Arriving At NASA's Goddard Facility, Wide Field Instrument Will Be Tested

The main instrument display of the Roman Telescope (photo: dock. NASA)

JAKARTA The main instrument for the Space Telescope Nancy Grace Roman has finally arrived at the Goddard Space Flight Center, one of NASA's facilities. While at Goddard, the performance of this instrument will be tested. Once the instrument component is confirmed to work as expected, this payload called Wide Field Instrument will be integrated into the instrument carriers. Furthermore, the carrier device will be paired to the telescope in the fall of this year. It is planned that the Roman Telescope will be launched in May 2027 and the Wide Field Instrument will take images with more than 300 million pixels in space. The field of view of this instrument is so wide that the results of the survey can reveal billions of cosmic objects. NASA explains that this instrument was made by a thousand people, from the early design stage to assembly. This Roman Telescope instrument was designed by workers at Goddard, BAE Systems in Boulder, Aerospace Corporation, Northrop Grumman, and much more. "I am very pleased to be able to present this extraordinary instrument," said Mary Walker, Manager of Wide Field Instrument for the Roman Telescope. "For years of hard work and team dedication have brought us to this exciting moment."

As an eye of the Roman Telescope, Wide Field Instruments are designed with high-level capabilities. These instruments have sharp resolutions and good sensitivity. While in space, these instruments will assist the Roman Telescope in studying dark matter and exoplanets. Julie McEnery, Senior Scientist of the Roman Project, said that this instrument can change the signals that enter from space. This way of working can bring new understanding of how the universe works. "To achieve its main goal, this mission will precisely measure hundreds of millions of galaxies. It is a fairly large dataset to be taken by all types of researchers, so there will be many results on a wide range of sciences," said Julie.