Follow-Up: NASA's Roman Space Telescope Completes Internal Instrument Alignment to a Fraction of a Hair's Breadth
WASHINGTON — NASA said on November 13 that its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has completed a key milestone, bringing its instruments into precise alignment and moving the observatory another step closer to science operations.
Roman's optics and instruments were aligned on the ground before launch, but launch vibrations, temperature changes and the lack of gravity in space can cause small shifts. Scientists have been conducting test observations to measure those shifts and update their internal map of the observatory. The Wide Field Instrument's 18 detectors must work together when locking onto guide stars, and the team observed stars and compared their positions in Roman's images with where they were expected to land.
Tony Sohn, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said Roman is now internally aligned to within a tiny fraction of a hair's breadth. Dominic Benford, Roman's program scientist at NASA Headquarters, said Roman has to be at least ten times more stable than the Hubble or Webb space telescopes.
For the Coronagraph Instrument, the team adjusted the secondary mirror, a smaller mirror connecting the telescope to the coronagraph, and all the masks and optics within the instrument. Next, they will exercise more than 3,000 small moving parts that drive the instrument's deformable mirrors, rejecting starlight step by step to reveal faint planets close to their stars — a first, if completed in space with real starlight, according to Brian Kern, an optical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
(Source: NASA)
Source: NASA
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：南希·格雷斯·罗曼太空望远镜在轨飞行示意图。美国国家航空航天局 NASA 官方发布，公共领域。 / Image: Artist's concept of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in orbit. Credit: NASA (public domain).
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