NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has entered its science commissioning phase, the agency announced on 22 October. “We’ve established that the observatory is fully functional,” said Julie McEnery, the project’s senior scientist.
Checks showed the telescope can guide, take exposures, move data correctly and slew between targets. Observations of star-packed regions and dusty nebulae went well, and some systems are performing better than required.
What remains is calibrating the instruments and refining image quality. Its Wide Field Instrument can detect objects about a hundred million times fainter than the human eye can see, and Roman’s wide surveys will study dark matter, dark energy, exoplanets and very distant galaxies.
