Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: Imagine stepping outside tonight, right, and you hold up a single,
Speaker 2: tiny grain of sand at arm's length against the night sky.
Speaker 3: Oh h, that's a classic way to visualize it, right, So.
Speaker 2: That minuscule speck, that almost invisible fraction of the cosmos,
Speaker 2: that's roughly the area that the Hubble Space telescope can
Speaker 2: observe in a single exposure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just a tiny, tiny pinprick of the sky exactly.
Speaker 2: Now, imagine if you could just swap out that grain
Speaker 2: of sand for a patch of sky larger than the
Speaker 2: entire full moon, and in one single snapshot you capture
Speaker 2: the precise location, the chemical composition, the age of every
Speaker 2: single galaxy, every start, every photon within that massive expanse.
Speaker 3: Wait, I mean it's a staggering leap in capability, it
Speaker 3: really is.
Speaker 2: And the crazy thing is that light is happening right now.
Speaker 2: It is mid May twenty twenty six. If you're listening
Speaker 2: to this right now, I want you to project yourself
Speaker 2: forward just a few short months.
Speaker 4: What's to September?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Picture the humid, salty air of the Florida
Speaker 2: coast in early September. You're standing on the grassy shores
Speaker 2: near Cape Canaveral, and you're looking across the water at
Speaker 2: Launch Complex thirty nine A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center,
Speaker 2: the historic pad, Yeah, the one with all the history.
Speaker 2: And sitting on that pad is a SpaceX Falcon heavy rocket,
Speaker 2: which is just this absolute behemoth of aerospace engineering, venting
Speaker 2: those clouds of white vapor into the morning sky.
Speaker 3: It's quite a sight.
Speaker 2: It's incredible. But the real story, you know, it isn't
Speaker 2: the millions of pounds of thrust waiting to ignite. The
Speaker 2: real story is tucked inside the payload faring at the
Speaker 2: very top of that rocket.
Speaker 3: Right the payload itself.
Speaker 2: We are talking about ten five hundred kilograms of the
Speaker 2: most exquisitely sensitive optical and engineering technology ever assembled. That
Speaker 2: payload is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Speaker 3: It really is an incredible machine.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this, because we are standing on the
Speaker 2: absolute precipice of a monumental event in astrophysics. We're going
Speaker 2: to break down exactly what is inside that payload faring,
Speaker 2: explore the mind bending physics it's built to exploit, and
Speaker 2: really understand why this specific observatory is going to fundamentally
Speaker 2: rewrite our understanding of reality.
Speaker 3: What's fascinating here is actually the timeline itself. That's where
Speaker 3: this story takes its first really extraordinary turn. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: the schedule, right, Because in the realm of flagship aerospace projects,
Speaker 3: I mean endeavors that involve thousands of brilliant minds and
Speaker 3: billions of dollars and cutting edge, never before flown technology,
Speaker 3: schedules are well, they're historically treated as rough suggestions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, launching in twenty two money usually means maybe twenty.
Speaker 4: Twenty four exactly.
Speaker 3: Projects of this scale almost universally face delays. The engineering
Speaker 3: challenges are simply too complex and the unknowns are just
Speaker 3: too vast. Yet, NASA made a formal structural commitment to
Speaker 3: deliver the Roman Space Telescope no later than May of
Speaker 3: twenty twenty seven, which is next year, right, But the
Speaker 3: fact that we are sitting here in mid May twenty
Speaker 3: twenty six actively targeting an early September launch means the
Speaker 3: observatory is tracking roughly eight months.
Speaker 4: Ahead of schedule.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is a staggering administrative and engineering triumph. I
Speaker 3: mean it is almost without precedent and modern space exploration
Speaker 3: to deliver a generational, flagship class scientific instrument not just early,
Speaker 3: but remarkably under its projected budget.
Speaker 2: That is exactly the point where my brain just sort
Speaker 2: of stutters a bit.
Speaker 3: It's hard to process, honestly, Right.
Speaker 2: A flagship space telescope coming in under budget and ahead
Speaker 2: of schedule feels like a complete violation of the laws
Speaker 2: of physics before the telescope even gets off the ground.
Speaker 4: A way to put it, It's like it's.
Speaker 2: Like hiring a contractor to completely gut and remodel your kitchen,
Speaker 2: and not only do they finish the job three months early,
Speaker 2: but they also hand you a check for the materials
Speaker 2: they didn't end up.
Speaker 4: Needing, which never happens never, except.
Speaker 2: In this scenario. The kitchen costs several billion dollars, requires
Speaker 2: materials that barely exist, and it's going to be parked
Speaker 2: a million miles away in the lethal vacuum of outer space.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the steaks are just slightly higher than a kitchen remodel.
Speaker 2: Just a little bit. So how did the teams actually
Speaker 2: pull this off? Like, how did we arrive at this
Speaker 2: incredibly advantageous vantage point today?
Speaker 3: Well, to appreciate how they accomplish this, you really have
Speaker 3: to look at the meticulous, frankly grueling gauntlet of milestones
Speaker 3: the teams at NASA and their commercial partners navigated over
Speaker 3: the past few years. A pivotal moment, like the true
Speaker 3: turning point was November twenty fifth, twenty twenty five. That
Speaker 3: was the day final assembly was completed inside the massive
Speaker 3: ultrasterile clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Speaker 3: Green Belt, Maryland.
Speaker 2: And building something like this in a clean room, that's
Speaker 2: not just you know, wearing a hairnet.
Speaker 3: Oh no, No, the assembly phase is essentially a high
Speaker 3: stakes microscopic ballet. You are marrying the delicate, precision aligned
Speaker 3: optical systems and sensors with the rugged spacecraft.
Speaker 2: Bus, the bus being like the frame.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, the structural spine that provides power, propulsion, and communication.
Speaker 3: And in a clean room like that the air is
Speaker 3: aggressively filtered to remove particles down to a fraction of
Speaker 3: a micron. Wow, technicians operate in full body suits, the
Speaker 3: bunny suits, because literally, a single rogue eyelash or a
Speaker 3: microscopic flake of dead skins settling on a primary mirror
Speaker 3: can permanently degrade the scientific return.
Speaker 2: That is so stressful to even think about.
Speaker 3: Right. But once that final bolt was torqued and the
Speaker 3: integration was complete in late twenty twenty five, the intellectual
Speaker 3: challenge shifted into a phase of sheer physical brutality.
Speaker 2: Which is the environmental test.
Speaker 3: Exactly, environmental test.
Speaker 2: Right, because building a master piece of delicate optics is
Speaker 2: only step one. Step two is proving that your masterpiece
Speaker 2: won't instantly shatter into a billion pieces when you strap
Speaker 2: it to the top of a controlled chemical explosion, which is,
Speaker 2: let's be honest, precisely what the Falcon heavy launch vehicle is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a giant bomb that goes up. So environmental
Speaker 3: testing is the ultimate crucible. It is the phase where
Speaker 3: you intentionally torture your own creation.
Speaker 2: You torture it.
Speaker 3: Literally. It begins with acoustic and vibration simulations. They take
Speaker 3: this fragile, perfectly aligned instrument, suspend it and subject it
Speaker 3: to mechanical vibrations that perfectly replicate the violent, bone rattling
Speaker 3: ascent of the rocket pushing through the Earth's atmosphere.
Speaker 2: So they shake it violently.
Speaker 3: One yes, but the acoustic testing is arguably even more visceral.
Speaker 2: Oh really sound?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: They place the observatory in a specialized acoustic chamber. It's
Speaker 3: essentially a room lined with massive, specialized nitrogen driven horns.
Speaker 2: Okay, wait, like speakers.
Speaker 3: Huge speakers, and they blast the spacecraft with sound waves
Speaker 3: so incredibly intense, often exceeding one hundred and forty decibels,
Speaker 3: that if a human were standing in that room unprotected,
Speaker 3: the acoustic energy would cause immediate catastrophic physical trauma.
Speaker 2: Wait, one hundred and forty decibels, that's what like standing
Speaker 2: next to a jet engine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's lethal sound. They are blasting the telescope with
Speaker 3: literal walls of sound to prove that the sheer roar
Speaker 3: of the rocket engines won't shatter the glass mirrors or
Speaker 3: shake the microscopic solder joints on the circuit boards.
Speaker 2: Apart, I just I cannot imagine the physiological stress of
Speaker 2: being an engineer in the control room during that test.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's terrifying.
Speaker 2: You've spent a decade of your life designing this singular,
Speaker 2: irreplaceable object and you have to sit behind thick glass
Speaker 2: and watch as it gets battered by lethal sound waves,
Speaker 2: just praying that your.
Speaker 3: Math was right and you just have to wait and see.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if it survives the sound, then it has
Speaker 2: to survive the total absence of it. Yeah, go straight
Speaker 2: into thermal vac chamber, which I have always found to
Speaker 2: be the most intimidating concept in spacecraft engineering.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the thermal vacuum test or TVAC. It's an entirely
Speaker 3: different kind of extreme because space is not a friendly,
Speaker 3: stable environment, definitely not. When a telescope is in orbit,
Speaker 3: the side facing the sun is baking an intense, unfiltered
Speaker 3: solar radiation, while the shadowed side is plunged into the
Speaker 3: unimaginably frigid temperatures of the cosmic void, you know, hovering
Speaker 3: just a few degrees above absolute zero.
Speaker 2: Which is what like minus four to fifty fahrenheit or
Speaker 2: something roughly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So to simulate this, engineers lock the fully assembled
Speaker 3: observatory inside a massive, multi story steel vault a vault, yeah,
Speaker 3: and they pump out the atmosphere to create a high
Speaker 3: vacuum entirely removing air pressure and convection. Then, using cryogenic
Speaker 3: liquid nitrogen shrouds and intense thermal lamps, they plunge the
Speaker 3: spacecraft into extreme temperature swings, soaking it in heat and
Speaker 3: then freezing it.
Speaker 4: And this isn't just for a couple hours, No, this
Speaker 4: phase lasts for weeks, weeks, weeks.
Speaker 3: The primary goal is to ensure that the disparate materials,
Speaker 3: you know, the carbon fiber, the aluminum, the glass, the titanium,
Speaker 3: that they don't expand and contract at rates that would
Speaker 3: warp the structure.
Speaker 2: Because if the glass shrinks more than the aluminum.
Speaker 3: Exactly, the mirrors could crack or the optical alignments could drift.
Speaker 3: They have to prove that the alignments remain flawlessly true
Speaker 3: down to the nanometer, even when the entire machine is
Speaker 3: operating in a deep freeze.
Speaker 2: And Roman passed this.
Speaker 3: Roman endured the scontlet and passed with flying colors. That
Speaker 3: absolute validation is what led to the April twenty twenty
Speaker 3: six media event at Goudard where NASA officially showcased the
Speaker 3: integrated observatory and confirmed this highly accelerated September launch target.
Speaker 2: Which brings us right to this exact moment. It is
Speaker 2: mid May. The telescope is sitting at Godard right now
Speaker 2: undergoing its absolute final close out, the final checks. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're running the ultimate system verifications. They're conducting deployment tests
Speaker 2: right like commanding the solar raised unfold, testing the deployment
Speaker 2: mechanisms for the high gain antennas.
Speaker 3: Because in Spacelight you only get one shot.
Speaker 2: Exactly if a solar array gets stuck halfway open a
Speaker 2: million miles from Earth, there is no astronaut repair crew
Speaker 2: you can call. You can't just jiggle the handle. It
Speaker 2: has to work perfectly the very first time.
Speaker 3: And that's why they test it one hundred times.
Speaker 4: On the ground.
Speaker 2: Right, So all of this testing is the preamble to
Speaker 2: next month. In mid June twenty twenty six, they're going
Speaker 2: to carefully load this multi billion dollar masterpiece into a
Speaker 2: custom built environmentally controlled shipping container, put it on a
Speaker 2: specialized transporter, and carefully drive it down to the Kennedy
Speaker 2: Space Center in Florida.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the road trip and the arrival at Kennedy represents
Speaker 3: the final terrestrial chapter for the Roman Space Telescope.
Speaker 2: So what happens when it actually gets to Florida, Well.
Speaker 3: When it gets to Florida next month, it will be
Speaker 3: wheeled into the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility commonly known as
Speaker 3: the PHSF the PHSF okay, And this facility is exactly
Speaker 3: what its name implies. It is where the most critical
Speaker 3: and often the most dangerous, final processing occurs. The telescope
Speaker 3: will undergo another round of meticulous.
Speaker 2: Cleaning because it's been on a truck, right.
Speaker 3: And technicians will install the final thermal protection blankets, securing
Speaker 3: the multi layer insulation that looks like you know, shiny
Speaker 3: gold foil but is actually highly engineered captain and mylar.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, that classic gold foil look on satellites exactly.
Speaker 3: Then comes the hazardous part loading the propellants. The spacecraft
Speaker 3: relies on highly toxic chemicals like hydrozene for its thrusters
Speaker 3: so it can maintain its orientation and orbit.
Speaker 2: Hydrozene is nasty stuff, right.
Speaker 3: It is incredibly dangerous. The technicians performing this fueling must
Speaker 3: wear heavy, fully encapsulated scape suits wait scape suits, yeah,
Speaker 3: self contained atmospheric protective ensembles because hydrozene vapor is lethal.
Speaker 3: Just breathing a tiny amount can be fatal.
Speaker 2: Oh wow. Okay, so they're in full hasmag gear fueling
Speaker 2: this thing. Yep.
Speaker 3: And once the tanks are fueled and the final end
Speaker 3: to end electrical checks are completed, the observatory will be
Speaker 3: enclosed in the aerodynamic payload firing and physically made it
Speaker 3: to the Falcon heavy rocket.
Speaker 2: Okay, So when we talk about putting this machine into
Speaker 2: the firing, we really need to examine the hardware itself.
Speaker 2: The beating heart of the Roman space telescope is a
Speaker 2: two point four meter primary mirror.
Speaker 3: That's the core of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and for anyone who follows the history of space exploration,
Speaker 2: that specific number two point four meters that should trigger
Speaker 2: immediate recognition. That is the exact diameter of the primary
Speaker 2: mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Speaker 3: The exact same size.
Speaker 2: Because of this, you constantly hear Roman referred to in
Speaker 2: the press as the super Hubble, but from an engineering standpoint,
Speaker 2: calling it that almost feels like an under sell.
Speaker 3: I would agree with that. The two point four meter
Speaker 3: mirror is a fascinating piece of aerospace heritage. The mirror
Speaker 3: is identical in size to Hubbles, which, don't get me wrong,
Speaker 3: is an extraordinary light gathering bucket.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure.
Speaker 3: Hubble has provided us with some of the most profound,
Speaker 3: deeply moving images in human history. However, its view of
Speaker 3: the universe is fundamentally constrained by its optical design. Looking
Speaker 3: through Hubble is essentially like looking at the night sky
Speaker 3: through a very long, very narrow soda straw.
Speaker 2: The soda straw, yeah.
Speaker 3: It provides breathtaking, high resolution detail, but only of a
Speaker 3: microscopic pinpoint fraction of the sky at any one moment. Roman, conversely,
Speaker 3: is built from the ground up for panoramic wide area surveys.
Speaker 2: Okay, and this is the exact mechanism I want to
Speaker 2: break down. If the mirror gathering the light is the
Speaker 2: exact same size as Hubbles, why is the picture coming
Speaker 2: out the other end exponentially larger.
Speaker 3: It's all about what happens after the mirror, right.
Speaker 2: How are the engineers bouncing that light differently to give
Speaker 2: us a massive panoramic view, but without sacrificing that razor
Speaker 2: sharp Hubble like clarity. Here's where it gets really interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So to understand how they achieve this, we have
Speaker 3: to look at the evolution of optical engineering and the
Speaker 3: way light is manipulated after it hits that primary mirror.
Speaker 3: Hubble was designed as a cast grain telescope with a
Speaker 3: very long focal length. It was built specifically to zoom
Speaker 3: in tightly on small, distant.
Speaker 2: Targets, like zooming in with a telephoto lens on a
Speaker 2: camera exactly.
Speaker 3: But Roman employs a completely different optical prescription known as
Speaker 3: a three mirror and a stigmatima. Yeah, and the challenge
Speaker 3: in any telescope is that a curved mirror naturally creates
Speaker 3: optical distortions. Light bouncing off the edges of a curved
Speaker 3: mirror focuses differently than light bouncing off the center, which
Speaker 3: causes something called spherical aberration.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the image gets blurry right.
Speaker 3: And off axis light can look stretched or comet shaped,
Speaker 3: a flaw known as coma. And then you have a
Speaker 3: stigmatism where the focal point changes depending on the plane
Speaker 3: of the light, just.
Speaker 2: Like a stigmatism in a human eye.
Speaker 3: Very similar. Yes, so Roman uses a complex arrangement of
Speaker 3: secondary and tertiary mirrors to perfectly correct all three of
Speaker 3: these aberrations. Spherical aberration, coma, an astigmatism simultaneously.
Speaker 2: That is some serious math.
Speaker 3: It's brilliant engineering. But the crucial innovation happens at the
Speaker 3: focal plane, the area at the back of the telescope
Speaker 3: where the camera sensors sit. Romans optics physically flatten the
Speaker 3: curved field of light gathered by the primary mirror. They
Speaker 3: flatten the light, they flatten the focal plane. By flattening
Speaker 3: that focal plane, engineers can array a massive grid of
Speaker 3: flat digital detectors across it. This allows Roman to capture
Speaker 3: a field of view that is roughly one hundred times.
Speaker 4: Larger than Hubbles one hundred times.
Speaker 3: One hundred times. To put that into a visual perspective,
Speaker 3: Roman can capture an area of the sky larger than
Speaker 3: the physical size of the full moon in a single
Speaker 3: incredibly crisp exposure, maintaining the exact same high resolution clarity
Speaker 3: as Hubble across visible and near infrared wavelengths.
Speaker 2: A single picture that captures an area larger than the
Speaker 2: full moon. When you consider that it takes Hubble hundreds
Speaker 2: of individual, painstakingly pointed exposures stitched together over weeks just
Speaker 2: to capture a fraction of that area. The scale of
Speaker 2: Roman is just.
Speaker 3: Staggering changes the game entirely.
Speaker 2: But capturing that flattened light requires an incredibly sophisticated net.
Speaker 2: To catch it right, you need some serious hardware strapped
Speaker 2: at the back of those mirrors. That brings us to
Speaker 2: the actual scientific instruments bolted into the spacecraft, the wide
Speaker 2: Field Instrument or the WFI and the chronograph instrument the CGI.
Speaker 4: The two main war courses.
Speaker 2: Let's look the main warhourse first, the WFI. The specifications
Speaker 2: on this thing read like science fiction. We're talking about
Speaker 2: three hundred megapixel visible and near infrared camera and spectrometer.
Speaker 2: It covers wavelengths from point four to eight to two
Speaker 2: point three micrometers.
Speaker 3: Which is a huge range.
Speaker 2: It uses eight specific imaging filters, plus things called grism
Speaker 2: and prism assemblies for slitless spectroscopy, and the focal plane
Speaker 2: itself is composed of eighteen H four RG ten detectors.
Speaker 3: Yeah, those dense technical specifications are the engine of that
Speaker 3: super hubble capability we were talking.
Speaker 2: About, So break those down for us.
Speaker 3: Let's start with those eighteen detectors. The H four RG
Speaker 3: ten s enswers are the absolute pinnacle of infrared digit
Speaker 3: sensing technology. Developed out of advanced material science. They are
Speaker 3: made from mercury cadmium telluride mercury cadmium telluride yes, and
Speaker 3: this specific semiconductor material allows engineers to tune the band gap.
Speaker 2: The band gap, what's that?
Speaker 3: It's basically the amount of energy required to kick an
Speaker 3: electron loose and register a signal on the sensor. By
Speaker 3: tuning it perfectly, these sensors can detect incredibly faint, low
Speaker 3: energy infrared.
Speaker 4: Photons, so they can see the faintest light possible exactly.
Speaker 3: But the catch is thermal noise. If the sensor itself
Speaker 3: is warm, the heat energy of the sensor will knock
Speaker 3: electrons loose, creating static that drowns out the faint starlight.
Speaker 2: Ah the sensor's own body heat.
Speaker 4: Blinds it precisely.
Speaker 3: That is why the WFI operates at cryogenic temperatures. These
Speaker 3: eighteen massive detectors, providing three hundred megapixels of resolution, are
Speaker 3: super cooled to hundreds of degrees below zero.
Speaker 2: Wait, okay, so eighteen of these sensors three hundred megapixels
Speaker 2: For you listening right now, imagine taping hundreds of top
Speaker 2: tier smartphone sensors together super cooling them and asking them
Speaker 2: to count individual photons from billions of light years away.
Speaker 3: That's a really great way to think about it. And
Speaker 3: doing that gives Roman a zero point two eight square
Speaker 3: degree field of view with an astonishing resolution of point
Speaker 3: one to one arc seconds.
Speaker 2: Okay, point one to one arc seconds. How detailed is that?
Speaker 3: Well? To give you context, an arcsecond is a unit
Speaker 3: of angular measurement. There are three thousand, six hundred arc
Speaker 3: seconds in a single degree.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, so a degree is tiny and there's a
Speaker 2: fraction of a fraction.
Speaker 3: Right, Achieving point one to one arc second resolution across
Speaker 3: a massive, flattened focal plane is mathematically brilliant. It means
Speaker 3: Roman can take one shot and cleanly resolve the distinct
Speaker 3: individual structures of billions of stars and galaxies across a
Speaker 3: massive swath of space.
Speaker 2: That is chest, it's wild. So we have an array
Speaker 2: of super cooled, ultra sensitive sensors cleanly catching billions of photons.
Speaker 2: But you also mentioned grisms and prisms for slitless spectroscopy.
Speaker 4: Yes, the grisms spectroscopy.
Speaker 2: Is how we determine what things are made of by
Speaker 2: looking at their light. But what exactly does it mean
Speaker 2: to do it slitless and frankly, what is agrism?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 3: So spectroscopy is fundamentally the science of splitting light into
Speaker 3: its component colors, like a prism, casting a rainbow like
Speaker 3: the Pink Floyd album cover exactly like that, and by
Speaker 3: looking at which specific colors or wave links are missing
Speaker 3: from that rainbow, we can tell exactly what chemical elements
Speaker 3: the light passed through.
Speaker 4: It's like a barcode, yes, a chemical barkote.
Speaker 3: Traditional spectroscopy in astronomy uses a physical mask with a
Speaker 3: tiny slit in it. You pourt the telescope, put the
Speaker 3: target star directly in the slit to block out all
Speaker 3: surrounding light and analyze just that one object.
Speaker 2: Highly precise, but I'm guessing very slow.
Speaker 3: Incredibly slow. You can only analyze one thing at a time. Agrism, however,
Speaker 3: is a hybrid optical element. It's a combination of a
Speaker 3: grating and a prism.
Speaker 2: Grating plus prism equals grism.
Speaker 3: You got it. In slitless spectroscopy, Roman slides the grism
Speaker 3: into the optical path instead of blocking out the sky,
Speaker 3: the grizzm takes the light from every single star and
Speaker 3: every single galaxy, and that massive moon size field of
Speaker 3: view and simultaneously smears each point of light into its
Speaker 3: own tiny individual rainbow.
Speaker 2: Wait, if you take millions of points of light and
Speaker 2: a single image and smear them all into little rainbows,
Speaker 2: doesn't that just create a chaotic, overlapping mess of color?
Speaker 2: How do you read anything in that?
Speaker 3: That is exactly the engineering hurdle. It's literally known as
Speaker 3: the overlap problem. Because you are smearing millions of spectra simultaneously,
Speaker 3: they will inevitably overlap.
Speaker 4: On the detector.
Speaker 2: So how do you fix it?
Speaker 3: The solution is computational. Roman will take an image with
Speaker 3: the grism aligned in one direction and then rotate the
Speaker 3: telescope slightly and take another, and then another. Ah yeah,
Speaker 3: And by using advanced algorithms to compare how the overlapping
Speaker 3: smears shift at different angles, supercomputers on Earth can mathematically
Speaker 3: disentangle the spectra. It allows Roman to gather the chemical
Speaker 3: fingerprints and the exact distances of millions of galaxies simultaneously,
Speaker 3: rather than painstakingly analyze them one by one. It turns
Speaker 3: the telescope into a cosmic assembly line for data.
Speaker 2: That is nuts. It's like taking a single photograph of
Speaker 2: a crowded stadium of one hundred thousand people and through
Speaker 2: some digital sorcery, instantly extracting the complete DNA sequence of
Speaker 2: every single person in the crowd simultaneously without having to
Speaker 2: swab a single cheek.
Speaker 3: That is a perfect analogy.
Speaker 2: That is what the WFI is doing. But that is
Speaker 2: only the primary instrument. The second instrument on board, the
Speaker 2: Chronograph Instrument or CGI, is built by NASA as a
Speaker 2: technology demonstrator, but looking at the physics involved, it seems
Speaker 2: less like a demonstration and more like they are trying
Speaker 2: to perform active magic.
Speaker 3: Honestly, it kind of is. The chronograph instrument is arguably
Speaker 3: one of the most mechanically and optically complex devices ever
Speaker 3: slated for spaceflight.
Speaker 4: Really, oh absolutely.
Speaker 3: A chronograph's fundamental job is to block the blinding, overwhelming
Speaker 3: light of a host star so that a telescope can
Speaker 3: detect the incredibly faint objects orbiting.
Speaker 4: Right next to it, like an exoplanet, like.
Speaker 3: An exoplanet or a usty circumstellar debris disc. The core
Speaker 3: problem is the contrast ratio. Trying to directly image an
Speaker 3: exoplanet orbitting its star is frequently compared to trying to
Speaker 3: spot a single firefly hovering right next to the beam
Speaker 3: of a coastal lighthouse while looking at it from across
Speaker 3: the ocean. That sounds literally impossible, because the star can
Speaker 3: be hundreds of millions or even billions of times brighter
Speaker 3: than the planet reflecting its light.
Speaker 2: Right. And the problem isn't just the sheer brightness, right,
Speaker 2: it's the physics of light itself.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Light acts like a wave. Yes, So when it enters
Speaker 2: the telescope and hits the edges of the primary mirror
Speaker 2: or the internal support struts, it doesn't just travel in
Speaker 2: a perfectly straight line. It bends, It ripples, It.
Speaker 4: Diffracts exactly diffraction, and that creates.
Speaker 2: An optical glare, a complex pattern of halos and spikes
Speaker 2: that completely washes out the tiny, faint light of the planet.
Speaker 2: You can't just stick a physical thumb over the star
Speaker 2: in the image and expect the planet to suddenly become
Speaker 2: visible because the diffracted starlight is scattered everywhere.
Speaker 3: Is It's the exact nightmare of high contrast imaging. The
Speaker 3: scattered diffracted light creates a speckle pattern that perfectly mimics
Speaker 3: the appearance of planets. You can't tell what's a speckle
Speaker 3: and what's a world?
Speaker 2: So how does the CGI beat that?
Speaker 3: To solve this, the CGI doesn't just rely on physical masks.
Speaker 3: It utilizes an advanced starlight suppression system built around dual
Speaker 3: deformable mirrors.
Speaker 2: Deformable mirrors.
Speaker 3: Yeah, these are not rigid pieces of glass. A deformable
Speaker 3: mirror has a reflective surface mounted on top of thousands
Speaker 3: of microscopic computer controlled piezoelectric.
Speaker 2: Actuators the little tiny motors.
Speaker 3: Basically, yeah, these actuators can physically push and pull the
Speaker 3: surface of the mirror, altering its shape thousands of times
Speaker 3: a second.
Speaker 2: Okay, so how does physically rippling the mirror solve the
Speaker 2: glare problem?
Speaker 3: It exploits the wave nature of light through a principle
Speaker 3: called destructive interference. Imagine two ocean waves crashing into each other. Okay,
Speaker 3: if the crest of one wave perfectly aligns with the
Speaker 3: deep trough of a nuther wave, they cancel each other out,
Speaker 3: leaving perfectly flat water. The deformable mirrors in the CGI
Speaker 3: are designed to meticulously manipulate the incoming wavefronts of the
Speaker 3: starlight by creating microscopic hills and valleys on the mirror's surface,
Speaker 3: which are measured in fractions of a nanometer. The instrument
Speaker 3: intentionally alters the phase of the light waves, so.
Speaker 2: Its shifting the waves to crash into each other precisely.
Speaker 3: It forces the crusts of the diffracted starlight to align
Speaker 3: perfectly with the troughs of the incoming starlight. They effectively
Speaker 3: cancel each other out.
Speaker 2: It's essentially the exact same technology as noise canceling headphones,
Speaker 2: but applied to light waves.
Speaker 4: That's it exactly.
Speaker 2: The headphones listen to ambient sound, create an exact opposite
Speaker 2: sound wave, and play it into your ear, so the
Speaker 2: two waves annihilate each other, leaving silence. The CGI is
Speaker 2: taking the blinding glare of a star creating an inverse
Speaker 2: optical wave by physically morphing the mirror and combining them
Speaker 2: to create absolute optical silence around the star, revealing the
Speaker 2: faint planet hiding in the dark.
Speaker 3: That is an exceptionally precise way to visualize it. Operating
Speaker 3: invisible to near infrared wavelengths. This active suppression of difracted
Speaker 3: light is a revolutionary leap in high contrast imaging from space, and.
Speaker 2: They call it a technology demonstrator.
Speaker 3: It is classified as a technology demonstrator, because it is
Speaker 3: laying the absolutely vital engineering groundwork for the massive observatories
Speaker 3: of the twenty forties and beyond, the ones whose primary
Speaker 3: dedicated mission will be to directly photograph and analyze the
Speaker 3: atmospheres of Earth like exoplanets. Roman is paving the technological
Speaker 3: path for that future.
Speaker 2: So we have assembled this incredible machine. We have a
Speaker 2: ten thoy five hundred kilogram spacecraft. It draws roughly four
Speaker 2: point five kilowads of power from its deployable solar arrays.
Speaker 2: It carries a three hundred megapixel cryogenic camera capable of
Speaker 2: scanning the universe, and a shape shifting mirror that physically cancels.
Speaker 4: Out starlight white the payload.
Speaker 2: The logistical question is where do you park a ten
Speaker 2: ton machine so it can actually do its job safely
Speaker 2: and efficiently. It isn't going into lowerth orbit like Hubble.
Speaker 3: Now, Lower Earth orbit is way too warm, right.
Speaker 2: It's heading out to the Sun Earth l to lagrange point,
Speaker 2: which is roughly one point five million kilometers from Earth.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The selection of the l to lagrange point is fundamentally
Speaker 3: tied to the thermal requirements of the infrared sensors.
Speaker 4: We discussed earlier.
Speaker 3: If we connect this to the bigger picture, Yeah, we
Speaker 3: connect this to the bigger picture. The mechanics of L
Speaker 3: two are deeply counterintuitive. A lagrange point is an orbital
Speaker 3: sweet spot, a region of mathematical equilibrium in standard orbital mechanics.
Speaker 3: The further an object is from the Sun, the slower
Speaker 3: it orbits.
Speaker 2: All right, Earth takes one year to orbit the Sun,
Speaker 2: but Mars, being further out, takes nearly two earth years.
Speaker 3: Exactly by that logic, a spacecraft place one point five
Speaker 3: million kilometers further away from the Sun, then Earth should
Speaker 3: orbit slower and therefore drift.
Speaker 4: Away from us.
Speaker 2: Right, it should fall behind Earth in the orbital tracks.
Speaker 2: So why does it stay locked in position with us?
Speaker 3: Because at L two, the gravitational pull of the Earth
Speaker 3: and the pull of the Sun are perfectly aligned in
Speaker 3: the same direction. That combined gravitational force adds just enough
Speaker 3: extra inward pull to increase the orbital speed of the spacecraft.
Speaker 3: It balances the centrifugal force precisely, allowing the telescope to
Speaker 3: orbit the Sun at the exact same angular velocity as
Speaker 3: the Earth. Despite being further out, it remains in a
Speaker 3: fixed position relative to the Earth, hovering in our shadow
Speaker 3: as we both sweep.
Speaker 4: Around the Sun.
Speaker 2: But wait, James Webb is also parked at L two.
Speaker 4: It is, and the.
Speaker 2: European Space Agency's Gaya Observatory is out there. Are we
Speaker 2: just cramming these multi billion dollar machines into a cosmic
Speaker 2: parking lot? Is there a legitimate risk of these giant
Speaker 2: telescopes bumping into each other in the dark.
Speaker 3: It is a logical concern, but the scale of L
Speaker 3: two prevents any risk of collision. L two is not
Speaker 3: a single finite coordinate in space.
Speaker 2: It's not just an X on a map.
Speaker 3: No, it is an expansive region of gravitational stability. Furthermore,
Speaker 3: spacecraft don't just sit perfectly stationary at the exact geometric
Speaker 3: center of L two. That would be an unstable equilibrium,
Speaker 3: like trying to balance a marble on top of a
Speaker 3: bowling ball. Any slight nudge would send it rolling off,
Speaker 3: so they do. Instead, the telescopes enter massive sweeping loops
Speaker 3: known as halo orbits, around.
Speaker 4: The invisible L two point halo orbits.
Speaker 3: Yes, these halo orbits are incredibly vast, like hundreds of
Speaker 3: thousands of kilometers across Roman will trace its own unique
Speaker 3: halo orbit, completely segregated from James.
Speaker 4: Web or Gaya.
Speaker 2: Okay, so plenty room.
Speaker 3: Tons of room, and the reason they all flock to
Speaker 3: this region is purely thermal. Because the Sun, the Earth,
Speaker 3: and the Moon are always located in the exact same
Speaker 3: direction relative to L two, the telescope can permanently point
Speaker 3: its solar rays and its sunshield towards that heat source.
Speaker 2: So blocks all the heat from the inner Solar system.
Speaker 3: It acts as a massive parasol. Meanwhile, the dark side
Speaker 3: of the telescope, housing the delicate optics and the cryogenic WFI,
Speaker 3: constantly faces outward into the freezing, pitch black void of
Speaker 3: deep space. If you put an infra red telescope like
Speaker 3: Roman into low Earth orbit, the massive thermal radiation reflecting
Speaker 3: off the Earth's surface would completely blind its sensors. L
Speaker 3: two provides the permanent deep freeze stability it requires.
Speaker 2: So let's fast forward in our timeline. Roman completes its journey.
Speaker 2: It aris at its halo orbit around L two. The
Speaker 2: instruments are perfectly chilled to their operating temperatures, the optics
Speaker 2: are aligned, and the telescope has an unobstructed view of
Speaker 2: the infinite dark ready to go. Now it begins its
Speaker 2: actual mission, and the first of its three core science
Speaker 2: pillars tackles arguably the most profound, most intimidating mystery in
Speaker 2: modern physics, dark energy and cosmic structure. Yeah, the bay
Speaker 2: Ones Roman is explicitly tasked with surveying billions of galaxies
Speaker 2: to precisely map the expansion history of the universe. To
Speaker 2: do this, the mission parameters site techniques like weak gravitational lensing,
Speaker 2: baryon acoustic oscillations, and the measurement of type ia supernovae.
Speaker 3: A very comprehensive approach.
Speaker 2: The ultimate goal is to test the validity of general
Speaker 2: relativity on the largest cosmic scales and trace how the
Speaker 2: massive structures of the universe grew over billions of years.
Speaker 2: Let's really break these methods down, because when you talk
Speaker 2: about measuring dark energy and dark matter, it feels like
Speaker 2: we are trying to weigh the ghosts of the universe.
Speaker 2: We are studying things we fundamentally cannot see.
Speaker 3: Weighing ghosts is a remarkably accurate way to frame the challenge.
Speaker 3: When you look up at the night sky, everything you see,
Speaker 3: you know, every star, every glowing nebula, every massive galaxy
Speaker 3: is composed of normal baryonic.
Speaker 4: Matter, stuff we can interact with right.
Speaker 3: But normal matter accounts for roughly five percent of the
Speaker 3: total mass energy density of the universe.
Speaker 4: Only five percent five percent.
Speaker 3: The other ninety five percent is completely invisible to our
Speaker 3: eyes and our instruments. Roughly twenty seven percent is dark matter,
Speaker 3: a mysterious substance that exudes a gravitational pull and holds galaxies.
Speaker 4: Together like cosmic glue exactly.
Speaker 3: The remaining sixty eight percent is jark energy and even
Speaker 3: more baffling force that acts as a repulsive pressure, causing
Speaker 3: the expansion of the universe to accelerate. We cannot see
Speaker 3: dark matter, and we cannot isolate dark energy. We only
Speaker 3: know they exist by painstakingly observing their gravitational influence on
Speaker 3: the five percent of the universe we can see.
Speaker 2: And this is where that first technique, weak gravitational lensing,
Speaker 2: comes into play. If dark matter has mass, it has gravity,
Speaker 2: and if it has gravity, according to Einstein, it warps
Speaker 2: the very fabric of space time around it.
Speaker 4: Exactly.
Speaker 3: Imagine a massive, invisible cluster of dark matter suspended in
Speaker 3: space behind it. Far deeper in the universe is a
Speaker 3: luminous galaxy. Okay, As the light from that distant galaxy
Speaker 3: travels toward Earth, it must pass through the warped space
Speaker 3: time created by the dark matter. The path of the
Speaker 3: light is literally bent, distorting the image of the background galaxy.
Speaker 2: Like looking through a glass bottle.
Speaker 3: Right. Strong lensing is when this effect is so extreme
Speaker 3: that it smears the background galaxy into a visible ring
Speaker 3: or multiple images. But Roman is folk gussing.
Speaker 4: On weak lensing, so it's more subtle.
Speaker 3: The distortion is incredibly subtle, perhaps altering the apparent shape
Speaker 3: of a galaxy by just a fraction of a percent
Speaker 3: by itself. If you're just looking at one galaxy, you
Speaker 3: couldn't tell if the galaxy is naturally slightly oval shaped
Speaker 3: or if its light was warped by invisible dark matter.
Speaker 2: So what does this all mean? To make an analogy,
Speaker 2: If I'm looking at a funhouse mirror, weak cleansing is
Speaker 2: like measuring the exact curves of the mirror by analyzing
Speaker 2: how distorted my reflection is. But the mirror is made
Speaker 2: of dark matter.
Speaker 3: Well sort of. If you just look at one person's
Speaker 3: reflection in the funhouse mirror, you don't know if the
Speaker 3: person actually has a giant forehead, or if the mirror
Speaker 3: is just warping the image, you can't figure out the
Speaker 3: shape of the mirror from one reflection.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 3: Right, But if you stand thousands of people in front
Speaker 3: of the mirror and you know that statistically human faces
Speaker 3: are generally symmetrical, you can mathematically analyze how all of
Speaker 3: their reflections are distorted to reverse engineer the precise curvature
Speaker 3: of the glass.
Speaker 2: Oh, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: In this case, the glass is the invisible dark matter
Speaker 3: stretching across billions of light years, and the people are
Speaker 3: the background galaxies.
Speaker 2: That perfectly encapsulates the statistical power of Roman. By observing
Speaker 2: hundreds of millions and eventually billions of background galaxies and
Speaker 2: analyzing the minute statistical correlations and how their shapes are
Speaker 2: sheared and distorted, Roman will create a highly precise three
Speaker 2: dimensional topographical map of the invisible dark matter in the universe.
Speaker 3: That's the goal. And by looking at different depths which
Speaker 3: are different eras in cosmic history, we can see how
Speaker 3: that dark matter has clumped together over time.
Speaker 4: Oh, because looking further away is looking back in time.
Speaker 3: Yes, This directly measures the tug of war between gravity,
Speaker 3: which is trying to pull the dark matter together into
Speaker 3: massive webs and dark energy which is stretching the universe apart,
Speaker 3: and fighting that clumping process.
Speaker 2: And that times directly into the second technique you mentioned
Speaker 2: very on acoustic oscillations or BAOS. This sounds like an
Speaker 2: incredibly dense physics term, but it is a sly about
Speaker 2: finding a cosmic ruler, a standard measurement of distance. How
Speaker 2: do sound waves from the early universe help us measure
Speaker 2: dark energy today?
Speaker 3: Right BAOS. To understand BAOS, we have to rewind the
Speaker 3: clock to the very early universe, roughly three hundred and
Speaker 3: eighty thousand years after the Big Bang, wayback way back.
Speaker 3: At that time, the universe was a dense, incredibly hot plasma.
Speaker 3: It was a soup of protons, electrons, and photons. It
Speaker 3: was so dense that light couldn't travel freely. The photons
Speaker 3: were constantly colliding with the matter, so it just opaque,
Speaker 3: completely opaque. Within this superheated fluid. Microscopic quantum fluctuations created
Speaker 3: areas of slightly higher density. Gravity tried to pull the
Speaker 3: plasma into these dense spots, but the intense heat and radiation.
Speaker 4: Pressure pushed outward, a push and pull.
Speaker 3: This constant battle between gravity pulling in and radiation pushing
Speaker 3: out created massive spherical sound waves that rippled outward through
Speaker 3: the plasma at roughly half the speed of light.
Speaker 2: So the early universe was literally ringing with acoustic.
Speaker 3: Waves like a belt, exactly like a ringing bell. But
Speaker 3: then as the universe expanded, it cooled. When it hit
Speaker 3: a specific temperature, the protons and electrons combined to form
Speaker 3: neutral hydrogen atoms. Suddenly, the radiation pressure dropped to zero,
Speaker 3: the bush stopped, the photons were free to travel across
Speaker 3: the universe, which is what we now see as the
Speaker 3: cosmic microwave background, and the plasma turned into a transparent
Speaker 3: gas because the outward pressure vanished. Instantly, those massive sound
Speaker 3: waves abruptly frozen places. The ripples stopped moving. The dense
Speaker 3: crest of the sound wave left a spherical shell of
Speaker 3: slightly thicker matter surrounding the original point. Over billions of years,
Speaker 3: galaxies preferentially formed along these frozen ripples.
Speaker 2: So we have these fossilized acoustic ripples permanently imprinted into
Speaker 2: the distribution of galaxies. It's like throwing a rock into
Speaker 2: a muddy pond and then instantly freezing the water. The
Speaker 2: ripples are locked in the ice.
Speaker 3: That's a great visual And because does this, this know exactly
Speaker 3: how fast sound travels in a plasma and exactly how
Speaker 3: long the universe took to cool. We can calculate the
Speaker 3: exact absolute physical size of those frozen ripples.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we know how big they are.
Speaker 3: They have a radius of roughly one hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: million parsex. Because we know their true physical size, we
Speaker 3: can look at the sky, find these massive rings of
Speaker 3: galaxies and see how large they appear to us. Just
Speaker 3: like holding a ruler at different distances. Comparing the apparent
Speaker 3: size to the true size tells us exactly how far
Speaker 3: away those galaxies are.
Speaker 2: That is brilliant.
Speaker 3: By measuring these frozen acoustic spheres at different distances, alongside
Speaker 3: measuring the brightness of exploding stars called type EA supernovae,
Speaker 3: which act as standard cosmic light bulbs, Roman will meticulously
Speaker 3: chart exactly how the expansion rate of the universe has
Speaker 3: changed over the last ten billion years, and.
Speaker 2: That tells us what about dark energy?
Speaker 3: This will definitively tell us if dark energy is a
Speaker 3: constant force or if it is changing over time.
Speaker 2: It is breathtaking to consider that we are building a
Speaker 2: machine to read the fossilized echoes of the Big Bang
Speaker 2: to understand the ultimate fate of reality.
Speaker 3: It's poetic, really.
Speaker 2: But once Roman has stared into the deepest reaches of
Speaker 2: cosmic history, it is going to shift its focus all
Speaker 2: the way back into our own galactic backyard. This brings
Speaker 2: us to science Killer two, the Great Exoplanet Census.
Speaker 4: Zooming back in exactly.
Speaker 2: The mission profile dictates a massive microlensing survey aims squarely
Speaker 2: at the dense, crowded inner bulge of our own Milky
Speaker 2: Way galaxy. The explicit expectation is that Roman will discover
Speaker 2: thousands of new exoplanets, crucially including rocky Earth mass worlds
Speaker 2: orbiting in the habitable zones of their.
Speaker 3: Stars, which is what everyone wants to find.
Speaker 2: Right we are moving from studying the expansion of the
Speaker 2: universe to creating a rigorous statistical census of planetary systems.
Speaker 2: The technique they are using, microlensing, sounds somewhat related to
Speaker 2: the weak lensing we just discussed, but applied on a
Speaker 2: much more localized scale.
Speaker 3: The underlying physics of micro lensing is identical to the
Speaker 3: weak lensing used for dark matter. It is all rooted
Speaker 3: in Einstein's general relativity and the fact that mass bends light. Okay,
Speaker 3: but instead of looking at massive clusters of dark matter
Speaker 3: warping distant galaxies, micro lensing looks at individual stars warping
Speaker 3: the light of other individual stars. Imagine you point the
Speaker 3: romy telescope toward the center of the Milky Way, where
Speaker 3: there is a dense, almost solid wall of millions of distant.
Speaker 4: Background stars, just a wall of light.
Speaker 3: Now, you wait for a foreground star situated somewhere between
Speaker 3: us and the galactic center, to drift directly across our
Speaker 3: line of sight to one of those background stars. As
Speaker 3: the foreground star passes in front, its gravity acts as
Speaker 3: a tiny magnifying glass. It bends the light of the
Speaker 3: background star, focusing it toward the telescope.
Speaker 2: If you were tracking the brightness of that background star,
Speaker 2: what do you see? Does it just get brighter and
Speaker 2: then fade back to normal?
Speaker 3: Precisely, you would see a very smooth, predictable curve. Background
Speaker 3: star would slowly brighten over several weeks as the foreground
Speaker 3: star moves into alignment, reach a peak magnification, and then
Speaker 3: smoothly dim back down. As the foreground star moves away.
Speaker 3: But the true magic happens if that foreground star is
Speaker 3: not alone. If that foreground star hosts an orbiting exoplanet,
Speaker 3: the gravity of that planet acts as a secondary microscopic
Speaker 3: magnifying glass. As the planetary system sweeps across the background starlight,
Speaker 3: the planet's gravity violently distorts the geometry of the magnification.
Speaker 4: Oh wow, you get the.
Speaker 3: Smooth, gradual brightening from the host star, but suddenly you
Speaker 3: get a sharp, intense spike, a blip in brightness that
Speaker 3: lasts anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
Speaker 2: That spike in the light curve is the unmistakable signature.
Speaker 4: Of a hidden world, unmistakable.
Speaker 2: By analyzing the exact timing, intensity, and duration of that blip,
Speaker 2: astronomers can mathematically deduce the mass of the planet and
Speaker 2: its orbital distance from its star. What makes microlending so
Speaker 2: crucial is its sensitivity. Observe stories like Kepler and Tests
Speaker 2: are phenomenal, but they primarily find planets using the transit method.
Speaker 3: Right watching for the tiny dip in starlight when a
Speaker 3: planet crosses in front of its star.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the transit method heavily favors massive planets that
Speaker 2: orbit extremely close to their stars because they block more
Speaker 2: light and orbit frequently. Microlensing, on the other hand, is
Speaker 2: highly sensitive to planets in wide orbits out beyond the
Speaker 2: snow line where water freezes.
Speaker 3: Yes, the outer planets.
Speaker 2: It can find the analogs to our own Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,
Speaker 2: and Neptune. And most importantly, it has the sensitivity to
Speaker 2: detect rocky Earth mass planets in orbits similar to our own.
Speaker 2: But I really want to emphasize an operational distinction here
Speaker 2: to make sure the mechanics are perfectly clear.
Speaker 3: Okay, Sure.
Speaker 2: When Roman discovers an Earth mass exoplanet using this micro
Speaker 2: lensing blip, the resulting data is entirely different from the
Speaker 2: data gathered by the coronagraph instrument we discussed earlier. With microlensing,
Speaker 2: we are never actually seeing the planet right correct. We
Speaker 2: aren't even seeing the light from the planet's host star.
Speaker 2: We are observing a temporary mathematical distortion in the light
Speaker 2: of a completely different, unrelated background star. Once that four
Speaker 2: ground star and its planet drift past, the alignment is
Speaker 2: broken and we will likely never see that specific planet again.
Speaker 2: It is a one time celestial event.
Speaker 4: It passes in the night.
Speaker 2: But with the CGI direct imaging, we are physically blocking
Speaker 2: a star's glare to capture literal photons bouncing off the
Speaker 2: atmosphere of a planet. That's the difference.
Speaker 3: That is a vital distinction. Micro Lensing is designed to
Speaker 3: provide a statistical census. It answers the fundamental demographic questions.
Speaker 3: How common are planetary systems, what is the ratio of
Speaker 3: rocky planets to gas giants? How many planets orbit in
Speaker 3: the outer reaches of their solar systems. It gives us
Speaker 3: the statistical blueprint of the galaxy, but you can't follow
Speaker 3: up on them exactly. Because micro lensing events are transient
Speaker 3: and unrepeatable, you cannot perform detailed follow up observations on
Speaker 3: those specific worlds. The coronagraph, conversely, is pointed at the
Speaker 3: nearest brightest stars to our Solar system. By suppressing the
Speaker 3: starlight and directly capturing the photons from the neighboring planets,
Speaker 3: it allows astronomers to perform spectroscopy on.
Speaker 4: Those specific worlds looking for chemicals.
Speaker 3: Right, It allows us to analyze the chemical composition of
Speaker 3: their atmospheres, looking for water, vapor, methane, or potential biosignatures.
Speaker 3: The two instruments perform completely different but equally vital roles
Speaker 3: in planetary science.
Speaker 2: And performing these massive surveys. Cataloging billions of galaxies for
Speaker 2: weak lensing, tracking hundreds of millions of stars for micro
Speaker 2: lensing blips is going to generate an unprecedented avalanche of
Speaker 2: data science. Pillar three covers infrared astrophysics and general surveys,
Speaker 2: which is a massive catchall. Yeah, Rohan will be setting
Speaker 2: everything from the mechanics of star formation and galaxy evolution,
Speaker 2: to hunting for supermassive black holes, transient phenomena, and even
Speaker 2: tracking minor objects within our own solar system. The projected
Speaker 2: data output from the Roman Space Telescope is expected to
Speaker 2: be on the order of tens of petabytes over its
Speaker 2: nominal five year prime mission.
Speaker 3: Tens of petabytes.
Speaker 2: A single petabyte is a million gigabytes. It is volume
Speaker 2: of raw information that is difficult for the human mind
Speaker 2: to process. How does the astronomical community physically and administratively
Speaker 2: handle that much data. This is where the synergy between
Speaker 2: Roman and the James webspased telescope really comes into focus.
Speaker 2: They aren't competing for discoveries, they are a perfectly engineered
Speaker 2: tag team.
Speaker 3: This raises an important question. Right the sheer volume of
Speaker 3: data force is a complete paradigm shift in how astronomy
Speaker 3: is conducted. Having petabytes of incredibly detailed infrared imagery is
Speaker 3: scientifically useless if you don't have the computational infrastructure and
Speaker 3: the human capital to analyze it. This is where the
Speaker 3: complementary nature of our space observatories becomes crucial. Because of
Speaker 3: its massive field of view, Roman acts as the ultimate
Speaker 3: cosmic surveyor. It can map vast stretches of the sky
Speaker 3: with incredible speed. It acts as the pathfinder. It sweeps
Speaker 3: across millions of galaxies and highlights the anomalies, the unusually
Speaker 3: bright quasars, the massive dark matter concentrations, the strange transient
Speaker 3: flashes of light.
Speaker 2: If we think about how medical imaging works, Roman is
Speaker 2: like a full body MRI scan. It rapidly scans the
Speaker 2: entire system, highlighting every suspicious anomally, every strange shadow, every
Speaker 2: tiny irregularity across the whole body in a single pass
Speaker 2: good analogy. But an MRI doesn't operate on the anomaly,
Speaker 2: it just find it. The James Web Space Telescope is
Speaker 2: the incredibly precise targeted bioxy needle. Once Roman identifies the anomaly,
Speaker 2: Web zero's in on that specific microscopic coordinate to extract
Speaker 2: the deep granular chemical details. Or to put another way,
Speaker 2: if Roman is the scout standing on the mountain pointing
Speaker 2: out thousands of interesting things in the valley, Web is
Speaker 2: the sniper zeroing in on one specific leaf, on one
Speaker 2: specific tree.
Speaker 3: That is an excellent way to conceptualize the workflow. Roman
Speaker 3: maps the landscape and says, there is a peculiar signature
Speaker 3: here in this ancient galaxy. Web with its incredibly powerful,
Speaker 3: narrow feel deep infrared spectrographs, then point it its massive
Speaker 3: merit at that exact set of coordinates to perform a
Speaker 3: highly detailed targeted analysis that Roman couldn't achieve alone. The
Speaker 3: ultimate team up and furthermore, managing Roman's petabytes of data
Speaker 3: requires a revolution in open science. Historically, in observational astronomy,
Speaker 3: the principal investigator who wrote the proposal to use a
Speaker 3: telescope was granted an exclusive embargo period, often a full year,
Speaker 3: to keep the data private, analyze it, and publish their
Speaker 3: findings before anyone else could look at it. The proprietary
Speaker 3: period exactly With the Roman Space Telescope, NASA is breaking
Speaker 3: down that traditional wall. The data will have zero proprietary period,
Speaker 3: zero zero. It will be rapidly processed and made publicly
Speaker 3: available via cloud based archives. It democratizes astrophysics. An undergraduate
Speaker 3: student in India, an amateur astronomer in Brazil, and a
Speaker 3: tenured professor at MIT will all have simultaneous access to
Speaker 3: the exact same petabytes of world class infrared data the
Speaker 3: moment it is down linked to Earth.
Speaker 2: That is incredible. We have spent a long time on packing,
Speaker 2: the awe inspiring engineering, the intense testing gauntlet, the incredible
Speaker 2: physics of dark energy and micro lensing, and the sheer
Speaker 2: volume of open source data this machine will produce. But
Speaker 2: to truly appreciate what is sitting inside that falcon heavy
Speaker 2: fairing right now, we must acknowledge the visionary human being
Speaker 2: whose name is painted on the side of the spacecraft.
Speaker 4: We really must.
Speaker 2: Honoring a legacy is a profound element of NASA's culture,
Speaker 2: and dedicating this flagship observatory to Nancy Grace Roman is
Speaker 2: arguably one of the most fitting, deeply resonant tributes in
Speaker 2: the history of science.
Speaker 3: Nancy Grace Roman is a towering figure in the history
Speaker 3: of astrophysics. She joined NASA in nineteen fifty nine, just
Speaker 3: months after the agency was formed, and became its first
Speaker 3: Chief of Astronomy.
Speaker 2: First chief of Astronomy.
Speaker 3: Yes, and it is critical to understand the historical context
Speaker 3: of her tenure. In the mid twentieth century, the field
Speaker 3: of astronomy was heavily male dominated, and the very concept
Speaker 3: of launching a delicate, precision telescope into the violent environment
Speaker 3: of outer space was widely dismis.
Speaker 4: People thought it was crazy completely.
Speaker 3: Many established astronomers considered it science fiction, and politicians considered
Speaker 3: it a financially reckless fantasy. But Nancy Grace Roman understood
Speaker 3: with absolute clarity the fundamental limitation of ground based astronomy.
Speaker 3: She knew that as long as we were looking through
Speaker 3: the turbulent, shimmering, distorting blanket of the Earth's atmosphere, our
Speaker 3: view of the universe would always be.
Speaker 4: Blurred because the atmosphere jiggles the light exactly.
Speaker 3: She spent decades relentlessly advocating, organizing committees, securing funding, and
Speaker 3: forcefully pushing both the scientific establishment and the political bureaucracy
Speaker 3: to invest in space based observatories. Her tireless administrative and
Speaker 3: scientific groundwork in the nineteen sixties and seventies directly enabled
Speaker 3: the development of the Hubble Space Telescope. She is universally
Speaker 3: and rightfully remembered as the mother of Hubble.
Speaker 2: The multi generational arc of that story is genuinely moving.
Speaker 2: Think about the resistance she faced. She was fighting for
Speaker 2: a technology that barely existed, facing immense skepticism, and yet
Speaker 2: without her foundational work, Without her absolute refusal to give
Speaker 2: up on the dream of space based astronomy, we likely
Speaker 2: never would have launched Hubble.
Speaker 3: It might not have happened.
Speaker 2: And without the staggering technological and scientific leaps pioneered by
Speaker 2: Hubble over the last thirty years, we certainly wouldn't be
Speaker 2: standing here in May twenty twenty six, preparing to launch
Speaker 2: a machine that takes Hubble's vision and multiplies it by
Speaker 2: one hundred. The Roman Space Telescope is the ultimate culmination
Speaker 2: of a vision she championed when spaceflight was still in
Speaker 2: its infancy.
Speaker 3: It is the purest vindication of her life's work to
Speaker 3: see an observatory of this immense capability, one that has
Speaker 3: overcome incredibly complex early development challenges to reach this state
Speaker 3: of readiness, perfectly assembled, extensively tested, and tracking ahead of schedule.
Speaker 3: It's a monumental testament to the foundation she laid for
Speaker 3: NASA's astrophysics programs.
Speaker 2: Which brings us back to the present moment mid May
Speaker 2: twenty twenty six. The next few months are going to
Speaker 2: accelerate rapidly. In just a few weeks mid June, we
Speaker 2: will witness highly orchestrated transport of the telescope to the
Speaker 2: Kennedy Space Center. Then comes the hazardous fueling in the PHSF,
Speaker 2: the painstaking integration with the Falcon Heavy rocket, and finally,
Speaker 2: early September the launch.
Speaker 4: The big day following.
Speaker 2: Orbital insertion, it'll take roughly a month of travel to
Speaker 2: reach the L two lagrange point. Once there, it enters
Speaker 2: a delicate months long period of commissioning. The solar rays
Speaker 2: will be fully deployed, the high gain antennas will be
Speaker 2: locked in. The cryogenic coolers will slowly draw the heat
Speaker 2: out of the instruments until they reach their operating temperatures.
Speaker 3: It's a very slow, careful process.
Speaker 2: Right The deformable mirrors will be calibrated, and then shortly
Speaker 2: after the first light images will be beamed back to Earth.
Speaker 2: Full science operations will commence, and they are guaranteed to
Speaker 2: dramatically expand our understanding of the cosmos well into the
Speaker 2: twenty thirties and beyond. For everyone listening, I highly encourage
Speaker 2: you to watch NASA's official channels, specifically the feeds from
Speaker 2: Goddard and the Kennedy Space Center. As this law Uch
Speaker 2: campaign unfolds over the summer. You are watching history being made.
Speaker 3: As we stand on the threshold of this launch, looking
Speaker 3: forward to the petabytes of data that will soon flow
Speaker 3: back to Earth, there is a profound, almost philosophical shift
Speaker 3: that we need to prepare for. What do you mean, Well,
Speaker 3: we have talked at length about the mechanics of mapping
Speaker 3: billions of galaxies to measure dark energy and the statistical
Speaker 3: power of finding thousands of rocky worlds, But consider the
Speaker 3: psychological impact of that second pillar. For the entirety of
Speaker 3: human history. We have looked up at the night sky
Speaker 3: and as to fundamental haunting question, are there other earths
Speaker 3: out there?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Once the Roman Space Telescope completes its galactic census, that
Speaker 3: era of wondering comes to an end. We won't just
Speaker 3: be asking the question anymore. What happens to humanity's collective
Speaker 3: psyche when we transition from wondering if these worlds exist
Speaker 3: to having a precise statistical map pointing exactly to the
Speaker 3: coordinates where thousands of them reside in the dark.
Speaker 2: Wow, that is an incredibly heavy, staggering thought to carry forward,
Speaker 2: moving from the realm of philosophical wonder to the realm
Speaker 2: of hard physical coordinates. Thank you for taking the time
Speaker 2: to join us on this exploration. Today. We have traversed
Speaker 2: an immense amount of ground, from the sterile, vibrating clean
Speaker 2: rooms of Maryland, to the freezing orbital mechanics of the
Speaker 2: Lagrange points, and out to the very invisible edges of
Speaker 2: the expanding universe. It has been an absolute thrill to
Speaker 2: unpack the physics and the promise of the Roman Space
Speaker 2: Telescope with you.
Speaker 3: Thank you. Tonight, when you step outside and look up
Speaker 3: at the stars, try to see them not just as
Speaker 3: distant points of light, but as a vast dynamic map
Speaker 3: that we are finally about to read