An engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is shown here with the fast steering mirror, a component of the Coronagraph Instrument on NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The mirror can make small movements that correct for slight wobbling of the observatory. The incoming image needs to be perfectly sharp in order for the instrument to suppress light from a star while allowing the light from planets orbiting it to pass through. Although the technologies differ, it's analogous to image stabilization in digital cameras, in which the camera lens moves to counteract the shake of your hands and keep the image sharp.

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/