Uncovering Dark Energy’s Biggest Secrets

Illuminating the Dark

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman for short) is an infrared telescope named after Nancy Grace Roman that seeks to explore the mysteries of dark energy and image exoplanets. Roman and the James Webb Space Telescope offer broader ranges of sight when compared to the Hubble Space Telescope and are steps NASA and Goddard’s Space Flight Center are taking to uncover the secrets of space. The ISTD has contributed to Roman through the PRISM and GRISM, where the GRISM is used for our broad sky survey for dark energy, and then the PRISM is used for looking at supernova/dark energy. The GRISM will be used to measure red shifts of large areas of the sky of galaxies and to help figure out how fast they’re moving away. As we know, the universe has been expanding since The Big Bang, but everyone thought that it would start slowing down. These instruments will kind of gauge that expansion curve when things moved away.

Because of the field of view of Roman and the size of that focal plane, these instruments (PRISM and GRISM) are massive, being four or five inches in diameter. They’re multiple elements instead of just like a wedge of glass with multiple glasses put together, so they had to mount both of these instruments and co-align their optics while using unique glass materials to get all the properties. Contrary to popular belief, the universe’s expansion has started accelerating due to a force called dark energy instead of slowing down. NASA is working to uncover the secrets of the universe by digging into a deeper understanding of dark energy.