The following is a summary of a story by Corbie Hill of Duke Magazine.
The successful recent launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was, for two Duke physicists, both a satisfying culmination of lots of hard work and the start of a new era in space research.
Dan Scolnic and Michael Troxel watched with enthusiasm August 30 as the rocket took off from the Kennedy Space Center and shot into space. The duo, which lead Duke's SPACE Initiative , have each played key roles in developing the technology and data gathering the telescope will provide from the far-reaching heavens.
"The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is NASA's next flagship mission," says Scolnic.
As co-principal investigator of the Roman Supernova Project Infrastructure Team , Scolnic and his colleagues write software that will help researchers around the world understand the data the telescope sends back to earth.
Scolnic's work examines a certain type of supernova, which explodes in a similar way each time, to figure out the universe's expansion rate.
Roman will find thousands of supernovae, allowing for precise measurements. It is vastly superior to its predecessor - the Hubble Telescope - faster with a far larger camera. The opportunity, Troxel says, is nearly immeasurable.
"[Roman] can do what Hubble could do in a thousand years in just one year," he says.
Troxel chairs the Roman Simulations Technical Working Group, simulating what the telescope will see and the data it will generate, so that researchers will be prepared for the real thing. He is also on the steering committee for the High-Latitude Imaging Survey (HLIS) Project Infrastructure Team , which develops scientific infrastructure ahead of the wide survey Roman will do.
For now, science waits while the telescope travels; the fun begins when the images and data starts arriving later this year.
Read the full story .
