NASA's Roman Telescope uses active coronagraph with shape-shifting mirrors to block starlight 1000x better
Two deformable mirrors cancel starlight like noise-canceling headphones, revealing exoplanets hidden in glare.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launching as early as next month, will carry the first space-bound active coronagraph. It uses two deformable mirrors with 48x48 actuators to cancel out unwanted starlight. Compared with current space-based coronagraphs, the system is expected to improve sensitivity to exoplanets against the glare of their host stars by a factor of up to 1,000. This will allow astronomers to take the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars that are similar to those in our solar system. The telescope's 300-megapixel wide-field camera can capture images about 100 times larger than Hubble's widest exposures at similar resolution, aiding studies of dark matter and dark energy and helping to detect around 100,000 new exoplanets.
- Active coronagraph uses two deformable mirrors with 48x48 actuators to cancel starlight with 10-picometer precision.
- Sensitivity improvement up to 1,000x over Hubble and JWST coronagraphs, enabling direct imaging of Jupiter-like exoplanets.
- 300-megapixel camera captures images 100x larger than Hubble's widest exposures, detecting ~100,000 new exoplanets via microlensing.
Why It Matters
This technology is a critical stepping stone toward directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets and finding Earth 2.0.