NASA has successfully launched the $4.3bn Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The observatory took off atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center at 7.26 a.m. local time on 30 August. The craft will now spend three months travelling to a point in space known as the second Sun–Earth Lagrange point (L2) where it will survey space with a field of view at least 100 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope.

From L2, which lies about 1.6 million kilometres from Earth, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will yield insights into dark energy and dark matter, discover and characterize exoplanets, map billions of galaxies, and gain fresh understanding of black holes.

It will do so via a 2.4 m primary mirror that is accompanied by two instruments: a wide-field instrument will obtain images in visible and near-infrared light, while an experimental coronagraph will use masks, prisms and mirrors to cancel out the light from stars to help detect exoplanets.

“Roman will be a discovery machine that will bring us closer than ever before to answering humanity’s most profound questions about our cosmic history,” notes Nicola Fox, associate director for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

NASA intends the observatory to operate for at least a decade, with three specific surveys planned for its initial five years. The first will identify tens of thousands of distant supernovae, many more than the 2000 currently known, while a second survey will observe more than a billion galaxies.

Both these sets of measurements, combined with data from other survey telescopes, will be used to improve our understanding of dark energy and its potential role in the speed at which the universe expands. Their observations of gravitational lensing will also allow astronomers to map dark matter.

A third survey, meanwhile, will search the centre of the Milky Way for signs of gravitational microlensing that will reveal more than 2000 otherwise invisible exoplanets.

Mother Hubble

The observatory was initially known as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope before it underwent several design changes due to cost pressures. In 2020 it was then renamed after Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018), who in the early 1960s became NASA’s first chief astronomer and is known as “the mother of the Hubble Space Telescope”.

Yet the Roman observatory won’t replace Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope, rather it will complement them, providing data from wide areas of the universe that those two instruments will then be able to observe in greater detail.

Indeed, Roman will survey the universe a thousand times faster than the Hubble, creating 1.4 billion terabytes (1.4 zettabytes) of information daily – the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission.

NASA says that machine learning, artificial intelligence and “citizen science” will be used to help sift through the data and flag findings that astronomers will then study.

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman praised the mission as “exactly the kind of success story we want to see”. He noted that it was completed “ahead of schedule and on budget”, adding that it “will demonstrate what is possible when America’s space programme pairs bold ambition with disciplined execution”.

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The US Department of Defense (DoD) has given 30 US research universities until the end of the month to audit, and potentially cease, their partnerships with universities and military training institutions in “foreign entities of concern”.

If the institutions do not comply with the order, they risk losing funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, and the Air Force Research Laboratory – losses that could potentially close entire academic research groups or departments.

The order does not specify the foreign entities it targets. But a list that the DoD published last month identified 130 universities and research institutes in China, Russia and Iran that it claimed to be wrongly appropriating US-funded technologies.

The DoD, which the Trump administration calls the Department of War, also noted that its order applies to “organizations associated with rebranded Confucius Institutes” – cultural programmes associated with US universities that began in 2004.

The DoD asserts that the audit process is designed “to protect American taxpayer-funded research investments from unauthorized technology transfer, intellectual property theft and adversarial exploitation” adding that it will allow the department to “better anticipate emerging threats, adapt to evolving adversarial tactics and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation”.

“The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,” notes Emil Michael, the DoD’s undersecretary of war for research and engineering. “Institutions that receive funding from American taxpayers must uphold the highest standards of research security, and these mandated audits will ensure accountability across the board.”

China tension

Those affected by the order include Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University and Johns Hopkins University.

The DoD has not indicated why it has chosen the 30 targets for audit. However, since it took office last year the second Trump administration has criticized prominent universities over issues such as antisemitism and their use of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Harvard has received particular ire from the administration, which has cut or delayed government grants to its departments while fighting the university in court.

A Republican majority House of Representatives committee issued a report on 13 August claiming that Harvard received over $630m from Chinese sources. The report also noted that the university had created a nonprofit organization, Harvard Global, to accept overseas grants that the university itself is not legally permitted to receive.

The DoD’s audit comes as the Trump administration prepares to welcome President Xi Jinping to the US late next month.

Reacting to the order, a statement by China’s embassy in Washington notes that it opposes what it calls the politicization of normal scientific, educational, and academic exchanges. “The US side should abandon the Cold War mentality and foster an open, fair, and non-discriminatory environment for educational, scientific, and people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States,” it declared.

Physics World contacted some of the universities affected by the order but did not receive a response.

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