Roman telescope's flexible mirrors aim to photograph distant gas giants

NASA's next space observatory carries the first active coronagraph flown in space, built to pull faint planets out of a star's glare.

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could launch as early as the end of August 2026. It carries the first active coronagraph ever flown in space, a device that suppresses most of a host star's light so faint planets nearby can be seen. Named for NASA's first chief of astronomy, the telescope also carries a roughly 300-megapixel wide-field camera capable of images about 100 times larger than Hubble's widest exposures at similar resolution.

The coronagraph works through two deformable mirrors, each with a 48-by-48 grid of actuators beneath a flexible glass surface. Each patch can shift by up to half a micrometer in steps as small as about 10 picometers, correcting for imperfections that would otherwise drown out a planet. The team, including engineers at JPL, expects the system to improve sensitivity against star glare by a factor of up to 1,000 over current space coronagraphs, and the telescope overall to detect around 100,000 new exoplanets through starlight distortion.

Directly imaging a Jupiter-like world orbiting a sunlike star would sharpen the map of where habitable planets might exist. Every such measurement narrows the search for worlds like our own, a foundation for knowledge that belongs to everyone.

Watch the launch window, which is stated as "as early as" the end of next month and not confirmed. The Earth-like imaging goal is framed as a future mission that Roman enables, not something Roman itself will do, and all capabilities remain expected rather than demonstrated until after launch.

Source: MIT Tech Review