Somebody's headline is going to turn 'a hundred times larger than Hubble's or Webb's infrared views' into '100x Hubble', and readers will picture a sharper Hubble. The mirror is the same 2.4 meters as Hubble's. The hundred times is sky per image, from 18 detectors tiled into one 300 megapixel frame, and the payoff is more than a billion galaxies in its first five years. I'm pitching it as the telescope built for statisticians, which my editor is going to hate.
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- 0:00Roman will carry a mirror the same size as Hubble's, 2.4 meters across, but its true
- 0:07power comes from something entirely different. Its wide-field instrument will
- 0:11allow Roman to see enormous portions of the sky at once. A single Roman image
- 0:17will capture an area a hundred times larger than Hubble's or Webb's infrared
- 0:22views, while still delivering high resolution and sensitive observations.
- 0:27Roman does this with a unique array of 18 4k detectors. They are arranged in an
- 0:34arc to make full use of the optical system's region of best image quality.
- 0:39Combined, they form a 300 megapixel image. That combination of power and scale
- 0:46changes what is possible. Instead of studying a few objects at a time, Roman
- 0:52survey vast regions of the universe. During its first five years, it is
- 0:57expected to observe more than a billion galaxies and collect data that would
- 1:02take centuries for other observatories to gather.
