NASA Goddard space center held a press conference about the state of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and it’s impending launch (in September).

The incredible cutting edge telescope is all set and ready before schedule and under budget!

I have to admit, it flew a bit under my radar.
But what the people in the press conference told and highlighted about it’s capabilities, made me really excited for what is to come.

Unprecedented high resolution images a thousand times faster than Hubble!

More science data than anyone could process in several lifetimes.

Expectations of solving the lambda-cmd problem, telling us once and do all of our standard cosmological model is right or wrong.

Dark matter science.

Detection and direct imaging of exoplanets.

Mapping of billions of stars and galaxies.

And dare I say it… unlimited space porn!

I'm excited about the Roman, too. It's going to deliver big new science on exoplanets and unusual stars, as well as settle or at least constrain certain mysteries of the cosmos. The images and data sets from Roman will be so huge, only Machine Learning platforms will be able to search them for exceptional targets to be flagged for human review. [Note the these ML tools are not to be confused with Large Language Models, the chatbots that basically just plagiarize for you and hallucinate when convenient. That's a whole different thing.]

I asked Google AI a couple of dumb questions about the James Webb and Roman telescopes to see what it would say. It's AI, but what I got back (condensed and rephrased here by me) sounds credible:

1) There is no risk of a collision with JWST when both telescopes are stationed at L2. They will generally be separated by hundreds of thousands of kilometers, in huge orbits around the Lagrange point. It's not like two telescopes vying for the same parking spot. The L2 region is vast.

2) It will not be possible for either JWST or NGR to take a picture of the other when they are both "at" L2. The large distance between them, their small size, their angular resolution specs, high relative speed of target, and the need to avoid looking back toward the sun at all costs will make it utterly impossible.