NASA scientists may be on the brink of a series of unprecedented space discoveries starting this September — and the telescope at the center of it was largely built and tested here in Greenbelt.
The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, named after NASA’s first female executive and first Chief of Astronomy, is a new NASA observatory that was constructed and tested at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. Goddard’s two main objectives in creating Roman are to discover the cause of the expansion of the universe and to search for exoplanets, which are planets located outside the solar system.
Scientists expect Roman will unveil secrets about this galaxy in ways that have never been possible with NASA’s previous telescopes, Hubble and James Webb. With data collected from Roman, scientists can study 100,000 exoplanets, hundreds of millions of galaxies, billions of stars and rare objects that have never been witnessed before…