On Monday, Oct. 5, 2020, journalists are invited to attend a virtual workshop for science writers on NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, hosted by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. This workshop will feature a panel of prominent scientists, including a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. They will provide an overview of major areas of scientific inquiry that the Roman Space Telescope will address.

Scheduled for launch in the mid-2020s, the Roman Space Telescope is expected to revolutionize astronomy by building on the science discoveries and technological leaps of the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. Roman’s Wide Field Instrument will provide a panoramic field of view that is 100 times greater than Hubble’s at the same resolution, leading to the first high-resolution, wide-field maps of the universe. Its Coronagraph Instrument will provide a demonstration of a next-generation coronagraph, important for the direct detection of planets around other stars

The workshop will feature the following topics and speakers:

* Who Was Dr. Nancy Grace Roman?
Olivia Lupie (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

* Introduction: The Roman Space Telescope and Science with the Wide Field Instrument
Julie McEnery (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

* Introduction: The Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Instrument
Jason Rhodes (NASA Jet Propulsion laboratory)

* The Dark Universe
Nobel Laureate Adam Riess (STScI/Johns Hopkins University)

* Galaxies Across Cosmic Time
Rachel Somerville (Flatiron Institute/Rutgers University)

* Science Synergies of the 2020s
Harry Ferguson (STScI)

The presentations will be followed by a question-and-answer session. Speaker presentation slides will be available for download following the event.

Speaker bios and additional information will be added to the event’s webpage:
https://www.stsci.edu/contents/events/stsci/2020/october/science-writers-workshop-on-the-roman-space-telescope

Date: Monday, Oct. 5, 2020
Time: 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. EDT [19:00 to 20:30 UTC]
Location: Virtual, link will be provided to registered attendees

We request that journalists interested in attending register in advance by contacting Christine Pulliam (see below) no later than Friday, Oct. 2nd.

This workshop is being held in conjunction with the virtual scientific conference “Galaxy Formation and Evolution in the Era of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope” (https://www.stsci.edu/contents/events/stsci/2020/october/galaxy-formation-and-evolution-in-the-era-of-the-nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope), hosted by STScI. The livestream of introductory presentations on the first day of the conference (Oct. 5) will also be open to workshop participants.

Contact:
Christine Pulliam
STScI News Chief
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
+1 410-338-4366
cpulliam@stsci.edu

The Space Telescope Science Institute is expanding the frontiers of space astronomy by hosting the science operations center of the Hubble Space Telescope, the science and operations center for the James Webb Space Telescope, and the science operations center for the future Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. STScI also houses the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) which is a NASA-funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, and is the data repository for the Hubble, Webb, Kepler, K2, TESS missions and more.