Spy satellite to space telescope: Meet NASA's Nancy Grace Roman

Take a moment to think of some of the most iconic images of our solar system, of our universe. There's a good chance that what you conjured in your mind was created by what are termed the Great Observatories. The Great Observatories was a program to launch four telescopes that would observe across the electromagnetic spectrum from the Gamma Ray, which was the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, to the visual, which was Hubble, to the infrared, which was SIRTF, and finally in the x-ray, which was Chandra. And so NASA managed to accomplish all of that. Two of the observatories are still operating. And soon, no earlier than August 30th, a new observatory will also fly to space, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an observatory named for one of the biggest champions of the Great Observatories program. Roman's career as a radio astronomer led her from the University of Chicago to the Naval Research Laboratory in the mid-50s. She came to NASA in 1959 as the head of observational astronomy. A year later, she became both the first chief of astronomy and the first woman to hold an executive-level role at NASA. She helped bring the ground-based astronomy community on board with the idea of space-based observatories. That involved creating the science steering group for the Large Space Telescope, which would go on to be renamed the Hubble Space Telescope. Her advocacy would earn her the nickname the Mother of Hubble. Nancy Roman was a pioneer in terms of space observatories. In fact, the Great Observatories program, she had a lot to do with. It was her vision and her advocacy that helped make all that possible. So, I mean, I just, you know, feel really privileged to have at least gotten to talk to her often at, you know, Hubble anniversary events where we would both be invited. This is Dr. Steve Hawley. And Dr. Steve Hawley ready to go. The retired NASA astronaut is extremely well-versed on these Great Observatories. That's because on April 24, 1990. Two, one, and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope, our window on the universe. Hawley was one of five astronauts. Mission Control, Houston. Who flew the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. Roll program. Roger roll, Discovery. This is Mission Control, Houston. This digital animation being fed by live telemetry depicting the motion of the robot arm as Mission Specialist Steve Hawley begins to put it through its paces. This live view coming from the forward port bulkhead camera aboard Discovery gives us a look at the real thing. Steve Hawley has un-berthed the arm and has begun to move it into position for grapple of the Hubble Space Telescope. That critical role of deploying Hubble with a robotic arm proved far more challenging than Hawley expected based on his training. As I was lifting Hubble out of the bay, the telescope wasn't going in the direction I was commanding. And that was concerning and confusing because that wasn't anything we had seen in training. And it was hard to know what to do to get the telescope to move in the direction I wanted it to go. So we kind of moved slowly by trial and error. I remember Charlie Bolden, our pilot, was looking out the window and trying to give him, give me calls on how much clearance we had that he could see. Part of the problem was Hubble was so big that as soon as it got appreciably out of the payload bay, it blocked the windows. And so we didn't have a visual on the clearances, but we had TV cameras we could try to use. But Hubble was successfully deployed by the crew of STS-31 and has been generating memorable images ever since. Hawley, who is not only a retired astronaut but also an astronomer, says he expects that the initial imagery generated by the Roman Space Telescope will be just as striking as that of Hubble. Bob Williams was the director of the Space Telescope Institute at the time, and he devoted some of his director's discretionary time to take an image of what we thought was a blank piece of sky away from the plane to the Milky Way and away from known clusters of galaxies. And, you know, honestly, I don't remember exactly how I thought the image would look, but I can remember being astonished at what we saw. And that was this 10-day exposure and almost all of the points of light in the image were galaxies. And my guess is I'll feel something like that. The pictures will just be beyond what I had expected. The Roman Telescope is not designed to replace Hubble, but to help augment its observational capabilities, as described to us by Roman program scientist Dominic Benford back in April. They're very similar sizes. They have a mirror of approximately the same size, same collecting area, which gives it the same sensitivity, and also produces the same sharpness of image. But the camera on Roman is over 100 times the field of view of the camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. And it's a more agile observatory. It can move around and take photos far faster than Hubble. So what Hubble can do in a year, Roman can do in a day or two. What Roman will do in its first few years would take Hubble millennia. That kind of change of capability means that you can ask questions of the universe that were never possible to answer with a telescope like Hubble. So that's a transformative change in what astronomers are able to do. Inside the Roman Telescope is the optical telescope assembly, which houses the primary 2.4 meter diameter mirror, as well as nine smaller additional mirrors. Its origins go back to the National Reconnaissance Office and a multi-billion dollar program in the late 90s called the Future Imagery Architecture. To make a long story short, the program flopped in 2005 due to cost overruns. And in 2012, the NRO donated two telescopes to NASA. That year, NASA announced it would use the donation for what was originally called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, later renamed after Nancy Grace Roman. The Roman Telescope has two main instruments. One of them, the Wide Field Imager, is designed to be the workhorse of Roman. Benford and others believe it may help uncloak some of the fundamental mysteries of our universe. Roman is designed to answer major questions outstanding in our understanding of the universe, such as what are dark matter and dark energy, and how do those forces and how does that matter cause the universe to evolve? You can only sense these things by looking at the influence of dark matter and dark energy on the luminous matter that we can see, stars and galaxies. And so we have to do this by taking images of literally hundreds of millions of galaxies. And so we need a capability like what Roman has. Now, while we're doing that and taking that imagery, in those wide fields, all those galaxies will be relatively near to us, but relatively like halfway across the universe. But a very few of them will be almost all the way across at the edge of the observable universe. And the most distant galaxies will tell us about how quickly the universe was able to form galaxies. But to understand what those galaxies are like takes a telescope with more capability than Roman, and that's the James Webb Space Telescope, which can then find these tiny little red dots that Roman has discovered and study them to understand how our universe worked at its earliest possible eras. The second main science instrument is a coronagraph built by teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Vanessa Bailey, the Roman coronagraph instrument scientist, explains. We're going to be testing a lot of key technologies that we'll need for future missions that want to directly detect life on an Earth-like planet around a sun-like star in our local neighborhood. There are various technologies to suppress the starlight that's needed to do that. And the Roman coronagraph is a technology pathfinder towards that pale blue dot. We have deformable mirrors that correct for optical imperfections. We have incredibly sensitive cameras that can detect individual photons as they arrive. We have a very stable observatory and a very stable instrument that will allow us to fine-tune all of our alignment to suppress that starlight. Unlike the James Webb Space Telescope, Roman doesn't have anywhere near such a complicated deployment and commissioning sequence, but that doesn't mean practice isn't required to get this right. I don't think there's any one thing that really keeps me up at night. It's more of me being aware of the whole sequence of events. So one of the things that we do over and over and over again is we practice our launch day and we practice our first six days and we practice beyond into day 40 of commissioning. And it's just going through all those steps, even though I know that we've planned this and we've practiced this and we've worked out all the bugs, it still makes me nervous when I think about it all together. It's almost like when you're kind of packing for a trip and you know you've gotten everything in your suitcase, but you're always nervous about, what is that one thing that I forgot? But I will say that all of that practicing and that planning and the fact that we have this great team is that I know even though we've probably forgotten something or you're always going to forget something, that the team knows how to react to that and knows what to do when something like that might not work quite like we thought it would. Roman is designed with a planned five-year mission and enough fuel on board to last for at least 10 years. While he says that he and astronomers across the globe have big expectations for the observatory, it bears the name of a critical NASA pioneer. And although the Roman Telescope isn't officially part of the Great Observatory's program, it is unquestionably in family and is and hopefully will be a great observatory. Reporting for Space Flight Now, I'm Will Robinson-Smith.