NASA'S ROMAN TELESCOPE ACTIVATES 300-MEGAPIXEL CAMERA IN SPACE

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has switched on its Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera, following its launch on 30 August, according to NASA. The agency said the telescope's Coronagraph Instrument, designed for imaging planets, has also completed a series of digital, electronic and mechanical checks after being activated earlier in the month. Roman is travelling towards the second Lagrange point, roughly a million miles from Earth, where it will be based. NASA has released the instrument's first test images, showing clusters of stars as blurry green rings, ahead of full calibration of the camera. Josh Schlieder, the Wide Field Instrument scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, said the instrument's activation marked "a huge milestone" for teams at Goddard, industry partners BAE Systems and Teledyne, and NASA's science centres.

NASA said the Wide Field Instrument is designed to combine a wide view of space with the sharpness of observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope, with each image covering an area of sky larger than the full moon and, according to NASA, up to 100 times larger than a comparable Hubble image. Before the instrument could be switched on, engineers left it idle for ten days to allow it to dry out and decontaminate, NASA said. The commissioning process is expected to continue for several months as the telescope proceeds towards its final position.

NASA said Roman will be used to search for planets beyond the solar system, investigate dark energy, and map how matter is distributed across the universe, with its wide-scale observations also intended to support other scientific studies. Schlieder said there was "much to do" but that the mission was "on our way to groundbreaking science". Separately, a reader survey of more than 270 people reported that 57 percent selected the search for habitable exoplanets as the aspect of the mission they found most significant, with 27 percent citing dark energy research.