NANCY GRACE ROMAN SPACE TELESCOPE

Each time humanity launches a new space telescope, it opens up a new window to the universe. One of NASA’s latest is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, previously the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) before being renamed after NASA’s first chief astronomer. It’s due to launch in 2025 and will attempt to answer questions about dark energy through observations of gravitational lenses, supernovae and baryon acoustic oscillations – fluctuations in the density of the visible matter in the universe. It will also survey exoplanets, directly imaging those of Jupiter size, and use gravitational microlensing to find bodies only a few times the mass of Earth’s Moon. And it will do all this using infrared light.

Roman can trace its origins back to 2011, when a 1.3-metre (4.2-foot) infrared telescope was proposed. The next year this was scrapped in favour of a plan to use two secondhand telescopes donated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a US intelligence agency that also uses space telescopes, but points them in the other direction. The NRO considers these telescopes obsolete for its purposes, but for NASA