Illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. (Credit: GSFC/SVS)

NORTH LOGAN – Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Lab made news this week announcing it had delivered a critical subsystem to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This subsystem will be part of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope which is being prepared for launch to answer fundamental questions about exoplanets and infrared astrophysics and to search for worlds beyond our solar system.

Matt Felt, who heads SDL’s thermal technologies, explains what this system is designed to do.

It provides cooling to the infrared cameras on the Roman coronagraph instrument and it cools them to cryogenic temperatures that are approximately 161 degrees below zero,” says Felt. “To give you an idea how cold that is, it’s about 100 degrees colder than the coldest temperature that’s been recorded at the Peter Sinks up Logan Canyon which is well known for its cold temperatures in the winter.”

Felt says for the new space telescope to perform properly it has to be able to see through the glare that is produced by the star that the planets are orbiting, so the coronagraph uses some sophisticated sunglasses to block that glare, while its infrared cameras will search for exoplanets, which are planets outside the solar system.

“Our subsystem cools those cameras by radiating the heat they produce into deep space,” Felt adds. “Some graphite thermal straps that we developed here at SDL in 2019 conduct heat away from those cameras through radiators. Mass is always a precious commodity on a spacecraft and we could not have achieved the low mass that was required with the conventional metallic thermal straps we’ve been making here for decades. This new development in the technology was really enabling for this mission.”

Named for Nancy Grace Roman, an American astronomer who is regarded as the “Mother of the Hubble”, the Roman Space Telescope will launch no later than May 2027.





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