Deep Dive: Inside the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope’s 300-Megapixel WFI Sensor Suite

A comprehensive engineering teardown of the Roman Space Telescope's Wide Field Instrument (WFI), high-contrast coronagraph, and near-infrared focal plane array.

At the core of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), a 300-megapixel near-infrared focal plane array comprised of 18 Teledyne H4RG-10 mercury-cadmium-telluride detector modules. Operating at cryogenic temperatures below 100 Kelvin, the array captures ultra-sensitive infrared emission lines.

Combined with an active optical coronagraph that suppresses starlight by a factor of one billion, Roman allows astrophysics research teams to capture direct spectroscopy of Jupiter-sized exoplanets orbiting distant host stars.