00:00Could you photograph an exoplanet?
00:03I'm here in Florida to see NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launch.
00:08And on board this telescope is one of the coolest pieces of technology, the coronagraph.
00:13Now, coronagraphs allow us to look directly at planets orbiting other stars, or exoplanets.
00:19Now, to try to see a planet around another star is incredibly difficult.
00:23It's like trying to see a firefly next to a lighthouse thousands of miles away.
00:28The star is going to be too bright to see anything in its orbit.
00:32So what a coronagraph does is it blocks the light of the star,
00:36allowing the much fainter light of the planets in its orbit to come into view.
00:40Now, the Roman coronagraph is perhaps the most advanced coronagraph ever designed,
00:45and it will allow us to directly look at other worlds across the cosmos,
00:49investigating different types of planets and atmospheres.
00:53This technology demonstration will show us how this tech works in space.
00:57And if successful, the Roman coronagraph will pave the way toward one day finding
01:02and studying planets that we might even call habitable.
01:05So follow along as the Roman Space Telescope launches this weekend,
01:10and we send this amazing tech out into space.
