NASA's upcoming Roman Space Telescope will help identify and track potentially hazardous asteroids while conducting its primary mission to study dark energy and the universe.
Key facts
- •The Roman Space Telescope features a 300-megapixel infrared camera with a field of view 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope.
- •Roughly 25,000 asteroids large enough to devastate a city are estimated to be in near-Earth orbits, with more than half currently unlocated.
- •The 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid, which hospitalized 1,500 people, was approximately 60 feet long, the same size Roman is capable of detecting.
- •Roman will work alongside other observatories, including the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, to improve the precision of asteroid orbit calculations.
- •Information on an asteroid's composition and density gathered by Roman can help scientists estimate potential impact damage or the effort needed to deflect the object.
NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at the end of August. While designed to study dark energy and dark matter, the telescope's wide-angle infrared camera can also detect asteroids as small as 60 feet long. Planetary scientists plan to use the telescope to help identify and track space rocks that could pose a threat to Earth.
By the numbers
Complementing Planetary Defense Efforts
The Roman Space Telescope is not a dedicated planetary defense instrument, but its massive field of view allows it to rapidly assess multiple asteroids simultaneously. By providing infrared observations, it can help refine the orbits of suspicious objects more efficiently than other observatories. Once Roman identifies potential threats, data can be handed off to telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope for closer inspection and characterization of the asteroid's size and composition.
Software Adjustments for Asteroid Detection
To utilize Roman for planetary defense, researchers must adjust its software, which currently discards streaks caused by cosmic rays or glitches—data points that could represent asteroids. By analyzing these discarded streaks, astronomers can identify and track space rocks. This capability will support the work of the upcoming Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor, a dedicated planetary defense telescope scheduled for launch in 2027.
Timeline
- 2013An asteroid exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, causing 1,500 injuries.
- End of AugustNASA is scheduled to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
- 2027NASA plans to launch the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor space telescope.
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This article was independently rewritten by ManyPress editorial AI from reporting originally published by MIT Technology Review.
