NASA Center for Climate Simulation

As the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope prepares for operations, the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) continues playing critical roles in developing NASA’s next major space observatory — the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Roman is targeting launch in the mid-2020s, with an announced launch date no later than May 2027. The telescope will focus on answering questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics.

Telescope namesake Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018) obtained her doctorate in astronomy from the University of Chicago in 1949, when there were few women in the field. After researching stars and other phenomena at prominent observatories and doing pioneering work in radio astronomy, she joined NASA in 1959 as its first female executive and later became its first chief astronomer. Roman is known as the “Mother of Hubble” for her instrumental role in taking NASA's Hubble Space Telescope from concept to reality.

In the image to the right, Nancy Grace Roman explains the Advanced Orbiting Solar Observatory to astronaut Buzz Aldrin in 1965.

NCCS resources are supporting the development of Roman’s primary instrument, the Wide Field Instrument (WFI). This 300-megapixel infrared camera will have a field of view about 200 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), allowing it to capture significantly more of the sky with less observing time.

NASA flight missions follow a standard life cycle for research and development. After passing the critical design review on September 29, 2021, Roman engineers could begin Integration and Testing (I&T) of its instruments.

WFI I&T challenges include 301-megapixel images that could produce up to 18 terabytes of data per day, yielding an expected pre-launch volume of 5 petabytes of raw data alone. With calibration, quality analysis reports, and science user projects, the project expects to store 10 petabytes total. “Handling and inspecting this amount of data before launch requires a new way of thinking about I&T data and moving from traditional manual inspection to more automated methods,” said Karin Blank, Roman WFI I&T Science Data Processing Lead, who works in the Software Engineering Division, Engineering and Technology Directorate, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Blank said that her team’s primary interests are detecting instrument issues in I&T and providing access and computation to Roman scientists studying the I&T data. Enter the NCCS Explore/ADAPT Science Cloud and its Prism GPU cluster, which are helping the WFI I&T Science Data Processing group meet several goals:

• Generating user-level WFI I&T products
• Developing “Quicklook” tools for users to view and manipulate WFI data
• Developing “Deeplook” products that automatically inspect data and alert users to potential issues during I&T
• Providing I&T data access to users

Science Data Processing group members are currently using Explore/ADAPT to produce, test, and run their software as well as analyze 200 terabytes of detector data from tests in NASA Goddard’s Detector Characterization Laboratory residing on the system. Researchers are leveraging Slurm (an open-source job scheduler for Linux) to batch process data, JupyterHub (a web-based interactive computing platform) to visualize data and analysis reports, and Prism to prototype machine learning problem detection methods.

“Because of our requirements for storage and data access to external partners, it would have been difficult and expensive to build our own setup,” Blank said. “We looked into private clouds as a possibility — they were six times the cost for storage alone.”

“It is pretty safe to say that without the NCCS our ability for users to have data and computational access would have been extremely limited,” she concluded.

Related Links

• Roman Space Telescope Mission Timeline
• NASA Science Missions: Universe

Jarrett Cohen, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center