NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has completed its ground system preliminary design review, which will make data from the spacecraft accessible to scientists. This is the stage in which the plan for science operations has met all of the budget requirements, schedule, and design, and will now move on to the next phase: building the data system.
The Roman Space Telescope will launch sometime in the mid-2020s and when it does, it will be able to take massive panoramic pictures of space in unprecedented detail. This wide field of view will enable astronomers to perform sweeping surveys of the cosmos, producing an amazing amount of information about the universe.
When operational, Roman will have the same resolution as the Hubble Space Telescope, but the field of view it will produce will be nearly 100 times bigger. NASA expects the observatory to gather more data than any of its other missions.
The Roman space telescope will be able to gather data approximately 500 times faster than Hubble, adding up to 20,000 terabytes in the five years it's tasked to operate. Once its primary mission is done, more mysteries about our universe will be uncovered.
This wealth of information will require NASA to design new processing and archival methods. Scientists will access and analyze Roman's data using cloud-based remote services and more sophisticated tools than those used by previous missions.
What's great is that merely days after the observations, all of Roman's data will be publicly available, which is a first for a NASA astrophysics flagship mission. This is significant because Roman's colossal images will often contain far more than the primary target of observation.
And because scientists all over the world will be given access to Roman's data, more phenomena will be discovered at a faster rate, including short-lived ones like supernova explosions. This kind of fast detection will allow other telescopes to make follow-up observations.
"With its incredibly fast survey speeds, Roman will observe planets by the thousands, galaxies by the millions, and stars by the billions," said Karoline Gilbert, mission scientist for the Roman Science Operations Center at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "These vast datasets will allow us to address cosmic mysteries that hint at new fundamental physics."
NASA's Goodard Space Flight Center manages the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, with the help of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC, Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from research institutions across the U.S.
