Roman Coronagraph Optical Bench Assembly

Engineer Jordan Rupp is shown at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in September 2022 with the optical bench for the Coronagraph Instrument on NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Light from the telescope is directed to the optical bench and passes through series of lenses, filters, and other components that ultimately suppress light from a star while allowing the light from orbiting planets to pass through. Mirrors redirect the light and keep it contained within the optical bench. In this image, the bench is partly assembled at the start of the integration and testing period for the instrument. The large black circles are surrogate components that are standing in for the actual instrument hardware.

The Roman Coronagraph Instrument was designed and is being built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the instrument for the agency. Contributions were made by ESA (the European Space Agency), the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the French space agency Centre National d'Études Spatiales(CNES), and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Germany. Caltech, in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about the Roman telescope, visit: https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/