Dark matter and new exo-planets focus of new NASA telescope; plus, Flock controversy, and imported beef lands Trump in trouble with GOP

**Christy Strawser** (0:01)
The day's biggest stories, the people behind the headlines, the conversations you won't hear anywhere else.
I'm Christy Strawser. You're listening to Audacy's On Deadline. Let's talk today about vision, not the metaphorical kind, the literal kind. What we can see. We'll start with a new space telescope and expectations for how it could open up our world. Here's Tommy Tucker in New Orleans.

**Tommy Tucker** (0:24)
Morgan Van Arsdahl joins us now. NASA Roman Operations Manager. Tell me about what's going on with NASA. They're going to launch a new telescope?

**Morgan Van Arsdahl** (0:32)
Absolutely. So on Sunday, we are launching the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It's NASA's next great astrophysics mission. It's designed to help us answer fundamental questions about the structure and composition of the universe. And we'll be studying things like dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets.
It has two science instruments on board that together will produce over a terabyte of data every single day of the mission. So we really can't wait to get it on orbit and find out what we're going to discover.

**Tommy Tucker** (1:01)
What kind of things are we going to be looking for?

**Morgan Van Arsdahl** (1:03)
We're doing this.
One of the really cool things about Roman is that it has this really wide field of view. So when we talk about searching for dark energy or dark matter or exoplanets, really it's going to, because we have such a wide field of view, we're going to be able to see billions and billions of stars and billions of galaxies. So we'll be able to just fundamentally understand things about the structure of the universe that we haven't in the past. So for example, we know that there's more matter out there in the universe than what we can see.
So the things that we can see like galaxies and your chair in your office, all only make up about 5 percent of the matter that we think is in the universe. That other 95 percent, we just call dark matter because we don't really understand it yet. And Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is going to help us understand exactly what that matter is and what most of the universe is made up of.

**Tommy Tucker** (1:57)
How in the world, if you can keep this on a level that, again, not me, but most people can understand, what is dark matter? How do you go from launching a telescope to seeing it? And talk about exoplanets. What is all of that?

**Morgan Van Arsdahl** (2:13)
Sure. So when we know that there's more matter than we can see because of how gravity attracts things, right? So we know there must be more gravity out there than we understand. And that's what that dark matter is. And it's not just, it's not, most people don't understand it. The astrophysics don't know what dark matter really is made up of yet.
So that's what we're, that's what we're going to be looking for for that.

**Tommy Tucker** (2:36)
Let me just jump in for a sec. So if you don't know what it is, how do you know it exists?

**Morgan Van Arsdahl** (2:42)
That's a great question. It's really, we can see gravity acting in planets and galaxies responding to each other and the whole universe structure responding to each other more than what we can see. Gravity attracts based on matter. So if you drop a ball, the ball weighs however much it weighs and that's how gravity is going to behave. And that model works great on Earth. But when you talk about the structure of the universe, we see gravity behaving in waves that don't make sense for the amount of visible matter that we can see.
So we know that there must be something more there. We just don't really understand what that more is yet. And that's one of the fundamental questions we're trying to answer.

**Tommy Tucker** (3:24)
So in addition to discovering new things, are we going to learn more about things we already know about?

**Morgan Van Arsdahl** (3:32)
Absolutely. So you mentioned exoplanets, and that's one of the other really cool things that Roman is going to be able to do. So all exoplanets are are planets that are around stars that aren't the sun, right? So just planets throughout the rest of the universe.
And we've been able to map so far about 6,000 exoplanets across the universe. But we expect with Roman to be able to map tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of exoplanets. And when we can see that many of some some type of object, we can start to understand it so much more better than we do right now.