Washington: BAE Systems has successfully shipped the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s Wide Field Instrument (WFI) to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and has completed integrating and testing it, the company announced in a press release.
“The [WFI] is an advanced visible-to-near-infrared imager with additional spectral capabilities that will capture highly detailed images over wide swaths of the sky, offering a field of view at least 100 times greater than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, with a similar resolution,” the release said on Tuesday.
The WFI will dramatically improve the speed and scale of astronomical surveys to allow more advanced exploration of dark matter and dark energy, distant galaxies and exoplanets, and studying how the universe has formed over billions of years, BAE Systems said.
“The Wide Field Instrument is one of the most sophisticated instruments ever constructed, and once it’s in orbit it will provide the scientific community with the most comprehensive surveys of the sky we’ve ever captured,” said Bonnie Patterson, BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems Senior Director of Civil Space Programs Bonnie Patterson said in the release.
The Goddard team will lead the effort to integrate the WFI into the instrument carrier and mate it to the spacecraft bus later this year. The Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch by May 2027, BAE Systems said.
