NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Digital animation of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

In the coming years, NASA will give the James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes another flagship team member to study the cosmos.

And has chosen a research group at the Arizona Cosmology Lab at the University of Arizona to manage two teams of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

One team will cover wide-field science and another in project infrastructure. 

While the telescope has a mirror that is comparable to the size of Hubble’s, it is able to take images up to 100 times larger. That is important because a major goal of the Roman telescope is to build a map of the night sky. 

Tim Eifler is a professor with UA managing the project infrastructure team. He said, "If you're interested in going very, very deep into the universe. For just one specific object or for a small patch of the sky, then the James Webb Space Telescope is the instrument to use. But what we are interested in is to actually create a map of the universe." 

In order to do so, it will use new measurement ideas called Kinematic Lensing that can account for the distortions of light due to gravitational fields.

Eifler said doing so will help provide understanding of dark energy and dark matter. 

“Figuring out what dark energy is, that requires you to map very, very large fractions of the entire sky and that is what Roman is ideal to do," Eifler said. 

The telescope is set to launch by May 2027.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

This infographic shows the complementary capabilities of select instruments on three of NASA's flagship missions: the Hubble Space Telescope and the currently under development Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope.