Profs & Pints Metro Baltimore: NASA’s New Quest to See the Unseen

[Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore](https://www.profsandpints.com/baltimore) presents: **“NASA’s New Quest to See the Unseen,”** a look at the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and its mission to expand our understanding of dark matter, dark energy, and the Milky Way, with Bear Witherspoon, payload systems engineer for the Roman telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. [Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at [https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/metro-baltimore-nasa-quest](https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/metro-baltimore-nasa-quest) .] NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is set to be launched into space in late summer or early fall, and what it sees out there is likely to leave us spellbound. Its to-do list includes performing a demographic census of planetary systems in the Milky Way, testing out a new camera that directly images exoplanets to help us find habitable worlds, and shedding light on the universe's most mysterious features—dark energy and dark matter. Come get an insider’s perspective on that mission from Bear Witherspoon, who has overseen the assembly of the telescope and will be part of its launch team. He’ll walk you through the design of the telescope and how it was built and tested. You’ll learn how it has a field of view 200 times that of the Hubble telescope as well as infrared vision that will help astronomers peer far across space and deep into the universe’s dustiest regions. It was subjected to rigorous vibration and sound tests to ensure it could survive launch as well as extreme cold in a vacuum to ensure it can function in space. We’ll look at how the Roman space telescope will work with those that preceded it into the space, the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, by taking a much broader view and pinpointing worthy subjects of investigation for the more-focused instruments. You’ll learn how the Roman telescope will help us investigate the roughly 95 percent of energy and matter called “dark” because we’ve been unable to observe it and how it works. Witherspoon will walk you through how it’s surmised that dark energy and matter provide the infrastructure for visible matter in the universe, and how the Roman telescope will try to identify the presence and effects of dark matter by observing visible matter on an incredibly large scale. The talk promises to leave you in a state of wonder and excited about all we’ll be learning out there. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.) Image: A NASA illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.