By Tripp Henderson | Staff Writer
As NASA’s newest flagship space telescope begins its mission millions of miles above Earth, a Baylor professor and his students will have a hand in deciphering the data it sends back.
NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Aug. 30, marking the beginning of a mission designed to investigate questions surrounding dark energy, exoplanets and the history of the universe.
Dr. Benjamin Rose, a professor and astrophysicist, is one of four principal investigators for the Roman Supernova Cosmology Infrastructure Team. In the role, Rose leads a group of about 50 scientists across 20 institutions working to prepare researchers for the massive amount of data Roman will produce.
“One of the important sorts of scientific tests and experiments that [the telescope] is doing is trying to understand the nature of the universe, what it’s made up of and understand its history,” Rose said.
According to NASA, the telescope is designed to address questions surrounding dark energy, exoplanets and astrophysics. Roman joins NASA’s flagship space telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope.
While Roman can achieve resolution and depth comparable to Hubble, Rose said its field of view will allow scientists to collect data at a much greater scale.
“[Roman] is able to observe 100 times the amount of the sky at once,” Rose said.
That difference will dramatically increase the amount of information available to researchers.
“In the first year of Roman, it’s going to be able to collect enough data that would mirror a thousand years of Hubble data,” Rose said.
But collecting that much information creates another challenge: processing it.
With such an increase in the quantity and quality of data, Rose said the current infrastructure, whether analysis tools or computer hardware, is “just not enough” to process it, so NASA built a team to help create a pipeline for that data.
“NASA has invested in groups of people to sort of build out the analysis pipelines that are needed in order to actually answer these really interesting, new and tough questions,” Rose said. “And one of those teams is the Supernova Project Infrastructure team.”
Rose’s team is preparing for Roman’s team to begin collecting scientific data, which he said will likely happen at the beginning of the year.
“As the survey and the science operations start probably in January, we’re getting ready so that the scientific community can actually do science at the new scale and rate that Roman will provide,” Rose said.
The data processed by Rose’s team will be publicly available and is meant to be shared with “the whole world.” As researchers interact with the information, it can lead to historic scientific breakthroughs.
“We’re trying to understand new things, complex things,” Rose said. “Most of these areas that we’re looking at have previously led to major discoveries and understanding about our universe — these things have led to Nobel prizes.”
That access also brings the mission back to Baylor, where students will have opportunities to conduct research using Roman’s data.
Jansyn Pihl, a first-year PhD student from Southeast Puyallup, Washington, originally had Rose as a professor in her Foundations of Astronomy course at Baylor. Now, she works alongside him and will help analyze data as it is received from Roman. Pihl said that Rose has contributed substantially to research at the university.
“I think he’s brought a really important culture and interest for research in the physics department … he’s brought forward kind of a breath of fresh air,” Pihl said.
