I'm imagining an alternate history where the Roman empire survived til today and when Roman citizens are taken hostage by 21st century carthaginians they only say their name and nationality.
Maybe Jody foster starred in silence of the elephants, and HBO's Rome wasn't cancelled for obvious reasons.
I had to look way too hard to find this...."ai overview".
It's named the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to honor Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer, for her pioneering vision and leadership in creating space astronomy programs, earning her the nickname "Mother of Hubble" for her foundational work that led to the Hubble Space Telescope and paved the way for future missions like Roman.
With this administration, I wouldn't have doubted it was named after the latter to get the damned funding through. Look at how Boeing coddled his fragile ego with the latest combat jet, the F-47.
Gotta say, if I were an influential astronomer named Nancy Grace Roman, and I learned that there exists a younger human named Nancy Grace that's a complete joke, then I would be pretty insistent that people just call me Nancy Roman.
It's even worse than that. They're actively damaging America for the benefit of your adversaries. Any personal benefit they can grift from those actions is merely a cherry on top.
AI remains a money blackhole that destroys investments and everything it touches...
But now Plaintir will have a whole bunch of AI data farms (because they're too big to fail) and Oracle is busy buying up every news outlet...
AI being rejected by vast majority of folks is proving it has no real commercial application. Once that chatbotss shot winds down you just have a slightly less annoying Siri.
But hey, that facial recognition works great
Good times.
AI being rejected by vast majority of folks is proving it has no real commercial application. Once that chatbotss shot winds down you just have a slightly less annoying Siri.
The goal isn't to make money by selling it to you.
The goal is to make money by replacing you.
When we talk about companies being too big to fail, we generally talk about how these companies failing would have knock on effects that would hurt the economy. I'm not seeing how Palantir fits that bill.
Republicans can't exist without them, they can't win elections because they need their data analytics and propaganda bots, they can't make decisions because they lack experts or even experience in any industry outside of performance politics and infotainment, and they can't organize to make money without billionaires and industry leeches. They've used Palantir here and there over the past decade+ but now they're wholly integrated into the Trump administration.
The myopia of that stance is so staggering. A glance at basically any scientific advancement even within the last decade, and especially those during the space race as witnessed by the boomers, have shown there is an unbelievable capacity for profit in that progress. They can only see back to the past fiscal quarter and only forward to the next.
I'm still confused why more people aren't more annoyed by that - it is incredibly annoying when weather predictions are wrong, and that has been noticeably more common since DOGE's wanton cuts to the weather service.
Everyone I know who isn't putting their heads in the sand is annoyed by it.
And then the other folks are just pretending it's not the case. And just go "gee these weathermen can't get the weather right can they!"
The venn diagram between those that aren't annoyed and those that are climate deniers is a circle.
They don't see the value of the science because they don't recognize it as valid. And any inaccuracies in forecasts are simply more confirmation bias of their incorrect conclusions.
Libraries, public television & radio, and the internet can be wonderful places to learn and grow so the cretins doggedly work to pollute and destroy them.
Reddit post recently about China having the lead in science, technology, medicine because of the war on thinking clearly. Anti-reason, anti-law, and anti-progress- sad.
Yeah, if you just look at what this Administration does and ignore everything it says it's almost exactly what you'd do to weaken American and make it a worse place vulnerable to influence and infiltration by her enemies and those hostile to freedom, liberty, and the thriving of the American people. But that's just based on the things they do. I'm sure their words speak much louder for a certain crowd and they will claim it's a long game and it's all Joe Biden's fault even though things were turning around until Trump decided to explode $10 B in market cap and blow up the deficit by adding another $2 T or $3 T to the national debt depending on who you ask, but whatever
The ones that try to destroy science are the same people that had their beliefs disprove by science time and time again for the past 2000 years. Trump is just a stupid puppet. Wave a $1 bill in front of him and he will do whatever you want for it.
I honestly don't think even most people that voted for him wanted this, when people hear "slash the administrative bloat" they don't think "let's end the greatest and most noble pursuits that our country is a proud world leader in" haha
You know the LHC in Switzerland? At CERN? Well, the SSC was to be built in Texas in 1993, a full 17 years before the LHC was built. The purpose of both particle accelerators was to find evidence of the Higgs Boson. Something we could have achieved at least a decade sooner than we did had the SSC continued and become operational.
But of course, some congresspeople just couldn't understand what the SSC was about and cancelled funding for the project despite then president Bill Clinton trying to prevent that from happening. This event is considered by many in the scientific community, specifically in various fields of advanced physics to be the end of American supremacy in those fields.
Anyway, if you wanna read about the SSC vs the LHC, there's already this phenominal post that I couldn't ever hope to match.
Trump doesn’t care about anything unless it results in profit or strokes his ego. If they offered to name it after him, I guarantee you he’d support it 100%
I am convinced it was ruined because the shutter speed of the glasses could make some people queasy; especially if they had consumed any alcohol.
They were really pushing the 3D live sports angle (golf in 3D was actually awesome), but since you can’t really drink and watch the game, that killed it for a lot of people.
Yeah, that quote isn't a great headliner. But to be fair, the quotes in the article were selected by a journalist and this specific quote was subselected by OP.
Actually it’s the same resolution, but it has a hugely larger field of view and can capture data at 1000x the speed
“With a Hubble-sized mirror and equivalent resolution, a Wide Field Instrument (WFI) with a field of view more than 200 times that of Hubble's current IR camera, and survey speeds up to 1,000 times faster than Hubble”
Are you arguing we should intentionally misinform the public by leaning into their misunderstanding?
Sure, there’s more pixels, but they aren’t looking at the same part of the sky as each other. Saying it’s a higher resolution is like taking 8 cameras, aiming them all slightly differently, and then claiming the panorama made by all 8 photos is higher resolution than if one camera had taken it. It’s kind of true, but they aren’t aimed at the same place. You could get the exact same resolution image if you used one camera and took 8 photos (which is what Hubble does to get the same size photo as Roman will)
I took it as 3D animation. Which was weird to me cause didnt we have movies of what is going on? We prolly get so much more now.
Anyways it sounds exciting!
r/Space, your calls have been answered | The problematic partisan mod has been removed + putting an end to wrongful post/comment removals critical of the current US govt
This happens a lot more often than you think it does. I work for an astronomical optics department (not in the US) and our office building and workshops/labs have to be high security clearance because of the detectors we have lying around
Sort of, it was more like parallel development. Same for JWST and SBIR.
The folding mirror spy satellite from the JWSTP (Joint Warfare Strategic Technology Plan) doesn't seem to have ever made it past early prototypes, likely because of improvements in IR remote sensing that didn't require the large mirrors for early warning missile detection
Do you have a source for the JWST being parallel development, I can't find anything suggesting as such. And AFAIK it wouldn't really make sense, once you're at the size of something like Hubble the limiting factor becomes atmospheric distortion, getting a bigger mirror just gives you a higher resolution image of a blurry target.
No, Hubble was explicitly civilian. There are some points of convergence, though. The size was driven indirectly by size of military spy satellites via space shuttle. Perkins Elmer got the job of polishing the mirror and they did that for spy satellites too. But the Hubble mirror was in a segregated area, and larger than the hexagon spy satellite mirror P-E made . IIRC, one of the investigations into the mirror problem pointed out that if the military/spy side and the civilian side had communicated more, maybe they might have been able to find the issue ..
The DoD came up with this initiative of Future Imaging Architecture, that you could do spy satellites smaller, better, cheaper. Boeing was hungry and underbid, while Lockheed, who was the experienced contractor was happy to let them. Boeing ran into problems (bad parts was a big part of it) and the optical portion of FIA was cancelled. That was essentially 2 hubble sized scopes just sitting in air conditioned storage, eating a million+ just for storage/ac costs.
FIA was said to be the biggest boondoggle of the NRO; the DoD went back to lockheed.
After a few years of paying storage, the DoD gave it to NASA. Eventually they figure that they can use it for wide field, and then actually modified it to make it into the Roman Space telescope NASA is still paying storage for the other without clarity on what to use it for., afaik
FIA has been called by The New York Times "perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects
It has a wider field of view. It won't see finer details (that's limited by the mirror size), but it can look a larger area of the sky in each observation.
Yes, Roman will perform wide field of view surveys of large parts of the sky, where as JWST has a narrow field of view and is best for imaging single objects to high depth (meaning gathering a lot of light so it can see faint features).
It's Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, so the full name of the telescope contains her full name: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. However the article does reference the telescope as simply Roman.
Planned to be at Lagrange point L2 (like JWST), which is cool...but I think limits its lifespan (due to propellant budget, and probably hard/impossible to service). Won't be getting the absurd longevity out of stuff like Hubble (currently 35 years?) anymore.
Well we aren't able to service any satellites now including the Hubble, so something being hard to service isn't really a big factor. The James Webb is still expected to be in service for 20 years, without any planned service. Besides with the advances in technology that occurred between Hubbles launch and this one, it's safe to say by the time the Roman one is to be replaced we will have much better telescope technology.
It's imagers are 100x more powerful than Hubble. It takes 3 shots to fully image Andromeda. For the sake of argument it can do in its 5 year span what would take 500 years for Hubble to do / image. But it will likely have enough propellant to last far more than 5 years and they will probably do some orbit adjustments at end of life to continue using it. Leaving L2 is not that expensive. Its expensive to stay there.
For the sake of argument it can do in its 5 year span what would take 500 years for Hubble to do / image.
It can't. The goal of Hubble is not to cover as much area as possible (there are other telescopes for that). It spends most of the time studying individual objects. If you want to know how this particular star behaves then covering more sky around the star isn't going to help. Maybe you are lucky and find one or even two other things you can observe in parallel but you won't find 100.
All Trump did was propose cutting the project, in his first term, and Congress funded it anyway, so Trump said "Ok" and then signed the funding into law. So it's sort of a nothing story because it was proposed, they debated, Trump withdrew proposal to remove funding and signed the budget to keep funding it. The end.
I actually agree with you, but they cancelled constellation and offered no replacement, they just cut the budget, canceled any plans for the moon, and offered no forward vision other than mostly statements that going to the moon was a waste of money. No redirection of funds anywhere else, just pure line item budget cuts with no redirection of funds elsewhere, just pure funding elimination.
Little know fact is that Hubble actually had two mirrors made, the flawed main one that was made by Perkins-Elmer in Connecticut and a perfect backup mirror that was made by Kodak in upstate New York. The Roman telescope was made by the same facility that made the good backup mirror.
I am familiar with the history. As an Apollo era child I was addicted to space. There was a severe drought of space Input. The shuttle suffered from media disinterest with the lone exception of the Hubble rescue and subsequent tragic mission failures. We did not have the daily feed we have now. Newspapers and magazines, no smart phones and internet. Basically the stone age. I wallow in my everyday instant space news nowadays.
Nancy Grace Roman was NASA's first head of astrophysics, and was instrumental in having NASA do science at all as well as in shepherding the Hubble Space Telescope from conception to completion.
What’s your beef with Webb? I only know him as a lifelong public servant and the guy that got the Apollo program started, made NASA a paragon of racial integration, and championed the very concept of space telescopes. Seems like a solid choice for naming government space telescope hardware after.
There were some accusations about him being complicit and purging homosexuals from the federal workforce including NASA. I think that was discredited but still controversial. Personally, I feel like Galileo would be a more appropriate name, or Kepler, or maybe Carl Sagan, Sally Ride, etc.
Galileo was a NASA telescope on an airplane and also a spacecraft that flew to Jupiter. Kepler was already used for a space telescope. Carl Sagan Observatory is already a proposal for a different space telescope.
Sally Ride's name would be available for a telescope. A Cygnus capsule was named after her.
Oh yeah, the other Nancy Grace is a terrible person, but Nancy Grace Roman is worthy of this title. But can we call it NG Roman or something for short… Nancy Grace gives ick vibes cause of the evil one
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Well, because that's the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
So, why did 'they' use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England . You see, that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And what about the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)
Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything and....
CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else.
This will be in space. The Roman is built on an unused reconnaissance satellite frame and is very similar in form to Hubble and will be in a similar orbit around Earth.
JWST was a bespoke design with a significantly larger mirror that had to unfold after traveling to it's destination.
Edit: They will both be beyond the Moon at L2, about 1 million miles away from Earth.
Cancel finishing it? What does he do, just make a daily list of how he can cause more damage? Congrats to the team that got it finished before he could take a wrecking ball to it.
With these detectors in its bag, Roman will cover much more cosmic real estate than Hubble. For example, Roman will be able to re-create Hubble’s famous Ultra Deep Field image with the same sharpness, but expand it to show countless stars and galaxies over an area of the sky at least 100 times larger.
Cool.
Named after Nancy Grace Roman, not Nancy Grace, btw.
Definitely had me in the first half NGL.
Had me in the first 2/3 NGL
I was going to use the initials of the telescope but I really didn’t feel comfortable after seeing them written out
There's a joke about a particular type of super-dense space object in there, but I'm too much of a coward to follow through.
I feel dumb, I can't figure this one out @_@ (you can dm it to me if you don't want to type it out in a comment lol)
[removed]
Yeah there's really no winning with that name...
Pretty sure you guys mean NGR
NGA bruh. The R makes Nancy Grace racist.
You mean you don't find rants over Jonbenet Ramsey, Natalee Holloway, and Casey Anthony by a boomer Georgia peach worthy of memorializing?
the fuck?
ah
wait who?
Hey cousin want to go bowling?
I'm imagining an alternate history where the Roman empire survived til today and when Roman citizens are taken hostage by 21st century carthaginians they only say their name and nationality.
Maybe Jody foster starred in silence of the elephants, and HBO's Rome wasn't cancelled for obvious reasons.
It doesn't matter, I still hear her screaming, 'Joran van der Sloot!'
TOTMOM!!! I used to yell it randomly
Scott Peterson lied about where he was that daaay!
And crying her crocodile tears. She was never happier than when some young innocent girl was found murdered.
Ah yes, the Nancy Grace Roamin’ telescope
Going around space, flying through the cosmos, looking for drama.
TOT-MOM!!
What do we see when we look into Andromeda? TOT-MOM!!
I was hoping it was going to be used to find missing
childrenstarsI had to look way too hard to find this...."ai overview".
We should just make plans for a bunch of telescopes and probes and name them all after Trump. They would probably be funded.
With this administration, I wouldn't have doubted it was named after the latter to get the damned funding through. Look at how Boeing coddled his fragile ego with the latest combat jet, the F-47.
The only plane named for a President's IQ
It does have a huge raised interrogative eyebrow so are we sure sure ?
Gotta say, if I were an influential astronomer named Nancy Grace Roman, and I learned that there exists a younger human named Nancy Grace that's a complete joke, then I would be pretty insistent that people just call me Nancy Roman.
Had a fuckin hoot when I was like "Nancy Grace...wat"
I hope when they put the name on the side of it, they include "(not Nancy Grace, BTW)", too.
On the other side it says "Ew. Can you imagine?"
Nancy Grace, and Romans. Grown men think about one of these things, but never both.
Hell ya! That's awesome. I very much look forward to seeing this telescope in action.
Amazes me that anyone can claim to love our nation while actively destroying our scientific prospects.
They don't actually love it, they just love what they can fleece out of it for themselves
Unless they’re the poor, dumb magas that voted for this. Then they’re just in it for racism, hatred, and bigotry.
No no no, they’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Soon they’ll be rich and can take advantage of all they’ve been voting for.
Well at least they are in for it for the love of the game
It's even worse than that. They're actively damaging America for the benefit of your adversaries. Any personal benefit they can grift from those actions is merely a cherry on top.
They don't love our country, they love being a fan of our country. Similar to the NFL, for example.
Keeping people stupid and stopping any scientific advancement that can’t be monetized is the GOP way.
Ask not what your country can do for you- Ask what you can do for billionaires /s
Won’t somebody please, please think of the billionaires?
Or used to spy on people.
AI remains a money blackhole that destroys investments and everything it touches... But now Plaintir will have a whole bunch of AI data farms (because they're too big to fail) and Oracle is busy buying up every news outlet...
AI being rejected by vast majority of folks is proving it has no real commercial application. Once that chatbotss shot winds down you just have a slightly less annoying Siri.
But hey, that facial recognition works great Good times.
The goal isn't to make money by selling it to you. The goal is to make money by replacing you.
In what way is Palantir too big to fail?
When we talk about companies being too big to fail, we generally talk about how these companies failing would have knock on effects that would hurt the economy. I'm not seeing how Palantir fits that bill.
Republicans can't exist without them, they can't win elections because they need their data analytics and propaganda bots, they can't make decisions because they lack experts or even experience in any industry outside of performance politics and infotainment, and they can't organize to make money without billionaires and industry leeches. They've used Palantir here and there over the past decade+ but now they're wholly integrated into the Trump administration.
The myopia of that stance is so staggering. A glance at basically any scientific advancement even within the last decade, and especially those during the space race as witnessed by the boomers, have shown there is an unbelievable capacity for profit in that progress. They can only see back to the past fiscal quarter and only forward to the next.
Just look want they did to NOAA. and since their cuts weather forecasts have gone to shit.
They have been way less accurate.
I'm still confused why more people aren't more annoyed by that - it is incredibly annoying when weather predictions are wrong, and that has been noticeably more common since DOGE's wanton cuts to the weather service.
Everyone I know who isn't putting their heads in the sand is annoyed by it.
And then the other folks are just pretending it's not the case. And just go "gee these weathermen can't get the weather right can they!"
The venn diagram between those that aren't annoyed and those that are climate deniers is a circle.
They don't see the value of the science because they don't recognize it as valid. And any inaccuracies in forecasts are simply more confirmation bias of their incorrect conclusions.
Umm excuse you. They cancelled hurricanes this year.
Thank you president trump. No one keeps the hurricanes away like him.
Stupid and angry people are much easier to control than well adjusted and informed individuals.
If it doesn't align with Russian interests, or line their pockets.... are you that surprised??
They HATE education, they hate knowledge, they hate science.
They want as little people to be educated as possible because they're far easier to lie to.
They will only invest in science if it means more power for them, or more money. America is fully in the grips of anti intellectualism
Libraries, public television & radio, and the internet can be wonderful places to learn and grow so the cretins doggedly work to pollute and destroy them.
Reddit post recently about China having the lead in science, technology, medicine because of the war on thinking clearly. Anti-reason, anti-law, and anti-progress- sad.
Science makes people think.
They can’t allow that.
Yeah, if you just look at what this Administration does and ignore everything it says it's almost exactly what you'd do to weaken American and make it a worse place vulnerable to influence and infiltration by her enemies and those hostile to freedom, liberty, and the thriving of the American people. But that's just based on the things they do. I'm sure their words speak much louder for a certain crowd and they will claim it's a long game and it's all Joe Biden's fault even though things were turning around until Trump decided to explode $10 B in market cap and blow up the deficit by adding another $2 T or $3 T to the national debt depending on who you ask, but whatever
It amazes you that people are brainwashed? Tale as old as time.
Oh, don't worry he's going to take credit for it now that it's done.
He also defines "our nation" as "himself".
Trump couldn't immediately think how to make money out of it, so its value to him was zero.
The ones that try to destroy science are the same people that had their beliefs disprove by science time and time again for the past 2000 years. Trump is just a stupid puppet. Wave a $1 bill in front of him and he will do whatever you want for it.
Trump is a Russian asset and is actively destroying his enemy, The United States. And he’s not trying to hide it.
There’s no need to feign hypocrisy anymore. Either you’re an extremely stupid sucker who has fallen for it, or not.
This much is obvious.
He probably just didn't like that it's named after a woman, and not him.
It breaks me a little more every fucking day man.
Pretty sure these people are not capable of loving anything.
I honestly don't think even most people that voted for him wanted this, when people hear "slash the administrative bloat" they don't think "let's end the greatest and most noble pursuits that our country is a proud world leader in" haha
Nation/nationalism is for idiots. Idiots don't like science because that is for smart people.
Let me tell you about a certain Super Conducting Super Collider....
Ok, tell me about it..........
You know the LHC in Switzerland? At CERN? Well, the SSC was to be built in Texas in 1993, a full 17 years before the LHC was built. The purpose of both particle accelerators was to find evidence of the Higgs Boson. Something we could have achieved at least a decade sooner than we did had the SSC continued and become operational.
But of course, some congresspeople just couldn't understand what the SSC was about and cancelled funding for the project despite then president Bill Clinton trying to prevent that from happening. This event is considered by many in the scientific community, specifically in various fields of advanced physics to be the end of American supremacy in those fields.
Anyway, if you wanna read about the SSC vs the LHC, there's already this phenominal post that I couldn't ever hope to match.
Alright, now explain to me why you brought it up.
And your neighbours and your allies…
Trump doesn’t care about anything unless it results in profit or strokes his ego. If they offered to name it after him, I guarantee you he’d support it 100%
Great project, terrible PR.
Hey, time to dust off that 3D TV sitting on your attic!
Honestly if you own a VR headset, 3D movies on those can be pretty damn good.
tbh i would pay an insane amount of money for an HD 3D VR 360 view around space captured by a telescope like this
Do it from the surface of mars right now
That "craze" lasted all of 30 seconds.
My dad still swears by it. You should see his hard drive bay full of 3D movie torrents
I am convinced it was ruined because the shutter speed of the glasses could make some people queasy; especially if they had consumed any alcohol.
They were really pushing the 3D live sports angle (golf in 3D was actually awesome), but since you can’t really drink and watch the game, that killed it for a lot of people.
Yeah, that quote isn't a great headliner. But to be fair, the quotes in the article were selected by a journalist and this specific quote was subselected by OP.
You might like this science overview for Roman better: https://www.stsci.edu/roman/about/science-themes
"Hubble is old and could die any day, we have already finished building its replacement. And it has a camera with 1000x the resolution"
Actually it’s the same resolution, but it has a hugely larger field of view and can capture data at 1000x the speed
slightly less resolution per pixel
It's 1000x the megapixels, for a public audience that's 1000x the resolution
Are you arguing we should intentionally misinform the public by leaning into their misunderstanding?
Sure, there’s more pixels, but they aren’t looking at the same part of the sky as each other. Saying it’s a higher resolution is like taking 8 cameras, aiming them all slightly differently, and then claiming the panorama made by all 8 photos is higher resolution than if one camera had taken it. It’s kind of true, but they aren’t aimed at the same place. You could get the exact same resolution image if you used one camera and took 8 photos (which is what Hubble does to get the same size photo as Roman will)
That's confusing as the angular resolution does not improve. It can cover a larger part of the sky in each image.
Yeah that user is incorrect, the resolution is actually slightly less per pixel. It just captures more of the sky at once.
I took it as 3D animation. Which was weird to me cause didnt we have movies of what is going on? We prolly get so much more now. Anyways it sounds exciting!
Awesome news. And a launch expected in the fall 2026! Really exciting to see these projects come to fruition.
MAGA mod deletes in 3... 2...
EDIT: had missed the post about MAGA mod's removal. Excellent.
Nope. The post is staying up :D
good shit mod team! Keep up the good work
Thank you. I finally have some time to moderate a little again now that I'm on break. The last few weeks have kinda sucked cause of finals
name and shame them into quitting, if r/art can do it so can r/space
didnt they get rid of the problem one? thought i saw something about that a few weeks ago
Yeah, they were removed a month ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1oy0xfu/rspace_your_calls_have_been_answered_the/
Thanks for sharing, that's great news
Weird. Who goes out of their way to protect a pedophile from criticism?
Folks that probably worry about the police checking their hard drives
Fuck yea my two favorite things are fash-free
They got rid of that guy.
Thank fuck. Much better place now
Absolute disgrace to humanity.
As long as the telescope is aimed at him it will be fine considering he is the center of the universe-
I can see him renaming it after himself given his misogyny.
I thought they got rid of that guy?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
generationmonitoring of the climateDecronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
17 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 21 acronyms.
[Thread #11983 for this sub, first seen 17th Dec 2025, 01:07] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I can’t wait to see the movies!
Pretty neat that the mirror size is the same as Hubble, but it's the extra detectors that enable such a higher resolution.
It doesn’t have a higher resolution, it has a larger field of view and can capture images more quickly.
Also they were handed over by...DoD? Just like.
Here's our old spy shit, this should work for your science project....
This happens a lot more often than you think it does. I work for an astronomical optics department (not in the US) and our office building and workshops/labs have to be high security clearance because of the detectors we have lying around
Isn't Hubble just a spy satellite that they flipped 180 degrees
Sort of, it was more like parallel development. Same for JWST and SBIR.
The folding mirror spy satellite from the JWSTP (Joint Warfare Strategic Technology Plan) doesn't seem to have ever made it past early prototypes, likely because of improvements in IR remote sensing that didn't require the large mirrors for early warning missile detection
Do you have a source for the JWST being parallel development, I can't find anything suggesting as such. And AFAIK it wouldn't really make sense, once you're at the size of something like Hubble the limiting factor becomes atmospheric distortion, getting a bigger mirror just gives you a higher resolution image of a blurry target.
No, Hubble was explicitly civilian. There are some points of convergence, though. The size was driven indirectly by size of military spy satellites via space shuttle. Perkins Elmer got the job of polishing the mirror and they did that for spy satellites too. But the Hubble mirror was in a segregated area, and larger than the hexagon spy satellite mirror P-E made . IIRC, one of the investigations into the mirror problem pointed out that if the military/spy side and the civilian side had communicated more, maybe they might have been able to find the issue ..
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3448/was-hubble-really-related-to-spy-satellites
The DoD came up with this initiative of Future Imaging Architecture, that you could do spy satellites smaller, better, cheaper. Boeing was hungry and underbid, while Lockheed, who was the experienced contractor was happy to let them. Boeing ran into problems (bad parts was a big part of it) and the optical portion of FIA was cancelled. That was essentially 2 hubble sized scopes just sitting in air conditioned storage, eating a million+ just for storage/ac costs.
FIA was said to be the biggest boondoggle of the NRO; the DoD went back to lockheed.
After a few years of paying storage, the DoD gave it to NASA. Eventually they figure that they can use it for wide field, and then actually modified it to make it into the Roman Space telescope NASA is still paying storage for the other without clarity on what to use it for., afaik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Imagery_Architecture#Electro_optical_imaging
It has a wider field of view. It won't see finer details (that's limited by the mirror size), but it can look a larger area of the sky in each observation.
Yea let's go!! Love to see these sorts of wins for the space scene.
So does this one perform a different role than Webb?
Yes, Roman will perform wide field of view surveys of large parts of the sky, where as JWST has a narrow field of view and is best for imaging single objects to high depth (meaning gathering a lot of light so it can see faint features).
Can we please just call it the Nancy Roman.. Nancy Grace is that ultra annoying television lady totally giving that telescope bad juju
It's Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, so the full name of the telescope contains her full name: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. However the article does reference the telescope as simply Roman.
I love me some space porn.
Planned to be at Lagrange point L2 (like JWST), which is cool...but I think limits its lifespan (due to propellant budget, and probably hard/impossible to service). Won't be getting the absurd longevity out of stuff like Hubble (currently 35 years?) anymore.
Well we aren't able to service any satellites now including the Hubble, so something being hard to service isn't really a big factor. The James Webb is still expected to be in service for 20 years, without any planned service. Besides with the advances in technology that occurred between Hubbles launch and this one, it's safe to say by the time the Roman one is to be replaced we will have much better telescope technology.
It's imagers are 100x more powerful than Hubble. It takes 3 shots to fully image Andromeda. For the sake of argument it can do in its 5 year span what would take 500 years for Hubble to do / image. But it will likely have enough propellant to last far more than 5 years and they will probably do some orbit adjustments at end of life to continue using it. Leaving L2 is not that expensive. Its expensive to stay there.
It can't. The goal of Hubble is not to cover as much area as possible (there are other telescopes for that). It spends most of the time studying individual objects. If you want to know how this particular star behaves then covering more sky around the star isn't going to help. Maybe you are lucky and find one or even two other things you can observe in parallel but you won't find 100.
Going to see this at GSFC on Thursday. Woot!
For a second there my mind saw Nancy Grace and was like what??? Then I was relieved when I kept reading and realized Nancy Grace Roman
NASA deserves far more funding, they do so much with so little its amazing.
We do need this. Many older ones need to be replaced, the og replacement never happen.
I still remember when Obama canceled the Constellation program to return to the moon and also cut NASA's budget, and Reddit tried to justify Obama's smarter NASA spending.
All Trump did was propose cutting the project, in his first term, and Congress funded it anyway, so Trump said "Ok" and then signed the funding into law. So it's sort of a nothing story because it was proposed, they debated, Trump withdrew proposal to remove funding and signed the budget to keep funding it. The end.
The current presidential request is to cancel it, too. The senate and house don’t agree though.
Cancelling Constellation was the right move.
I actually agree with you, but they cancelled constellation and offered no replacement, they just cut the budget, canceled any plans for the moon, and offered no forward vision other than mostly statements that going to the moon was a waste of money. No redirection of funds anywhere else, just pure line item budget cuts with no redirection of funds elsewhere, just pure funding elimination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_financial_crisis
Please give some context, don't just comment a link.
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Nah, any chance they have to take a shot at Trump, even when it doesn't make sense, they have to do it.
Just rename it the Peace Prize telescope and he'll ensure it goes up.
Nah, he’d try to steal it.
I hope they got the optic prescription right because.......
Little know fact is that Hubble actually had two mirrors made, the flawed main one that was made by Perkins-Elmer in Connecticut and a perfect backup mirror that was made by Kodak in upstate New York. The Roman telescope was made by the same facility that made the good backup mirror.
I am familiar with the history. As an Apollo era child I was addicted to space. There was a severe drought of space Input. The shuttle suffered from media disinterest with the lone exception of the Hubble rescue and subsequent tragic mission failures. We did not have the daily feed we have now. Newspapers and magazines, no smart phones and internet. Basically the stone age. I wallow in my everyday instant space news nowadays.
Why is it named after Nancy Grace?
Nancy Grace Roman was NASA's first head of astrophysics, and was instrumental in having NASA do science at all as well as in shepherding the Hubble Space Telescope from conception to completion.
After Nancy (Grace) Roman. Most definitely a more worthy namesake than J. Webb.
What’s your beef with Webb? I only know him as a lifelong public servant and the guy that got the Apollo program started, made NASA a paragon of racial integration, and championed the very concept of space telescopes. Seems like a solid choice for naming government space telescope hardware after.
There were some accusations about him being complicit and purging homosexuals from the federal workforce including NASA. I think that was discredited but still controversial. Personally, I feel like Galileo would be a more appropriate name, or Kepler, or maybe Carl Sagan, Sally Ride, etc.
Galileo was a NASA telescope on an airplane and also a spacecraft that flew to Jupiter. Kepler was already used for a space telescope. Carl Sagan Observatory is already a proposal for a different space telescope.
Sally Ride's name would be available for a telescope. A Cygnus capsule was named after her.
Ha! Thank you for this, I didn't realize they are already starting to run out of names for these things!
Oh yeah, the other Nancy Grace is a terrible person, but Nancy Grace Roman is worthy of this title. But can we call it NG Roman or something for short… Nancy Grace gives ick vibes cause of the evil one
It's already shortened to Roman Space Telescope (RST) :)
Now it looks like it’s named after the Romans. And what did the Romans ever done for us?
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used? Well, because that's the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads.
Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
So, why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England . You see, that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And what about the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)
Now, the twist to the story: When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything and....
CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else.
Credit: Jeff On Radio
Well, there are the aqueducts. But that's all!
I realize this is probably a joke, but the Romans are responsible for a huge amount of things that are a part of our society today.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3448/was-hubble-really-related-to-spy-satellites
This one ?
Why can’t you use Google or wikipedia?
Republicans hate science, said before I’ll say it again.
When will we get the first images
Great news! Now let's start chatting about making a gravitational lens telescope.
Wait. We heard about Webb YEARS before it was done, pretty prominently, and now this new telescope just comes strolling in?
Is it also going in space, or staying on the ground?
This will be in space. The Roman is built on an unused reconnaissance satellite frame and is very similar in form to Hubble
and will be in a similar orbit around Earth.JWST was a bespoke design with a significantly larger mirror that had to unfold after traveling to it's destination.
Edit: They will both be beyond the Moon at L2, about 1 million miles away from Earth.
Thanks for the correction /u/whyisthesky
Roman won’t be in a similar orbit to Hubble, it’ll be in a halo orbit around L2 like JWST
Thats really good to hear.
Can we call it the Nancy Roman telescope?
Cancel finishing it? What does he do, just make a daily list of how he can cause more damage? Congrats to the team that got it finished before he could take a wrecking ball to it.
Holy shit.