But now that we’re here and my team members are talking about the hardware arriving, I can hear the excitement in their voices.”Ĭredits: NASA/JPL-Caltech More About the Mission “It’s definitely a delayed gratification, because we’ve spent so long preparing. “It’s exciting to finally start putting all the pieces together,” said Bedrosian. It will then be put in a vacuum chamber that replicates the space environment to check that the hardware remains aligned and operating correctly. Once assembled, the Coronagraph Instrument will undergo a series of tests, including almost a month of dynamical testing to simulate the rocket ride into space. It helped make a lot of our plans safer and simpler.” It showed us when it would be beneficial to lift the entire instrument with a crane, or if we were going to need a specialized tool to do our work at that angle.

“We could get a sense of how tight the access would be at certain points of integration by literally laying on the floor and getting visuals of under the instrument. “We learned a lot from that exercise,” said Bedrosian. The headset is also used by the Mars Curiosity rover team to see in 3D the Martian terrain that the rover drives over. That’s why the coronagraph team made use of an augmented reality headset that lets users see a virtual projection of a 3D object and the world around them. Integration and testing teams will often use digital 3D models of the instrument to help make their plans, but nothing can compare to seeing the object in a real space. Because the two layers have to be aligned with each other to within a fraction of a millimeter, the team will use lasers to get them positioned just right over the course of four days. The optical bench will be stacked by crane atop the electronics pallet. The electronics also control the mechanical components on the optical bench as well as the instrument heaters. The pallet, or bottom layer, houses the electronics that receive instructions from the Roman spacecraft and return the Coronagraph Instrument’s scientific data. This video explains how the complex instrument works.Ĭredits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center The Coronagraph Instrument on NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is designed to block the light from a star and capture the much fainter light from orbiting planets. The process will resemble a well-choreographed ballet that involves heavy duty cranes, lasers, and vacuum chambers the size of buses. She and her team then spent another two years collaborating with various subject matter experts and project members to review and adjust the plan, ensuring all the pieces would come together on time and in the right order. In 2018, Bedrosian started working on a set of assembly plans for something that’s never been built before. She likes to say that while integration and testing are technically the last steps in building an instrument, they’re actually part of the process from the beginning. JPL engineer Gasia Bedrosian leads the assembly and testing process as the instrument’s integration and test product delivery manager. Once complete, the Coronagraph Instrument will be shipped to the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and incorporated into the Roman observatory. The process kicked off recently at JPL and will take more than a year. “It’s like all the separate tributaries are finally coming together to form the river,” said Jeff Oseas, product delivery manager for the Coronagraph Instrument’s optical subsystem at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Now they have to put the pieces together and run tests to make sure they operate as intended.

The Coronagraph Instrument team has already designed the cutting-edge instrument and built the components.

The instrument will block the light from each distant star it observes so that scientists can better see the planets around the star, and it will demonstrate technologies needed to eventually study potentially habitable planets with future missions. But to do that they’ll need new tools, like those being tested on the Coronagraph Instrument on NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. As technologies for studying these worlds continue to advance, researchers may someday be able to search for signs of life on exoplanets that are similar in size, composition, and temperature to Earth. Scientists have discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. Putting it together will require a highly choreographed dance. The Coronagraph Instrument on NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study planets around other stars.

Roman space telescope coronagraph