The telescope was launched on August 30 aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket. Its primary mission is expected to last five years, although NASA says it has enough fuel to operate for another five years potentially.
During its mission, Roman could collect petabytes of data, equivalent to millions of gigabytes, Poleski said.
"Importantly, all this data will be publicly available. Anyone will be able to download and analyse it as part of open science," said Poleski, a professor at the University of Warsaw's Astronomical Observatory.
He added that the complete dataset would probably be too large to store on a personal computer. After reaching Earth, however, the data will undergo initial processing, which could take about two days, before being made available to the public.
The mission's major international partners include the European Space Agency (ESA), Japan's JAXA, France's CNES and Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA).
Roman is designed for wide-field observations of the universe. Its 2.5-meter primary mirror makes it comparable in class to the Hubble Space Telescope, but its field of view is around 100 times larger, Poleski said.
"This means that for some scientific tasks it is 100 times more suitable than Hubble," he said.
The telescope will be particularly important for large-scale surveys and repeated observations of the same areas of the sky.
For Poleski, one of its key scientific applications will be the search for exoplanets using gravitational microlensing, a technique in which the gravity of a foreground object bends spacetime and temporarily magnifies the light from a more distant star.
Astronomers also expect Roman to discover around 100,000 additional planets using the transit method, which detects planets as they pass in front of their host stars and cause a small change in the stars' brightness.
Poleski has developed software that will be used to analyze measurements of stellar brightness collected by the telescope.
The software will help researchers determine what type of planet has been detected through microlensing, what star it orbits and what its orbit looks like.
(aj)
SOURCE: PAP