A Fisheye Lens for the Universe: The Roman Space Telescope Wide Field Instrument
By
Dr. Benjamin Cromey

Is the subject of this month’s Estes Valley Astronomical Society (EVAS) meeting. EVAS, in conjunction with The Estes Park Memorial Observatory, is offering a free public open house and lecture on Saturday, June 27th at 7:00 pm. The goal of EVAS is to promote amateur astronomy and education in the Estes Valley.

NASA’s next-gen Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA artist’s concept)

The Roman Space Telescope Wide Field Instrument (WFI) will enable revolutionary advancements in astronomical survey science as the primary science instrument on the observatory. Roman will have a significant increase in field of view compared to existing space observatories to achieve its survey mission goals, greater than an 100x increase in areal FOV compared to several of Hubble’s instruments yet with the same angular resolution. The instrument sees from the red side of human vision into the infrared. This presentation will summarize the science objectives of the mission and examine the engineering challenges that derive from them. The talk will then describe the technical solutions BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems implemented as NASA’s primary industrial partner on WFI. Finally, the presentation will summarize the testing that was performed at our facility in Boulder. Our results demonstrated that the WFI was ready to help transform astrophysics as part of the next NASA flagship observatory.

Dr. Benjamin Cromey Senior Principal Optical Engineer

Dr. Benjamin Cromey is a Senior Principal Optical Engineer at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado. He received his PhD in Optical Sciences from the University of Arizona in 2020. He served as the Optical Design and Analysis lead on the Roman Space Telescope Wide Field Instrument at BAE Systems, as well as the responsible engineer for the eight filter elements on the instrument. His current work includes exciting R&D efforts to prepare for the NASA Habitable Worlds Observatory. He has authored more than 30 publications, and actively serves the scientific community in a variety of capacities across SPIE, Optica, and the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.

The observatory is just north of the high school at 1600 Manford Ave. Park in the teacher’s parking lot between the high school and the observatory. The doors will open at 7:00 pm, and the meeting will start at 7:30 pm.  The presentation, including a question-and-answer period, lasts about an hour. After the presentation, weather permitting, we will look through our 16-inch dome telescope at various celestial objects.