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NASA Selects Falcon Heavy to Launch Roman Space Telescope (WFIRST)

takyon writes:

NASA selects Falcon Heavy to launch Roman Space Telescope

NASA has selected SpaceX to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on a Falcon Heavy, but at a price significantly higher than most previous agency contracts.

NASA announced July 19 that it awarded a contract to SpaceX to launch Roman on the company's Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2026 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The contract is valued at $255 million for the launch and other mission-related costs.

Roman is the next large, or flagship, astrophysics mission after the James Webb Space Telescope. The spacecraft features a 2.4-meter primary mirror, donated to NASA a decade ago by the National Reconnaissance Office, with a wide field instrument and a coronagraph to conduct research in cosmology, exoplanets and general astrophysics.

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The James Webb Telescope Has Already Made its First Scientific Discovery

upstart writes:

The James Webb Telescope Has Already Made Its First Scientific Discovery:

First comes the art, them comes the science. Just over a week after NASA dazzled the world with the first clutch of images from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers working with one of the pictures believe they have found the oldest galaxy ever imaged—one dating back 13.5 billion years, or just 300 million years after the Big Bang, report Space.com and others.

The age of a galaxy is measured by what is known as its red shift: as the universe expands, the wavelength of light is stretched into the red spectrum. The redder the image, the greater the stretching and the farther—and older—the object in the image is. Analyzing the deep-field image the Webb telescope returned, a team led by astronomer Rohan Naidu of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics detected a galaxy with a shift that fixes it at the 13.5 billion year point.

"We're potentially looking at the most distant starlight ever seen," Naidu told France 24. The next step is to submit their findings for peer review that should hopefully validate their discovery.

The galaxy is not much as these things go. It measures 3,000 to 4,500 light years across and contains about a billion stars. In comparison, our Milky Way measures about 100,000 light years and contains an estimated 200 billion stars. But seeing something 13.5 billion light years away means we're seeing it as it looked 13.5 billion years ago. Over time, the small, old galaxy would have merged with others nearby, forming a single, giant galactic mass.

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