In an interview with Rohan Dua of The Global Envoy at the launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope,Deputy Associate Administrator in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC discusses the observatory’s unprecedented survey capabilities, the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, the search for exoplanets and NASA’s partnerships with the aerospace industry.
Q: The launch of the Roman Space Telescope is a momentous occasion in the history of astronomy. What are the three biggest takeaways from this mission?
Dr Mark Clampin: The big takeaway is that this is NASA’s first astrophysics telescope designed to conduct large surveys.
If you think back to the Hubble Space Telescope and Webb, they are designed to conduct very detailed studies of relatively small fields, concentrating on individual objects. But to do the science we want to do with the Roman Space Telescope, we need lots and lots of images of millions of galaxies.
That means we have to build a survey telescope. Roman will cover a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble’s every time it takes an image.
I also think this is a very important milestone for NASA science because we have built this telescope on cost, and it has come in ahead of schedule, which is very unusual.
Q: Roman is expected to advance research into dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets. How significantly could it change our understanding of these fields compared with what was possible 10 or 20 years ago?
Dr Mark Clampin: I definitely think we will make significant progress. The telescope is designed to study both dark matter and dark energy.
The only way you can really make headway is to study millions and millions of galaxies at the same time, because you need the statistics that come from observing that many objects.
This telescope will make a big impact on our understanding of the nature of dark energy, and it will also help us understand the nature of dark matter.
Q: How will Roman change the way scientists search for planets beyond our solar system?
Mark Clampin: At NASA, we have done a lot of work looking for transiting exoplanets, but they represent a relatively small percentage of all the planets that are out there.
In science, we call that a bias effect or a selection effect, because we are looking where we know we can find planets through a particular kind of observation.
Roman will instead look towards the Galactic Centre, where there are millions of stars. Using observations based on gravitational microlensing, we can build a census of what planetary systems look like around other stars.
We have learned that some stars have a multitude of planets, while others have only one or two. But we do not yet have that big picture.
If I look at a star in the sky, how many planets will it have, and what does its planetary system look like? This telescope will give us an answer to that for the first time.
Q: NASA’s partnership with SpaceX and other private-sector companies has become increasingly important. How critical are these industry collaborations to the success of a mission like Roman?
Mark Clampin: When we build a NASA science mission, partnerships are ingrained in everything we do. Every mission we build involves working with industry.
For this telescope, we worked with the BAE Systems group in Boulder, Colorado, which built the camera. We also worked closely with L3Harris.
For the coronagraph, we worked with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which collaborated with a number of smaller companies to put together the mirrors and sensors.
Every time we build something, we work with industry. And, of course, we have been launching with SpaceX for a long time now, for as long as I have been coming to these launches. We have been partners with SpaceX for a long time as well.
Q: Hubble has already established an extraordinary legacy, while the James Webb Space Telescope has taken astronomy further. How would you like Hubble to be remembered, and what legacy do you hope Roman will leave behind?
Dr Mark Clampin: I think Hubble has already written its own legacy. The Hubble legacy is the deep-field observations, which really gave us our first insight into the early stages of the universe.
It also told us that we needed to build the Webb Space Telescope to understand what happened when galaxies were formed.
Roman is really going to give us the insight we need into dark energy and dark matter
