Today, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched. It made it through several funding cuts, the likely reason being that it’s one of Nasa’s most important science missions. The Roman space telescope will have less resolution than the James Webb Space Telescope, but it’ll be able to survey a larger area of the sky.
Like the JWST, it will be positioned between the Earth and the Sun at a Lagrange point (L2). In this position, it will be able to orbit the sun at the one-year period that the Earth, so that its position relative to Earth will remain relatively unchanged. L2 is 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, with is four times as far than the Moon. The advantage of being that far from Earth, rather than in Low Earth Orbit like the Hubble telescope, is that there’s much less noise and temperature variation. Also, Earth is not in the way blocking half the sky. The Roman should reach L2 by the end of September and start science operations before the end of the year.
Here is Paul Gilster on Centauri Dreams. Here is Adam Kovac in the Scientific American talking about the Roman’s science mission.
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