Withstand 138 decibel sound bombardment

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that it has completed environmental testing for the next-generation space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Maryland placed the Roman Telescope in an acoustic test chamber this month and bombarded it with sound waves of up to 138 decibels. This is equivalent to the noise made by a jet engine at a distance of about 30 meters.

Cory Powell, director of structural analysis at the Goddard Center, explained, “The load you feel through your body during a concert with extremely loud bass sounds is acoustic energy,” and added, “The sound generated during a launch can put a very high load on a huge structure like the Roman.”

In addition to acoustic testing, engineers placed the telescope on a 'shaker table' to replicate the high-intensity vibrations it would experience during launch. Through this, we verified whether the telescope body and on-board equipment could fully operate after takeoff.

$4 billion project, why do we need such rigorous testing?

The estimated cost of the Roman Space Telescope exceeds $4 billion (about 5.5 trillion won). Because a single launch failure can lead to astronomical losses, NASA is putting special effort into extreme environment testing. The released photo is a rare record showing the rigorous verification process that space exploration equipment undergoes before launch.

The Roman Telescope is equipped with the same 2.4-meter (8-foot) primary mirror as the Hubble Space Telescope, but its viewing angle is 100 times that of Hubble. By installing a coronagraph here, you can block the light of distant stars and directly observe extrasolar planets orbiting them.

Once operational, the Roman Telescope is expected to perform a variety of missions, including mapping the large-scale structure of the universe, measuring dark energy and dark matter, detecting distant black holes, and discovering tens of thousands of exoplanets. NASA is currently targeting launch in the fall of 2026 if all goes according to schedule.