The Silicon Graybeard

In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is complete

Complete and being readied for launch in September.

I've been following the progress of the NGRST since first hearing about it in early 2022. It was first referred to as the WFIRST, Wide Field Infra Red Space Telescope, a long but descriptive name for its mission. It was renamed around that time in '22 the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope by NASA; the name pays tribute to the late NASA executive and first Chief Astronomer who was one of the driving forces in getting the Hubble Space Telescope program through its hurdles.

On Tuesday (April 21), NASA had a reveal of the NGRST at their Goddard Space Flight Center along with talks by Administrator Jared Isaacman and several others. For this:

Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, complete the final integration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's major components on Nov. 25, 2025, joining the spacecraft and telescope assemblies in the facility's largest clean room. (Image credit: NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya)

"I very much hope, and in fact, expect, that the most exciting science from Roman is going to be the things that we didn't expect, that we couldn't predict, but that will set the new deep questions for future missions to address," Julie McEnery, senior project scientist of Roman said during a press conference on Tuesday.

The NGRST is heading for the L2 Lagrange Point, currently the home of the James Webb Space Telescope, the European Union's Euclid infrared space telescope and a place for passing visitors, such as the Escapade mission on the way to Mars (bottom of that post).

NASA has chosen a Falcon Heavy to get this payload to its destination. There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches to date, with a 100% success rate for the 230-foot-tall, heavy lift vehicle. Not surprising since it's three different Falcon 9s strapped together (although the upper stage is different) and it's the most reliable vehicle ever.

Here's where it gets wild. The September launch for the NGRST is eight months ahead of schedule, and under budget. When's the last time you heard something like that? I'm not sure I ever have.

According to NASA, Roman's primary mirror measures about 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) wide, which is similar to Hubble's. However, Roman has the ability to take images that capture a patch of the sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble can.

"Its surveying capabilities are over 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and can chart 200 times more sky in a single image," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during the conference. "What would take Hubble 2,000 years to process, Roman can do in a year — the images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them."

To put that into context, over its approximately 35 years of service so far, Hubble has gathered about 400 terabytes of data; once fully operational at its workstation in space, Roman should be able to create 500 terabytes of data per year.

The collection of different space telescopes; the Hubble, James Webb, and more, allow ground based astronomers to choose the right instrument for the objects they want to study in the sky.

Compared to the JWST, Roman's images — taken with its aptly named Wide Field Instrument (WFI) — will be 50 times wider but more shallow, because Roman doesn't need to access the deep universe the way the JWST does. As we discussed, it can't see infrared like the JWST can and therefore would be wasted in looking too far back.

More specifically, WFI is composed of a 300-megapixel visible-to-near-infrared imaging camera and slitless spectrometer (a special tool that allows scientists to capture light dispersion of objects in a field of view). But there is something uniquely special about that shallow, panoramic view.

The wide and shallow field will be well suited to surveying space, not getting too much information from things that it can't look closer at.

They can just survey and hope to find a cool lead to zoom in on. This offers Roman the ability to catch events that transpire very quickly, such as fast radio bursts, and increases the chances that scientists can witness remarkable supernovas, colliding neutron stars and other easy-to-miss phenomena right as they happen.