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Roman Space Telescope – The Resolution of Hubble with a 100 Times Larger Field of View

Posted by Guy Pirro 01/12/2021 07:59PM

Roman Space Telescope – The Resolution of Hubble with a 100 Times Larger Field of View

In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope stared at a blank patch of the sky for 10 straight days. The resulting Deep Field image captured thousands of previously unseen, distant galaxies. Similar observations have followed since then, including the longest and deepest exposures, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and the eXtreme Deep Field. Now, astronomers are looking ahead to the future, and the possibilities enabled by NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2025. The Roman Space Telescope will be able to photograph an area of sky 100 times larger than Hubble with the same exquisite sharpness. As a result, a Roman Ultra Deep Field would collect millions of galaxies, including hundreds that date back to just a few hundred million years after the big bang. Such an observation would fuel new investigations into multiple science areas, from the structure and evolution of the universe to star formation over cosmic time.


Comments:

  • TonyS [Anatoly Sharfman]
  • 01/12/2021 10:53PM
The part about the same resolution as Hubble is not entirely true. That's mostly true for the IR channel. It's not true for the UV and Visual channel where if I remember correctly Hubble has 3 times the resolution of IR.

Anatoly:

Thanks for pointing that out.

You are correct in that the Roman Space Telescope will image the Universe in the infrared part of the spectrum.

Before it was re-named the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope it was called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). It had "Infrared" in its name.

Thanks,

Guy
  • TonyS [Anatoly Sharfman]
  • 01/13/2021 04:09AM
Cheers Guy, and great article!