Re:Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
by ChocolateGod on Saturday August 29, 2026 @01:46PM
(#49491773)
IIRC the mirror is from a spy satellite, but the chassis and electronics are all NASA.
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This is true. The telescope is much more than just the primary mirror.
Roman has two science instruments, a wide-field imager (“WFI”) and a coronagraph (“CGI”) and they were both built by NASA for this purpose (optics, electronics, detectors, deformable mirrors).
The WFI optics includes filters and a prism and grism for spectroscopy, and of course the very large CCD arrays.
The coronagraph is a rather special tech demo and allows imaging of exoplanets (Jupiter-like) while blocking the light of the host star. (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/coron...). It’s a precursor to HWO which is mentioned down-thread.
BTW, any idea what happened to the second mirror? IIRC NASA got 2 initially.