<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope it\u2019s remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for \u2026 finding Earth 2.0,\u201d says Brandon Creager, the instrument\u2019s lead mechanical engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).<\/p>\n
Named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA\u2019s first chief of astronomy, this new telescope will carry a roughly 300-megapixel wide-field camera that will enable it to capture images about 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope\u2019s widest exposures at a similar resolution. <\/p>\n
These capabilities will help astronomers unpack the mysterious identities of dark matter and dark energy\u2014and to detect around 100,000 new exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, whose presence can be inferred from the way they distort the starlight of more distant stars. Javier Via\u00f1a, a research scientist at Harvard who has had two projects selected for Roman\u2019s highly competitive first year of observing, compares the leap to moving from \u201cinterviewing a handful of people\u201d to \u201cconducting a global census.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another camera will use the coronagraph, blocking out a star\u2019s light as it observes one stellar system at a time. The instrument will allow astronomers an unprecedented look at the space around<\/em> stars, enabling them to see smaller, dimmer, and more close-in exoplanets. \u201cIt\u2019s giving us the ability to see planets that we haven\u2019t been able to physically see before,\u201d says Creager.<\/p>\n Coronagraphs in space aren\u2019t new. But earlier incarnations, such as those currently aboard Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, use a stationary system to block a star\u2019s blinding light. The approach does help, but it\u2019s a bit like putting your thumb over a flashlight while searching a dark room for a firefly. Though the bulb vanishes, stray glare can still escape and overwhelm the light of the insect. Inside a telescope, that glare can come from light leaking around the edges of machinery or from minuscule imperfections in mirrors and coatings that can scatter starlight into speckles. All this can hide, or even impersonate, a planet.<\/p>\n Roman\u2019s coronagraph, however, will attempt something completely unseen in space telescopes until this year: Before each observation, it will measure that leftover light and try to suppress it, a technique known as active wavefront control.<\/p>\n The telescope is able to do this because it contains two deformable mirrors. Each has a 48-by-48 checkerboard of actuators (tiny pistons) beneath a thin, deformable sheet of glass. Applying a small amount of voltage makes the actuators contract and tug their patches of mirror slightly backward, like thousands of microscopic fingers delicately sculpting a surface. <\/p>\n The effect is very subtle: Each patch of mirror can deform by up to 0.5 micrometers, or about one-fourth the size of an E. coli<\/em> bacterium, and in increments as small as approximately 10 picometers. That\u2019s about a tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom, says Ilya Poberezhskiy, the instrument\u2019s project systems engineer at JPL.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n #Shapeshifting #mirrors #NASAs #space #telescope #unveil #Jupiters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI hope it\u2019s remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for \u2026 finding Earth…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18106,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[12134,12133,12135,12138,12137,12132,908,3413,12136,909,4856,11462],"class_list":["post-18105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-active-coronagraph","tag-coronagraph","tag-exoplanets","tag-jupiters","tag-mirrors","tag-nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope","tag-nasa","tag-nasas","tag-shapeshifting","tag-space","tag-telescope","tag-unveil"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/260708_RomanCoronagraph.gif",1200,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/260708_RomanCoronagraph-150x150.gif",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/260708_RomanCoronagraph-300x150.gif",300,150,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/260708_RomanCoronagraph-768x384.gif",640,320,true],"large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/260708_RomanCoronagraph-1024x512.gif",640,320,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/260708_RomanCoronagraph.gif",1200,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/260708_RomanCoronagraph.gif",1200,600,false],"covernews-featured":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/260708_RomanCoronagraph-1024x512.gif",1024,512,true],"covernews-medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/260708_RomanCoronagraph-540x340.gif",540,340,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?author=1"},"category_info":"Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The anatomy of a vanishing trick<\/strong><\/h3>\n