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IIRC the mirror is from a spy satellite, but the chassis and electronics are all NASA.
by ChocolateGod 1mo ago
IIRC the mirror is from a spy satellite, but the chassis and electronics are all NASA.
- mturmon 1mo agoThis is true. The telescope is much more than just the primary mirror. Roman has two science instruments, a wide-field imager (“WFI”) and a coronagraph (“CGI”) and they were both built by NASA for this purpose (optics, electronics, detectors, deformable mirrors). The WFI optics includes filters and a prism and grism for spectroscopy, and of course the very large CCD arrays. The coronagraph is a rather special tech demo and allows imaging of exoplanets (Jupiter-like) while blocking the light of the host star. (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/coronagraph/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/coron...). It’s a precursor to HWO which is mentioned down-thread.
- m4rtink 1mo agoBTW, any idea what happened to the second mirror? IIRC NASA got 2 initially.
- willis936 1mo agoFrom what I can gather it is much more than just the primary mirror but the entire platform sans classified parts, which were replaced with NASA's optics and sensors.