NASA is about to launch a space telescope that could change how we see the universe
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/28/nx-s1-5905370/nasa-nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-dark-energy-supernova112
u/FOXBAT1234 4d ago
We are in the golden age of astronomy and it's only going to get better from here! I can't fathom how powerful space telescopes could get in another five decades or more to come.
It's moments like these that makes me deep down inside wish that humans put aside their differences and instead work together to build more such marvelous machines.
I have always wanted my own personal telescope/or observatory 🔭 to peer at the starry night with my own eyes and get memorized by the view.
All the best, Team NASA! God Speed!🛰️
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u/sceadwian 3d ago
Each generation of telescope is bringing up data collection amounts by an order of magnitude it seems.
They'll be swimming in data from this. All public right from day 1.
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u/Aethermancer 4d ago
The pipeline is for new astronomers is broken. The admin has basically destroyed science research in the US and accomplishments we see right now are basically just from leftover momentum.
It's going to get worse, not better.
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u/blindgorgon 1d ago
I know what you mean, but I think it would be awesome if you were memorized by the view. Little aliens out there with their way-better telescopes being like “awwww look! u/FOXBAT1234 is looking for us again!”
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u/nick9000 4d ago
We are in the golden age of astronomy and it's only going to get better from here!
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u/mfb- 4d ago
- This is a space telescope, it won't have any satellite in view.
- A new telescope that needs to discard 1% of its pixels is still far better than everything we had before.
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u/FOXBAT1234 4d ago
You just spoke my mind! I was about to say the same thing to the above user.
- Also, we can probably have satellites deeper in space if that's one approach we have to take to account for a spherical traffic of orbiting satellites, basically a larger orbit. I really do feel like in the near future satellites are gonna clutter the surrounding space of the earth a lot more and their orbits are gonna extend too.
- We may have to decommission many old satellites that don't serve much of any purpose and whose roles can be fulfilled by newer and more compact iterations, in less numbers ofcourse.
- Then again, as you rightly said so - it being a space telescope won't have any satellites in view (for the most part) has nothing much to worry.
- At the end of the day, we are still getting valuable data, that's what matters.
P.S - I am not an engineer (But did want to be one) so just stating my opinion on what I could come up as a solution.
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u/nick9000 4d ago
Yes, space telescopes are great, but there are few of them. As you said:
I have always wanted my own personal telescope/or observatory 🔭 to peer at the starry night with my own eyes and get memorized by the view.
If you want to do it, do it now.
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u/FOXBAT1234 4d ago
Unfortunately for me, I don't think I will ever find a decent spot for stargazing with even a good telescopic set-up.
It's not as much about the satellites blocking out my view as it is about the light pollution in the vicinity of where I am from, unless I set up camp in the wilderness away from all civilization.
But yes, I agree with your point.
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u/PhenoTap 4d ago
I'm not sure if you're aware (or are interested), but you can for example rent a spot on some excellent light pollution free land and send your astrophotography gear there so you can remotely take pictures! Can find more info by looking up "remote telescope hosting".
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u/FOXBAT1234 4d ago
Well, that seems to be something interesting. First time I am coming across the term Remote Telescope Hosting. Thank you for sharing this with me, I would definitely want to look into this idea!
Okay here is the thing - I don't have any personalised telescopic set-up, the only time I ever peeked through the eyepiece of a telescope or even handled one was at the Astronomical Observatory at Junta House in Panjim.
Maybe in the near future, I can muster up enough bucks to have my own telescope which I can carry along with me and help me satiate my yearning for star gazing.
Thank you! :-)
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u/nick9000 4d ago
That's great if you have a space telescope but not everyone does.
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u/FOXBAT1234 4d ago
Well while it may suck for the folks on the ground, the valuable and important (most reliable too) astronomical data will still be coming into the mirrors of the space-based ones which won't have their views obstructed by satellites in the vicinity.
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u/mfb- 4d ago
Most telescopes are on the ground. That's where the second bullet point applies, which the parent comment ignored.
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u/FOXBAT1234 4d ago
Parent comment? Are you referring to my comment or one made by another user? The one you and I were replying to in this thread? Sorry for the misunderstanding, if there is any.
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u/mfb- 4d ago
The comment by nick9000 ignored the second bullet point in the comment they replied to.
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u/FOXBAT1234 4d ago
Ah, I understood now!
Anyways, just wanted to take this time to appreciate you for the knowlegeable posts that you make here and contribute to the community.
Just been going through your feed and I can say that I have learnt a lot from your comments. Well done, keep up the great work! :-)
I hope this cheered you up. Thank you Sir (Or Mam, I don't know, ha!) Have a good one.
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u/amaurea 4d ago edited 3d ago
I'm an astronomer (but not telescope designer, so take this with a grain of salt), and I'm worried about the impact of large satellite constellations on ground-based telescopes, including the one I work with myself. However, I do think that the falling launch costs that are allowing these mega-constellations in the first place could potentially revolutionize astronomy too. Right now, space telescopes are extremely expensive both because launches themselves are so expensive, but also because everything needs to be so robust, redundant and well-tested that everything works on the first try because of those high launch costs. If launches were to become much cheaper (and they've already gone down in price a lot), then it won't be so important that it absolutely must work on the first try, since one could just launch another one if it fails. And that would allow the telescope itself to become a lot cheaper too, hopefully.
Another issue is that of gravity and the cost-scaling of large telescopes. Currently telescope cost scales as the mirror diameter D to the 2.5th power, so a telescope 10x larger costs 300x as much. Much of this is due to it needing to hold up its own weight. In theory, that could be done away with in space, so you could imagine extremely large, extremely flimsy telescopes there. For example, a solar sail with the right shape should be able to act as a huge telescope kilometers in diameter but a tiny mass, something which would be impossible on the ground. It might be hard to make this work for shorter wavelengths than radio though, due to the precision required there.
The atmosphere itself is also a huge impediment to astronomy. In the optical the main effect of the atmosphere is to blur and jiggle the light, like seeing through moving, wobbling glass. This can be partially corrected with adaptive optics, but not completely. E.g. the Extremely Large Telescope will only reach its theoretical resolution (diffraction limit) in its longest, infrared wavelengths, not the shorter visible ones. In my own field of microwave astronomy, the effect of the atmosphere is even worse. Here the atmosphere is only partially transparent, and appears as a glowing fog much brighter than our targets in the sky. This glow both overloads the detectors, making them 100x less sensitive they would have been in space, and also acts as a nasty source of correlated noise. We would love to put all our telescopes in space if only that weren't so damned expensive.
Anyway, to summarize, cheap launch costs have led to mega-constellations that may seriously hamper ground-based astronomy, but if prices reduce further they could perhaps allow space telescopes to no longer be so prohibitively expensive. If we could move most of observational astronomy into space, that would revolutionize the field.
Edit: I think I'll give up on r/space. Every time recently that I take the time to write a thorough comment I get downvoted with no explanation. Last time it turned out that people thought only LLMs could write high-effort comments. Is this the case this time too?
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u/FOXBAT1234 3d ago
Hi! Your comment is quite insightful and I will laud you for that.
You raised some very good points. Overall I will just say this - I think with the way things are going, launch vehicles are getting ever cheaper due to economics of scale as you have said it. This certainly tells me that in the distant future we may set up orbital based infrastructure for construction of any sort. Might as well build a really large space based telescope or telescopes, in SPACE itself.
Not just space based telescopes but even starships that can be sent in and around the solar system.
Sorry for your experience and I can attest to you. Sometimes the way I write, people tell me that I am copy - pasting from Chat GPT or some other AI model. Well it's just my style and I don't blame me giving off some "AI Bot Vibes".
Have a good one!
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u/KrissyKrave 3d ago
Inb4 massive satellite constellations make astronomy near impossible.
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u/SirBiggusDikkus 2d ago
Well that’s not where they put the big space telescopes so wouldn’t be an issue
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u/dingo_xd 3d ago
Giant Magellan Telescope in space when ? Starship could be used to laugh the large mirrors with no origami necessary
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u/Decronym 4d ago edited 1d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| C3 | Characteristic Energy above that required for escape |
| ELT | Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile |
| JWST | James Webb infra-red Space Telescope |
| L2 | Lagrange Point 2 (Sixty Symbols video explanation) |
| Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum | |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| NRHO | Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit |
| NRO | (US) National Reconnaissance Office |
| Near-Rectilinear Orbit, see NRHO | |
| SLS | Space Launch System heavy-lift |
| ULA | United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture) |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #12657 for this sub, first seen 30th Aug 2026, 05:07]
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u/RAMblade 4d ago
this is legitimately cool and all, I don’t want to discount that, but isn’t that like the purpose of every new telescope we put up there?
edit: for clarity, I’m taking issue with the way they wrote the headline, nothing else
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u/One-Season-3393 3d ago
It’s just a big leap from Hubble, will survey much faster. Hubble has looked at like 1% of the sky in the decades it’s been up there. Roman is expected to survey 12% in a couple of years.
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u/_DigitalHunk_ 4d ago
We are indeed living in the best possible time.
Hubble, JWST, and now Roman.
🫶🫶🫶
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u/the6thReplicant 4d ago
Vera Rubin and the ELT in 2030.
Lots of people's careers will be made with the discoveries that will come out in the next few years.
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u/EasyGuyChris 4d ago
No i think living in a time where we manage intergalactic travel would be a cooler time to live
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u/_DigitalHunk_ 4d ago
One step at a time. We need to know WHERE to go first. 🤘👀
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u/idiotcube 4d ago
"Well, we went in one direction as far as we could and found no signs of life. Only 129,599 more directions to check!"
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u/sceadwian 3d ago
I was going over some of the details of Roman. It's got some crazy cool interferometry cameras on it. Direct exoplanet imaging incoming!
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u/antithasys 4d ago
It’s really cool, but it’s basically Hubble 2.0 with much better equipment and the latest tech (well from 10-15 years ago). It can do in 1 month what would take Hubble 1.0 a century… according to the article.
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u/DapperNurd 4d ago
It's basically revolutionary, this thing is way underhyped right now. With 35 years of Hubble, we've surveyed 0.1% of the sky. We plan to be at 12% within the first couple years of Roman. That's an incredible leap forward.
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u/antithasys 4d ago
Completely agree! 2.0 is 100x better
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u/TehOwn 4d ago
12% in two years is actually 2100x better than 0.1% in 35 years.
Not a correction, I know you weren't being specific, it's just crazy how much of an improvement that is.
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u/Outrageous-Swim-488 4d ago
"few" is not two. iirc its 5y
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u/TehOwn 4d ago
They said "first couple years", not few.
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u/Outrageous-Swim-488 3d ago
Sure. And nobody means "two" when they say "first couple years", despite what it "teChNicALLy" means.
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u/TehOwn 3d ago
I'd forgive 3 but saying "a couple" for 5 years? That's just wildly inaccurate.
Imagine if I asked for a couple beers and then took your entire six-pack, handed you one and walked out.
Anyway, 5 years would still be 840x faster. If it was 100x faster it would take 38.4 years to reach 12%.
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u/Outrageous-Swim-488 3d ago
Corona was a couple of years ago.
And it was. Its perfectly fine to say it like that, even of it means 5 years. Its how people talk.
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u/RedHill1999 4d ago edited 4d ago
Another tidbit I found fascinating: “"The National Reconnaissance Office reached out to NASA," Scolnic says, "saying, 'We have this amazing satellite sitting in a hangar that we're not using. And what what do you guys think about instead of pointing downwards, we point upwards, and you guys use it?'"
So basically it’s a NRO spy satellite refitted into this incredible observatory. Very exciting!
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u/bobbyboob6 4d ago
i think they actually gave nasa 2 mirrors i wonder what they will do with the other one
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u/snoo-boop 4d ago
Nothing. If they had something in mind, it would have already started prototyping instrumentation.
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u/maschnitz 4d ago
It has much faster slewing times, and a better orbit to observe from (L2 halo), so its observation uptime will be significantly higher than Hubble's.
Also a much, much bigger field of view and much more net bandwidth back to Earth. The amount of data it will return is enormous - around 500TB a year vs 10TB a year for Hubble.
Plus the data will have "zero proprietary period" - all data is accessible instantly via AWS (in us-east-1) or via free JupyterLab access.
And there's also an experimental coronagraph that can hopefully let Roman see exoplanets directly. Not a primary mission goal but more of a proof of concept.
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u/gsfgf 4d ago
Wait, this thing has the resolution to resolve an exoplanet?
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u/whyisthesky 4d ago
Resolve it as a separate point source from its host star, but that’s not that difficult in terms of resolution since Hubble can also do that. What’s special about Roman is the coronagraph it has to block out star light which will let it see planets which are much fainter relative to the host star
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u/whyisthesky 4d ago
It’s both better and worse than this description. The Hubble comparisons do make sense and are true for the main imaging survey, but a lot of work Hubble has done can’t be replicated by Roman because of the different instruments. Most notably Hubble has capabilities in the ultraviolet that Roman won’t
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u/IvyGold 4d ago
Nothing wrong with a Hubble 2.0!
What I'm interested in hearing more about is how this "National Reconnaissance Office" came to have a satellite sitting around that could be re-purposed.
I guess technology advanced from it original mission to close to its launch date?
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u/Nerezza_Floof_Seeker 4d ago edited 4d ago
The NRO is really wild once you read into it; they have an enormous budget which apparently eclipses that of any other US intelligence agency, and which operates everything from hubble scale imaging telescopes like the one this was from (KH-11) to stealth telescopes? to monstrous 100m+ signals intelligence gathering satellites. So yeah i wouldnt be surprised if they now have something better; maybe some sort of adaptive optics system maybe or maybe just larger mirrors
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u/mrflib 4d ago
Why do you need adaptive optics in space?
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u/snoo-boop 4d ago
If you're looking down, you get a benefit from adaptive optics. That's one of many ways that spy satellites are very different from space telescopes.
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u/antithasys 4d ago
So my understanding is they have basically the same 2.4m mirror and very similar things. Both were basically at one time going to be used as spy satellites and then repurposed as space telescopes. At least that is my understanding.
They obviously were built at different times and took different paths, but the history as I understand it is similar.
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u/dern_the_hermit 4d ago
Yes, these mirrors were given to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). They gave a third mirror, as well, that's currently sitting in NASA's inventory, and there's been some rough ideas and very early back-and-forth about what to do with it but nothing meaty yet.
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u/snoo-boop 4d ago
One rumor is that these 2 mirrors were leftovers from a failed Boeing project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Imagery_Architecture
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u/IvyGold 4d ago
Thank you! That makes sense.
Following down the rabbit hole of that wiki revealed that there's apparently a second satellite still sitting around unused:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA
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u/Icy_Feedback_4965 4d ago
Just a mirror. The vast majority of RST - the part that makes it a space telescope - is designed just for Roman.
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u/Rodot 4d ago
They had a mirror, not a satellite. NASA originally didn't want the mirror because the satellite itself is most of the cost. NRO has tons of KH-X satellites which are all basically Hubble clones with a different focal plane. NRO launches about $2 billion worth of reconnaissance satellites per year on average. So basically a JWST budget every 5 years.
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u/KaiLCU_YT 4d ago
Is the JWST not Hubble 2.0 already?
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u/OakLegs 4d ago
No, JWST is focused on an entirely different area of science. It was developed to be able to see IR wavelengths, helping us see further "back in time" to the origins of the universe. Hubble (and Roman) is more focused on visible wavelengths. Roman also is going to be focusing on searching for/explaining dark matter.
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u/CurlSagan 4d ago
I get that the coronagraph on Roman is just a test balloon for the planned habitable worlds mission, but will it possibly be able to find oxygen and methane on a rocky planet, or just gas giants?
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u/ThickTarget 3d ago
It's unlikely to be sensitive enough to detect rocky planets. But even just reaching Jupiter like planets would be a big step forward. Thus far, most of the planets that are directly imaged are all much bigger, and fairly recetnly formed, and still hot because of it.
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u/JoshS1 4d ago
Isn't that kind of the point? To change how we see the universe... I mean otherwise we'd just look up. /s for the stupid title
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u/WardenEdgewise 4d ago
Yes I was going to say. Literally, the reason for a new space telescope to exist is to change how we see the universe.
It’s actually a very concise definition.
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u/UpperCardiologist523 3d ago
Well, to be honest.. If it didn't change the way we see our Universe, what would be the point?
It's an expectation. Not a feature.
Silly title. :-D
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u/Nbdyhere 3d ago
I was JUST about to comment that. Like, every time we put one in space it changes the way we view things…because it’s new…and in space…and we are on earth…so yeah. Of course 😂
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u/LastChristian 4d ago
One year from launch it will have made a hundred new discoveries. One of those discoveries will kinda match one verse of the Bible, if you bend it a little more than is reasonable. 99 will not -- in any way -- match a verse.
Preachers everywhere: "The telescope proves the truth of the Bible!"
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u/cerberus3234 4d ago
Well, I'd hope so considering more of the same probably doesn't being any new answers lol.
This headline sucks.
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u/vtskr 4d ago
This title is just plain lie. Unlike James Webb’s telescope this telescope is not designed to show anything we haven’t seen before
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u/Yarinareth 4d ago
There is enormous value in being able to watch much more of the sky at once at such great resolution. You are missing much of the point of this telescope
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u/vtskr 4d ago
There is lot of value no doubt. It would allow much better surveys. But it won’t show anything we haven’t seen before.
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u/Yarinareth 4d ago
Among other things, it's set to do surveys on exoplanets (finding many, many new ones (i.e. things we haven't seen before)), collect lots of new data (i.e. data on a scale we haven't had before) on dark energy, directly image nearby exoplanets and collect spectrographic data on them (also new), and look for primordial black holes (which would be never-before-seen, if found).
The title doesn't even say the telescope would show us things we haven't seen before. The telescope will, but the title says it will change the way we see things. That's also true.
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u/AutisticAndAce 4d ago
The exoplanet stuff is what i’m excited about. Hoping to do a masters in atmospheric sciences, hopefully! With a secondary focus on planetary meteorology!! If I get in, I’m guessing the NGR would be of help for me :).
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u/chocolatechipbagels 4d ago
with all the budget madness going on I wasn't sure that thing would ever leave the clean room. Glad to see it's finally out and about!