NASA's Roman Space Telescope Enters Final Commissioning Phase
NASA said in a mission blog post on October 22 that its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has entered the science commissioning phase, having successfully completed a comprehensive checkout and refinement of the observatory and primary instrument performance.
"We've established that the observatory is fully functional," said Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The telescope can guide and take exposures, data flows appropriately, and we can slew from one place to another for observations. So now we're drilling into the fine details of the quality of the images we're collecting."
NASA said the commissioning process is going smoothly and the observatory has already passed several challenging tests, including observing regions packed with stars and nebulae shrouded by dense dust, where the fine guidance system performed well in all cases. The team is now performing planned test observations to characterize performance, calibrate how the instruments respond to light, and refine image quality before transitioning to science operations.
Josh Schlieder, Roman's Wide Field Instrument scientist at NASA Goddard, said a typical Roman observation will show objects a hundred million times fainter than the human eye can detect. Some of the observatory's systems are performing even better than required, NASA said, which could open up new scientific capabilities.
Source: GSM, United States
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：太空望远镜（资料图），经 Wikimedia Commons。Photo: A space telescope (file photo), via Wikimedia Commons.
