Roman’s Heat-Vision Eyes Are Complete!
Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team recently flight-certified all 24 of the detectors the mission needs. When Roman launches in the mid-2020s, the detectors will convert starlight into electrical signals, which will then be decoded into 300-megapixel images of huge patches of the sky. These images will help astronomers explore all kinds of things, from rogue planets and black holes to dark matter and dark energy.
Eighteen of the detectors will be used in Roman’s camera, while another six will be reserved as backups. Each detector has 16 million tiny pixels, so Roman’s images will be super sharp, like Hubble’s.
The image above shows one of Roman’s detectors compared to an entire cell phone camera, which looks tiny by comparison. The best modern cell phone cameras can provide around 12-megapixel images. Since Roman will have 18 detectors that have 16 million pixels each, the mission will capture 300-megapixel panoramas of space.
The combination of such crisp resolution and Roman’s huge view has never been possible on a space-based telescope before and will make the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope a powerful tool in the future.
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