Ohio State Roman telescope team celebrates front row for historic mission

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Ohio State Roman telescope team celebrates front row for historic mission

University's role as academic powerhouse on display as faculty and staff hold launch party

Faculty, students and staff from The Ohio State University were up early in both Columbus and the Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope as it begins an historic mission to explore dark matter, dark energy, and distant worlds.

For more than a decade, Ohio State faculty, students and postdoctoral scholars have played a role in designing Roman's surveys. More than 20 Buckeyes, including nine undergraduates, traveled to Florida to watch the launch in person and joined their peers on the Columbus campus for a virtual watch party.

David Weinberg, Distinguished University Professor of astronomy at Ohio State, was viewing the launch near NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building, where the Apollo rockets were assembled and rolled out onto the launch pad.

"We heard briefings recently from the NASA administrators and others, and everybody is very excited to see this go," Weinberg said. "It's been fun to be here and see people we've been working with for 15 years and have it all come together."

Named after NASA's first chief astronomer, the 'mother of the Hubble Space Telescope,' Roman is designed to survey the universe a thousand times faster than Hubble.

The Roman telescope's primary tool, the Wide Field Instrument, is a 300-megapixel infrared camera with18 4K detectors - collecting photons of light that, according to NASA, will be "decoded into crisp cosmic panoramas."

Ohio State has deep ties to the Roman mission, showcasing the university's academic excellence across multiple departments. Members of the university's astronomy and physics departments have spent more than a decade developing the robust technologies and scientific programs in cosmology, exoplanets, and stars to make the extraordinary mission a success.

Claire Lamman, a cosmologist and postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State, followed the launch from Columbus and looks forward to the discoveries the telescope will make.

"I care about what the universe looks like on big scales, how it changes, and the forces that drive it, dark matter and dark energy," she said. "Roman will be excellent for this… Not just figuring out where these galaxies are, but getting really good pictures of them will help us understand how galaxies are connected to their cosmic environment in ways that we haven't seen before."

Paarmita Pandey, an Ohio State graduate student, joined Lamman at the launch party. She said the telescope's surveys will help explore the lifecycle of stars, supernovae, and black holes.

"I spend a lot of my time hunting for stars that should have exploded and didn't. Some massive stars, instead of going out in a supernova, just collapse into black holes. No explosions. No fireworks," she said. "So catching one of these failed supernovae in the act means staring at the same patch of sky over and over for years and waiting for a star to disappear. And that's exactly the kind of survey Roman is built for."

Following the successful launch, the Roman telescope is on a million-mile journey toward the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, where it will stabilize and begin to transmit back 1.4 terabytes of data every day, the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission so far.

Ohio State researchers expect the telescope's first science findings in mid-2027.

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