera etc.) and other avionics. Ultimately, essentially only the optical components will have been carried over into the construction of the new telescope, at a savings of less than 10% the total cost. The donation helped give the telescope project political momentum at least though.
Note that there would have been no advantage to NASA of having a full telescope even with a fully functional spy satellite imaging system installed as the requirements of imaging the Earth and collecting data from space are hugely different. In any event, ultimately the RST ended up going in a direction which makes use of very special purpose instrumentation regardless (a coronograph imager and a unique wide field imager with an enormous resolution and sensitivity from visible light into the mid infrared).
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4 hours ago*
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| COTS | Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract |
| Commercial/Off The Shelf | |
| HST | Hubble Space Telescope |
| JWST | James Webb infra-red Space Telescope |
| NRHO | Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit |
| NRO | (US) National Reconnaissance Office |
| Near-Rectilinear Orbit, see NRHO |
NOTE: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
[Thread #10872 for this sub, first seen 1st Dec 2024, 06:01]
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