NASA has completed the crucial spacecraft that will transport and support the highly-anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This state-of-the-art ‘RV in space’ will enable the telescope to achieve its ambitious scientific goals, surveying the universe to unravel the mysteries of dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets.
HOPE Probe: The Spacecraft Behind Discovery
After years spent carefully crafting and constructing the spacecraft bus that will carry the Roman Space Telescope to its orbit and keep it running, a team of engineers finally unveiled the nearly finished product. This workhorse of the mission is more than merely a transport — it’s essentially an adaptable ‘space-RV’ to support the telescope as it carries out its complex scientific tasks.
Everything from taking the telescope to its orbital destination, supplying power, communication and temperature control has to be done by the spacecraft. The spacecraft contains nearly 50 miles of electrical cabling that forms the central nervous system allowing all components of the observatory to function cohesively.
Perhaps most impressively, the spacecraft has to accommodate the vast torrent of data that the Roman Space Telescope will produce. The observatory is expected to transmit a crazy 1.4 terabytes of data each day — nearly equivalent to around two weeks worth of higher YouTube videos. The data collected will be vast and the spacecraft’s advanced data management system will make sure it is captured and relayed to Earth in an efficient manner.
Conquer challenges, inspire innovation
Building the spacecraft for the Roman Space Telescope has been a sort of odyssey in engineering and troubleshooting. The team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center faced sourcing challenges and new realities brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic but were able to come up with modern solutions.
As my opponent noted, a spacecraft mockup called the structural verification unit was built for one solution to this issue. It enabled the team to strength-test the mockup as they were putting together real spacecraft. This was a neat trick, which saved both cost and time by not requiring further testing of the final assembly.
In addition, the modular and asymmetrical design of the spacecraft bus was a revolutionary move in this industry The more traditional nested-jelled-egg structure was streamlined into a flexible “Trivial Pursuit pie piece” setup so the team could work on different parts concurrently without stepping all over each other. This improved their efficiency, and they were better able to respond quickly-changing schedules, and supply chain interruptions.
Lightweight materials including high-strength but extremely light composite panels and ultrathin metallic honeycomb structures trimmed spacecraft weight, consumed power and improved the metering electronics.
Conclusion
This week saw what may indeed be one of the biggest stages in the life of the Roman Space Telescope’s spacecraft. The ‘RV in space’ (as someone put it)—an innovative and capable spacecraft that not only gets the telescope to its destination orbit but also provides the critical help needed for any astronomy executing experiments from dark energy and dark matter all the way out exoplanets. The spacecrafts capabilities for data management and tamper-resistant, modular design could make it one of the key players shaping the new era of astronomy discovery.
