Roman Space Telescope Science Platform Will Open New Frontiers in Space Science

Profound shifts are happening in the field of astronomy. For decades, researchers have accumulated larger and larger surveys of the universe with ground-based telescopes, along with contributions from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, stitching together ever-expanding views of the cosmos. These surveys have been so successful - dramatically expanding both what we know and inspiring new questions - that astronomers and engineers around the world went on to design, build, and begin operating missions exclusively dedicated to delivering vast, varied surveys, like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile and ESA's space-based Euclid mission.

The next survey mission to come online will be NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, with liftoff on track for no later than May 2027, and possibly as early as fall 2026. Roman's images will have a panoramic field of view that is 200 times larger than Hubble's infrared view, leading to wide-field maps of the universe at space-based resolution. Using its Wide Field Instrument, Roman will survey billions of galaxies and catch the light of stellar explosions in a quest to solve the mystery of dark energy, which is causing the universe's expansion rate to speed up. Roman's scans of the sky will uncover thousands of exoplanets beyond our solar system, including planets we have never identified before. Roman will also explore the full range of astrophysical topics, including supermassive black holes in faraway galaxies, stars in neighboring galaxies, cosmic nurseries where stars and planets are forming in our galaxy, and small rocky bodies in our solar system. Approximately 75% of Roman's observing time will be dedicated to community-defined surveys.

How do you analyze such massive amounts of data? With the Roman Research Nexus, a new cloud-based platform designed to connect scientists who are working with Roman's data - enabling them to share tools, insights, and discoveries - in order to accelerate ground-breaking research in astrophysics. The Nexus made its formal debut in mid-December and was developed by teams at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) working in close collaboration with the mission's partners at NASA and Caltech/IPAC - intentionally well in advance of Roman's launch - to allow researchers to begin preparing to process and analyze the telescope's huge datasets.

Monumental survey data within reach

In its first five years, Roman will ultimately generate 20 petabytes of data - 20 followed by 15 zeros - and all the mission's data will very quickly be released for all to download and analyze. The scale of Roman's data will necessitate a different approach to data exploration, reduction, and analysis compared to the typical processes used to analyze Hubble and Webb data, which are often performed on personal computers. While all Roman data will be rapidly processed and archived in the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Roman's large data volume means that downloading and analyzing data on a laptop will be prohibitive for all but the most limited analyses of Roman's surveys.

To visualize the quantity of Roman's upcoming data, start by thinking about grains of sand, with one fine grain of sand representing one byte, the smallest unit of data. If Roman's anticipated 20 petabytes (20,000 terabytes) of "sand" were stacked and carved into a monument, it would be about as large as the Statue of Liberty.

For context, the iconic Hubble Space Telescope has delivered more than 400 terabytes of data over 35 years of operations (and counting). Once it is fully operational, Roman will return approximately 1.4 terabytes of compressed data per day, which will exceed 500 terabytes per year.

The Roman Research Nexus provides a "sandbox" for users, a rich computing environment that is co-located in AWS with the MAST datasets, eliminating the need to download large datasets for most researchers. This is where researchers will access Roman data. In advance of launch, they already have access to simulated Roman data alongside ground-test data. On the Nexus, researchers are actively running software to produce simulations and visualizations, applying a range of analysis tools to the datasets, exploring comprehensive training tutorials, and even installing their own software in preparation for Roman's data.

"With Roman, we are entering a new era of astronomy," said Dr. Kristen McQuinn, the head of the Roman Space Telescope Mission Office at STScI, where the mission's Science Operations Center is based. "Roman will deliver expansive, deep views of the universe and its data will be freely available to researchers worldwide. Ensuring that scientists can access and analyze these data efficiently is essential to the mission's success."

Access for all

Roman's open data marks another big shift in the field of astronomy. Researchers who are granted time to observe with Hubble, for example, receive up to one year of exclusive access to the new data, known as a proprietary period. When that period ends, the Hubble data become available to everyone on MAST. With Roman, no data will ever be held exclusively by any user for any period of time - all researchers will be able to actively analyze Roman's data.

The Nexus supports Roman's open data access in part by allowing any number of teams to work with the same datasets. Team accounts on the Nexus are another benefit, allowing groups to work on common projects in real time, while sharing compute resources, software environments, and a team directory to coordinate development. For example, researchers might mark up an image simultaneously or edit a plot together. STScI staff also recommend that astronomers spend time analyzing Roman's simulated data to get used to working with the large datasets Roman will return.

"The Roman Research Nexus is a new model for supporting science from a NASA flagship mission," shared Gisella De Rosa, the Roman mission scientist at STScI who led the development of the Nexus. "It brings together data access, analysis tools, and scalable computing in a single environment that was deliberately designed for Roman's survey scale and complexity."

The Nexus is welcoming to researchers of all levels. No previous research experience is assumed, which makes the platform an excellent online classroom of its own, where students, professors, and citizen scientists alike may work together.

Continued innovation at STScI

The Nexus is the largest, most detailed science platform STScI has released on the cloud to date. It builds on products that were initiated by staff who support MAST, including the Time Series Integrated Knowledge Engine (TIKE), another science platform where researchers can upload code to analyze data in the cloud, and a scalable distributed database system known as Tanzu Greenplum that supports larger and faster queries of other observatories' catalogs. The Roman Mission Office at STScI drew on this expertise to expand the capabilities of the Roman Research Nexus to meet the scale and complexity of Roman's forthcoming data.

For 45 years, teams at STScI have worked to make astronomical data from more than 20 missions accessible to everyone around the world. Our aim is to build and release tools that support researchers who pore over ever-increasing astronomical datasets. By releasing Roman's data on a publicly accessible, highly supportive science platform - the Roman Research Nexus - STScI aims to make it significantly easier to conduct astronomical research - and transform what we know about the universe.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems, Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is expanding the frontiers of space astronomy by hosting the science operations center of the Hubble Space Telescope, the science and mission operations centers for the James Webb Space Telescope, and the science operations center for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. STScI also houses the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) which is a NASA-funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, and is the data repository for the Hubble, Webb, Roman, Kepler, K2, TESS missions and more. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.