COLUMBUS, Ohio (WOWO) — Ohio State University researchers are helping NASA prepare for the launch of a space telescope expected to dramatically expand scientists’ ability to map the universe and investigate some of its biggest unanswered questions.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch August 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Ohio State says more than two dozen faculty members, students and postdoctoral researchers have contributed to the mission, including work on the telescope’s surveys and image detectors.

The mission is designed to study dark energy, exoplanets and a broad range of astrophysical and planetary science questions. Researchers expect Roman to survey hundreds of millions of galaxies and ultimately detect roughly a billion galaxies and 20 billion stars.

David Weinberg, a Distinguished University Professor of astronomy at Ohio State, said Roman’s unusually wide field of view will allow astronomers to map objects across the universe in ways that have not previously been possible.

“This enormous field of view will allow us to map astronomical objects in a way that we previously couldn’t,” Weinberg said. “These better measurements may end up teaching us something extremely revolutionary about all kinds of matter in the cosmos.”

One of the mission’s major components is the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey, which will look beyond the plane of the Milky Way and map about 12% of the sky in less than two years.

The scale of the undertaking is enormous. Weinberg compared a single Roman image to a wall filled with 4K televisions, saying the telescope will be able to detect objects more than 100 million times too faint for the human eye.

Roman will eventually operate from Lagrange Point 2, or L2, a gravitationally stable location roughly one million miles from Earth. From there, its observations will avoid many of the challenges created by Earth’s atmosphere and provide scientists with exceptionally precise measurements of distant astronomical objects.

Ohio State researchers have been involved in developing the tools needed to make sense of those observations.

Anthony Harbo Torres, a senior graduate student in physics at Ohio State, helped calibrate Roman’s image detectors. He said the telescope’s mission represents decades of scientific and engineering work.

“With Roman, we’ll be seeing some things for the first time, as well as revisiting places we’ve seen before but with an increased level of resolution,” Harbo Torres said. “It takes so many people to tackle a monumental undertaking like this and make it possible, so I hope that our images inspire a sense of wonder when people see the scale and detail of the things we find.”

Scientists will use Roman’s observations to investigate dark matter, the invisible substance scientists detect through its gravitational effects, as well as dark energy, the mysterious force believed to be accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Weinberg said mapping concentrations of dark matter could help researchers better understand why gravity behaves differently when studied at the scale of the universe compared with the scale of individual solar systems and galaxies.

“Mapping clusters of dark matter will help us figure out why gravity on the scale of the universe is so radically different from gravity on the scale of a solar system or galaxy,” Weinberg said. “Ohio State is part of the teams that are building the tools to actually do that advanced analysis.”

The telescope also will be used to search for planets beyond our solar system. Researchers plan to combine gravitational microlensing with the more familiar transit method used to detect planets as they pass in front of their stars.

Scott Gaudi, an Ohio State astronomy professor and principal investigator of the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team, said that combination could lead to the discovery of roughly 100,000 worlds.

Roman is expected to map the sky about 1,000 times faster than older instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope, according to Ohio State. Its wide field of view is a major reason for that increased efficiency.

Gaudi said the mission could be especially valuable because some of its most important discoveries may involve objects and events scientists do not encounter frequently.

“Roman is going to allow us to find extremely rare things and things that don’t happen very often,” Gaudi said. “It’s going to be those things that are likely going to surprise us and lead to new avenues of research.”

Researchers hope the telescope will help answer questions extending beyond the original goals of the mission, including whether planetary systems like ours are common, how many black holes exist within the Milky Way and where potentially habitable exoplanets might be found.

Roman is currently planned as a five-year mission, although scientists hope its instruments and the data it generates could support research for decades.

“Even though Ohio State has a large footprint on the mission, we don’t even begin to cover a fraction of the kind of science that can and will be done with Roman,” Gaudi said. “Our job so far has been to make sure it’s successful.”

The first scientific findings from the mission are expected in mid-2027. Once the telescope begins returning large datasets, researchers around the world will be able to use the information to pursue their own investigations.

Weinberg said that broad access could be one of the mission’s most important contributions to astronomy.

“The value of producing really big, vital datasets is that you then enable anyone in the world to go and make discoveries with it,” Weinberg said. “That’s a really powerful way of doing science, and I think bringing that to space-based astronomy is very inspiring.”

As many as 20 Ohio State researchers and other members of the university’s Roman team are expected to be in Florida for the August 30 launch.

Christopher Hirata, an Ohio State professor of physics and another member of the university’s Roman science team, said the technology developed for the telescope could influence space science well beyond this particular mission.

“Roman’s technology will have a huge influence on the future of space science,” Hirata said. “From launch onward, it’s going to be spectacular.”