NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, now under construction, will test new technologies for space-based planet hunting. The mission aims to photograph worlds and dusty disks around nearby stars with detail up to a thousand times better than possible with other observatories.
Roman will use its Coronagraph Instrument — a system of masks, prisms, detectors, and even self-flexing mirrors built to block out the glare from distant stars and reveal the planets in orbit around them — to demonstrate that direct imaging technologies can perform even better in space than they have with ground-based telescopes.
«We will be able to image worlds in visible light using the Roman Coronagraph,» said Rob Zellem, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California who is co-leading the observation calibration plan for the instrument. JPL is building Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument. «Doing so from space will help us see smaller, older, and colder planets than direct imaging usually reveals, bringing us a giant leap closer to imaging planets like Earth.»
A home far away from home
Exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system — are so distant and dim relative to their host stars that they’re practically invisible, even to powerful telescopes. That’s why nearly all of the worlds discovered so far have been found indirectly through effects they have on their host stars. However, recent advancements in technology allow astronomers to actually take images of the reflected light from the planets themselves.
Analyzing the colors of planetary atmospheres helps astronomers discover what the atmospheres are made of. This, in turn, can offer clues about the processes occurring on the imaged worlds that may affect their habitability. Since living things modify their environment in ways we might be able to detect, such as by producing oxygen or methane, scientists hope this research will pave the way for future missions that could reveal signs of life.
Story Source: Materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Original written by Ashley Balzer. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.