Roman Space Telescope’s Coronagraph Passes NASA Inspection

The coronagraph is a system of masks, prisms, detectors, and even self-flexing mirrors built to block out the glare from distant stars. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s coronagraph just completed a major milestone: It has met all of NASA’s design, schedule, and budget requirements, and can now proceed to building hardware for flight.

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] a coronagraph is a way to see distant planets hidden by the glare of the star they orbit the chronograph reduces the light coming directly from the star to separate it from the light reflected by the planet the nancy grace roman space telescope's coronagraph doesn't block the star's light with an opaque disc as a simple

00:00:21 coronagraph might instead it uses a combination of discs with complex patterns and light blocking stops to create destructive interference with the star's light effectively making it disappear while allowing the light from planets to pass through a complicating factor is that the light picks up small distortions as it reflects off the telescope's series of

00:00:44 mirrors and these distortions can reduce the effectiveness of the destructive interference collecting more light increases the image signal but the planets are still hidden under blobs of leftover distorted starlight to remove these blobs the coronagraph has special deformable mirrors that can

00:01:01 change shape by using hundreds of tiny pistons this corrects distortions in the light beam as the mirrors deform the blobs of light slowly begin to disappear revealing brighter planets further adjustment brings fainter planets into view advanced software processes this data further improving the contrast and

00:01:22 clarity of the image this processing makes objects more than a billion times fainter than the star visible as a result the roman space telescope will provide the first look at individual planets in star systems that might be similar to our own you