By Rory Dulock | Staff Writer
This semester, Baylor’s department of physics welcomed Dr. Benjamin Rose as an assistant professor of physics and project leader for NASA’s infrastructure research for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The project requires $11 million in funding and began its next stage in October.
According to NASA’s website, “The mission was recommended as the top priority for the next decade of astronomy in the 2010 United States National Research Council Decadal Survey. In February 2016, it was approved for development and launch. It is designed to settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and astrophysics.”
Rose became involved with the project in 2018.
“I had just graduated with my Ph.D. and started a post-doctorate mission at the Space Telescope Science Institute,” Rose said. “NASA was finalizing designs. They had several different teams of scientists working on what science was possible with different defined changes … to make sure we understood what we needed from the instrument and the telescope as a whole in order to do the science that we’re expected to do.”
Dr. Dominic Benford, a program scientist at NASA Headquarters for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, has overseen the mission and goals of the project since 2013.
“That was back [with] what we call pre-formulation, which means the concept study phase before it became an official mission,” Benford said. “In 2016, we actually said, ‘OK, NASA is committing to pursuing this mission.’ My role in this is, early on, I get to write down the science requirements, which is the list of objectives for what the mission is supposed to do.”
Benford said the team is planning to launch it three years from now — and no later than May 2027.
“We do these plans in a rigorous and actually statistical fashion so that what we actually always are running with is a very detailed plan,” Benford said.
Benford said the main achievement of the project will be new capabilities of surveying the universe.
“It will have the same angular resolution as the Hubble Telescope — the same kind of sharpness of images, the same kind of sensitivity, the same depth, the same ability to see out into the universe — but it has a field of view of roughly a hundred times greater and is a lot more agile and efficient,” Benford said. “So on the whole, when we’re surveying and mapping space, we can do it a thousand times faster than Hubble. … So we’ll be able to do things that have never been done before and discover things about the universe that we probably can’t predict well.”
Additionally, Benford said a unique aspect of the project will be the accessibility of its data to all people.
“The great thing is that Roman data are completely available to everybody, so you don’t have to write a proposal to get telescope time,” Benford said. “We’re taking monumental amounts of data and making them available to everybody, and that’s professional astronomers, amateur astronomers, people around the world. So I’d like to think that Roman’s legacy in a sense will be not just scientific but also cultural — that we’re trying to generate a truly inclusive environment where everybody is able to make scientific discoveries to the level that they are able.”
Benford said the selection process for scientists was unlike that of any other project in the past because it incorporated people from academia in addition to major science centers like the Space Telescope Science Institute or the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center.
“Most of the groups that we have selected are university groups that are the subject matter experts and will be working over the next several years to prepare for that mission and will presumably be in a good place to actually exploit the data that we have and make great scientific discoveries,” Benford said.
Among those selected from academia, Rose is one of four project leaders.
“Ben Rose is on a team doing supernova cosmology along with three other people from different institutions,” Benford said. “They are tasked with preparing the infrastructure for that particular kind of science. … This is very detailed, difficult scientific work because when you’re trying to make some measurement that is truly accurate — meaning it accurately represents the way the universe is at the fraction-of-the-percent level — you have to understand every possible little bit of error or uncertainty that comes into your measurements.”
Rose said there have not been too many challenges during his time working on the project.
“We are working on some large simulations so that we can have sample data to start practicing on, and that’s coming along really well,” Rose said. “I think right now, there haven’t been too many issues — just the standard getting everyone started, assigning tasks, making sure funding is where it needs to be, and sort of those typical ‘getting a project off the ground’ concerns.”
Rose said that in general, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has been a very noteworthy project to take on due to its communal nature.
“Roman is a NASA flagship mission, and most of those have been really sort of ‘point at an interesting object and learn about it,’ but this one is a survey telescope, so it’s going to spend a lot of its time in sort of public data collecting mode,” Rose said. “Although we have a very specific science case of supernova cosmology, we are just in general trying to do it in a very public way. Roman in general, even the project infrastructure specifically, will have public input and will give the whole astronomical community a say in what we end up ultimately doing and delivering. So that’s interesting to be doing this work for the community in the community and with the community.”
