Inside the room where NASA built a groundbreaking tool to spot alien worlds

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is building and assembling an ultra-sensitive coronagraph—dubbed “starglasses”—intended for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. In a clean room at the Pasadena, California, facility, technicians wear full-body “bunny suits” and must avoid contamination sources such as makeup, lotion, or scented products. NASA used VR during assembly to help stakeholders visualize how components fit together. The coronagraph is ready to study the cosmos aboard Roman, which could launch as soon as this weekend, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said when the telescope was unveiled in April. Roman will investigate dark matter, dark energy, and the universe’s structure, and the coronagraph aims to block starlight to image faint, Jupiter-size planets and potentially Earth-like worlds.