NASA’s Curious Universe podcast has a special series on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Titled “Roman Series: Jupiters Around Other Suns,” it is the second episode in the podcast’s 13th season. The first episode in this series is titled “Roman Series: NASA’s New View of the Dark Universe.”
This second episode discusses the Roman Space Telescope’s upcoming search for exoplanets, noting that space telescope is expected to discover as many as 100,000 new exoplanets within 26,000 light years from Earth. More importantly, it should be able to detect Earth-like exoplanets that have been very difficult to detect up to this point.
In the episode, Vanessa Bailey, a scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, states:
I’m quite excited, because the Nancy Grace Roman mission, one of the two cameras on board the Wide Field instrument, will use the microlensing method to get the most complete census to date of smaller planets orbiting at distances more like Earth, Mars, Jupiter, a real part of parameter space we’ve never been able to access before, and that’s what’s going to tell us, is our solar system common or rare, at least go a long way to answering that question.
The Roman Space Telescope will also analyze the light smudges represented by an exoplanet so it can learn more about the nature of that world. These smudges represent reflected light from the host sun, but it help us to identify the contents of the exoplanet’s atmosphere. And getting that smudge is a lot of work, which is described in detail in the podcast.
The podcast also discusses the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a future mission to discover even more about the atmospheres of exoplanets.
The efforts of the Roman Space Telescope should help to pave the way for the HWO and more amazing missions after that.
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