NASA Switches on Roman Telescope's Main Camera and Says It Works in Space
NASA has switched on the main camera of its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and says it is working in space. The agency's team activated the Wide Field Instrument on the morning of Sept. 11.
The camera is a 300-megapixel infrared imager, and NASA says each image will cover a patch of sky larger than the apparent size of a full moon, with the sharpness of a space telescope like Hubble. It will be used for surveys of planets around other stars, of dark energy and of how matter is spread through the cosmos.
To activate it, the team turned off the instrument's heater and let it cool to minus 225 °F, or minus 143 °C, at which point Roman's 18 infrared detectors could be switched on. Over the following days, engineers sent test data to the ground and checked the instrument's focus mechanism. Those checks confirmed the camera is working as expected.
"After years of effort to build and test the instrument on the ground, we now have confirmation that it is operational in space," said Josh Schlieder, the Wide Field Instrument scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He called the activation "a huge milestone" for Goddard and the mission's industry and science partners.
Roman's other instrument, a coronagraph that blocks a star's glare to reveal faint planets around it, separately passed a first functional test. Operators at Caltech's IPAC center in Pasadena, California, confirmed they can command its components remotely. Eric Cady, the optical engineer leading the coronagraph's commissioning at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said it is now sitting idle with its detectors warm so that water and trace chemicals come off its surfaces. "This will continue for 30 days, with occasional stops to do other early calibration activities," he said.
No science data has been returned yet. NASA also reported on Sept. 14 that fuel savings had doubled the mission's potential lifetime. The observatory is still traveling toward its operating point about a million miles from Earth, and NASA expects the first science images by early 2027.
