Now, I hope you'll forgive such a basic question, but I know that a lot of our listeners have heard about very exciting space telescopes in recent years and might be wondering, "Why so many? How is this one different from James Webb?" So could you tell us about why this observatory is unique, both in terms of its design and the kind of scientific questions it's going to answer?

So one way to compare the James Webb Space Telescope and Roman is the James Webb Space Telescope is like a telephoto lens that is really good at seeing things very far away, and Roman is like having a wide-angle lens where we get to see a lot at once.

And they are both really good at the things that they are designed for. Roman doesn't just have a large field of view.

The observatory itself is also designed to move and stop on a dime and be ready to take the next image.

So we can do bap, bap, bap, bap, bap to map out large regions of the sky very, very quickly and efficiently, and that gives us extraordinary capability.

We survey the sky a thousand times faster than Hubble.

So to just give you an example of what that means we can do a survey, we can take one month of observations and do a survey of our own Milky Way galaxy, and that survey will find something like 20 billion stars.

That will make it the largest catalog of astronomical objects we've ever produced with just one month of Roman observations.

That isn't even our main survey. Our main survey will take a year and will be extraordinarily huge.

It took me a little time to sort of think about how to convey just how amazing that survey is.