NASA Telescope to Snap First Photos of Jupiter-Like Planets

NASA is about to pull off one of astronomy's most precise disappearing acts, and it could change how we search for worlds like our own.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launching as early as next month, will carry the first space-bound "active" coronagraph into orbit. This instrument does something remarkable: it erases most of a star's blinding light during photography, allowing astronomers to see planets orbiting other stars that were previously invisible.

The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief of astronomy. Its roughly 300-megapixel wide-field camera will capture images about 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's widest exposures at similar resolution.

But the real magic happens inside the coronagraph, where two shape-shifting mirrors perform an intricate dance. Each mirror contains a 48-by-48 checkerboard of tiny pistons beneath a thin sheet of glass.

These pistons can pull their patches of mirror backward by up to 0.5 micrometers, about one-fourth the size of an E. coli bacterium. They can make adjustments as small as 10 picometers, roughly a tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

The result? The mirrors create an effect similar to noise-canceling headphones, but for light instead of sound. They cancel out unwanted starlight, creating a dark zone where faint planets become visible.

"It's giving us the ability to see planets that we haven't been able to physically see before," says Brandon Creager, the instrument's lead mechanical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Compared with current space-based coronagraphs, the system improves sensitivity to exoplanets by a factor of up to 1,000.

The telescope also uses "silicon grass," a forest of microscopic spikes that trap stray photons like a maze. Once light enters the thicket, it bounces deeper between the blades and never escapes.

Why This Inspires

Nearly all exoplanets photographed so far are nothing like the residents of our solar system. They're several times the mass of Jupiter, still glowing with leftover birth heat, and orbiting extremely far from their stars.

Roman could directly image a true Jupiter analogue for the first time: a planet similar to Jupiter in mass, circling a sunlike star at a distance comparable to our own solar system. These are the kinds of planetary systems where Earth-like worlds might exist.

"I hope it's remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for finding Earth 2.0," Creager says.

The telescope's wide-field camera will also help astronomers detect around 100,000 new exoplanets and unpack mysteries about dark matter and dark energy. Javier Viaña, a Harvard research scientist selected for Roman's first year of observing, compares the leap to moving from "interviewing a handful of people" to "conducting a global census."

The mission represents decades of engineering precision paying off in a single, elegant solution: making stars disappear so their planetary neighbors can finally shine.