NASA Sends a Giant New Eye Into Space

Professor Pip adjusted his slightly crooked spectacles and patted his forest-green lab coat until something clinked. "Ah, precisely!" he said, pulling out a small brass telescope and a rolled-up star chart.

The hilltop was dark. The first stars were beginning to prickle through the deep blue sky above.

"Today, my dear scientists," he announced, tail swishing, "humans launched a brand-new eye into space. And I want us to think about why anyone would want an eye that big, all the way out there."

"Bigger than yours?" giggled Mia.

"Oh yes, much!" Pip laughed. "Let's start small, though. Leo — squint at that porch light way down in the valley. Now, look through my telescope."

Leo squinted. Then he lifted the little brass telescope to his eye. "Whoa! I can see the moths flying around it!"

"Excellent!" Pip beamed. "A telescope is a light bucket. A bigger bucket scoops up more light — so you can see faint, faraway things that your plain eyes miss."

He unrolled the star chart, and it fluttered like a paper flag. "Now here is our puzzle. Space is enormous. If you point a normal telescope at the sky, you only see a tiny keyhole of it. This new one — its name is Roman — has a keyhole one hundred times wider than another famous telescope called Hubble. Imagine trying to find one lost penny in a park. Would you rather look through a straw…"

He curled his paw into a tube and squinted through it.

"…or through a big picture window?"

"The window!" cried Mia. "Duh! You'd see the whole grass!"

"Precisely!" Pip clapped. "Roman is a picture window. It will scan enormous patches of sky at once, snapping pictures so big that not even a giant TV could show all the pixels."

Leo scrunched his nose. "But what's it looking for?"

"Ah! Two things, mostly." Pip counted on his paw. "One: exoplanets — planets around other stars. Roman will use a special trick to block a star's bright glare, so we can spot the tiny, faint planets circling it. Two: dark matter and dark energy — invisible stuff that makes up most of the universe. We don't know what it is. Roman will help us find out!"

The children stared up at the sky. A single satellite blinked slowly across the stars.

"That could be Roman," Pip whispered. "Off on a three-month journey to its parking spot. Somewhere out there, it will send back pictures of worlds no one has ever seen before."

He tucked the star chart back into his pocket. "Now I wonder — if you could aim it at anything, what would you want it to see first?"