
Cornell Duffield College of Engineering
RT
@Cornell: Scanning vast swaths of sky, NASA’s next flagship observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, promises to revolutionize our understanding of dark matter and dark energy while discovering some 100,000 exoplanets.
The minimum five-year survey mission – targeting launch from Florida no earlier than Aug. 30 – also includes a technology demonstration that will attempt a first in space: direct imaging of exoplanets in visible light wavelengths.
As a principal investigator supporting Roman’s state-of-the-art coronagraph – an instrument designed to block out direct light from a star or another bright object – Cornell faculty member Dmitry Savransky has helped determine the targets that the instrument will study and when best to observe them. Capturing pictures of these previously hidden, Jupiter-like planets, he said, marks a first step toward directly imaging potentially habitable Earth-like planets.
“If we are successful, it would be incredibly compelling and exciting scientifically, because this will be a unique dataset that literally doesn’t exist,” said Savransky, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in
@CornellEng, and of astronomy in
@CornellCAS. “No other space observatory has this capability.”
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Image courtesy of
@NASA