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The Coronagraph Instrument on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope demonstrates technology that allows astronomers to directly image planets in orbit around other stars by greatly reducing the glare from the host star. It will be far more powerful than any other coronagraph ever flown, capable of seeing planets that are almost a billion times fainter than their star.
Results from the Roman Coronagraph, which is being built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will demonstrate the technology that will enable future missions to observe and characterize rocky planets in the habitable zone of their star – the range of orbital distances where liquid water could potentially exist on a planet’s surface. Studying the physical properties of exoplanets that are more similar to Earth will take us a step closer to discovering habitable planets and possibly learning whether we are alone in the cosmos.
Once the technology is successfully demonstrated over the first 18 months of the mission, the Coronagraph could become open to the scientific community. A Guest Observer program would invite a broader variety of observers to conduct experiments beyond the demonstration phase.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will peer at the universe through some of the most sophisticated sunglasses ever designed.
This multi-layered technology, the Coronagraph Instrument, might more rightly be called “starglasses”: a system of masks, prisms, detectors and even self-flexing mirrors built to block out the glare from distant stars — and reveal the planets in orbit around them.
Normally, that glare is overwhelming, blotting out any chance of seeing orbiting planets. The star’s photons — particles of light — swamp those from the planet when they hit the telescope.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s Coronagraph completed a major milestone: a preliminary design review by NASA. The instrument has met all design, schedule and budget requirements, and can now proceed to the next phase, building hardware for flight.
The Roman mission’s Coronagraph is meant to demonstrate the power of increasingly advanced technology. As it captures light directly from large, gaseous exoplanets, and from disks of dust and gas surrounding other stars, it will point the way to the future: single pixel “images” of rocky planets the size of Earth. Then the light can be spread into a rainbow spectrum, revealing which gases are present in the planet’s atmosphere — perhaps oxygen, methane, carbon dioxide, and maybe even signs of life.
The two flexible mirrors inside the Coronagraph are key components. As light that has traveled tens of light-years from an exoplanet enters the telescope, thousands of actuators move like pistons, changing the shape of the mirrors in real time. The flexing of these “deformable mirrors” compensates for tiny flaws and changes in the telescope’s optics.
Changes on the mirrors’ surfaces are so precise they can compensate for errors smaller than the width of a strand of DNA.
These mirrors, in tandem with high-tech “masks,” another major advance, squelch the star’s diffraction as well – the bending of light waves around the edges of light-blocking elements inside the Coronagraph.
The result: blinding starlight is sharply dimmed, and faintly glowing, previously hidden planets appear.
The star-dimming technology also could bring the clearest-ever images of distant star systems’ formative years — when they are still swaddled in disks of dust and gas as infant planets take shape inside.
The instrument’s deformable mirrors and other advanced technology — known as “active wavefront control” — should mean a leap of 100 to 1,000 times the capability of previous coronagraphs.
Roman's Exoplanet Coronagraphy observing program will demonstrate the technology that will enable future missions to observe and characterize rocky planets in the habitable zone of their star – the range of orbital distances where liquid water could potentially exist on a planet’s surface. Studying the physical properties of exoplanets that are more similar to Earth will take us a step closer to discovering habitable planets and possibly learning whether we are alone in the cosmos.
