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Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

science.nasa.gov

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Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#51

Post by ralfd »

Morromist wrote: post #45
dotancohen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you see it wrong. Plans for returning humans to the surface of the moon have been being developed for longer than you've known Musk's name. The Artemis program was developed out of the Constellation program, which was initiated sometime around 2005 or 6.

How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks? Of course there have long been plans to go back to the moon because its a cool fun thing to do and whoever happens to be president would likely be well remembered for taking credit for it. That doesn't give it credibility as a useful en…

Even if it is a publicity stunt it was not lobbied by Elon Musk. Also Jeff Bezos Blue Origin got more money for the Artemis program.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#52

Post by mturmon »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #13
willis936 wrote: post #11

Part of the story is everyone being shocked at being under budget and ahead of schedule. I don't know everything, but I think this is reasonably attributable to the fact that this is a retrofit of an obsolete spy satellite. The leftovers of the security sector will be the most advanced scientific space surveyor. I have to wonder what things would look like with different priorities.

IIRC the mirror is from a spy satellite, but the chassis and electronics are all NASA.

This is true. The telescope is much more than just the primary mirror.

Roman has two science instruments, a wide-field imager (“WFI”) and a coronagraph (“CGI”) and they were both built by NASA for this purpose (optics, electronics, detectors, deformable mirrors).

The WFI optics includes filters and a prism and grism for spectroscopy, and of course the very large CCD arrays.

The coronagraph is a rather special tech demo and allows imaging of exoplanets (Jupiter-like) while blocking the light of the host star. (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/coron...). It’s a precursor to HWO which is mentioned down-thread.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#54

Post by Morromist »

ralfd wrote: post #51
Morromist wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks? Of course there have long been plans to go back to the moon because its a cool fun thing to do and whoever happens to be president would likely be well remembered for taking credit for it. That doesn't give it credibility as a useful en…

Even if it is a publicity stunt it was not lobbied by Elon Musk. Also Jeff Bezos Blue Origin got more money for the Artemis program.

I see. And how do you you know that elon, a notably close supporter of the president didn't have anything to do with the Artemis program? I notice that Chinese electric vehicles are essentially banned in the US, but probably that had nothing to do with Elon as well right? And what does it matter if Blue Origin also made money on the Artemis program?

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#56

Post by delichon »

The data, up to 1.4TB/day raw compressed, is planned to be fully open, every observation is public as soon as it is processed with no embargo. You can just download it and start looking for Rama or Oumuamua or plan your exoplanetary real estate empire or make a really big sandbox game. I at least want somebody to make me a cool screen saver.

You could easily be the first person to see a galaxy.

I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#57

Post by alsetmusic »

jibal wrote: post #49

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman P.S. I didn't post this at top level ... it was in response to a silly joke about the Romans which has since been flagged by dang ... apparently my comment was relocated to the top level but it's redundant here as this link was already given in the post (which I didn't see when I made this comment.)

Oh, thank goodness. I greatly appreciate the link. I was confused and annoyed and now I’m happy.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#58

Post by willis936 »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #13
willis936 wrote: post #11

Part of the story is everyone being shocked at being under budget and ahead of schedule. I don't know everything, but I think this is reasonably attributable to the fact that this is a retrofit of an obsolete spy satellite. The leftovers of the security sector will be the most advanced scientific space surveyor. I have to wonder what things would look like with different priorities.

IIRC the mirror is from a spy satellite, but the chassis and electronics are all NASA.

From what I can gather it is much more than just the primary mirror but the entire platform sans classified parts, which were replaced with NASA's optics and sensors.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#59

Post by ReindeerFlotill »

The Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) flight software is a surprisingly massive at over 100,000 source lines of C++ code, which is significantly larger than typical JPL payloads. It is running on a a LEON4 (SPARC) processor on a radiation-hardened Frontgrade Gaisler GR740 board, using Wind River's VxWorks.

You can read all about it in the tech deep dive here https://workshop.ipac.caltech.edu/romancgi24/talks/Day2_Fluc...

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