If you live in Texas, you’re probably familiar with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, located in Fort Davis. It’s one of the largest optical telescopes in the world. However, being based on Earth means the views are limited by the atmosphere, which not only blocks specific wavelengths of light but is also composed of shifting pockets of air that can blur captured images.
Early attempts to locate a telescope in space include NASA’s launch of the Orbital Astronomical Observatory in 1968 and the Soviet Union’s launch of the Orion 1 ultraviolet telescope aboard the Salyut 1 space station in 1971. But everything changed on April 24, 1990, with the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Hubble orbits the Earth at an altitude of approximately 325 miles. Its location in “dark night” conditions above the atmosphere guarantees breathtaking, distortion-free images across a broad range of infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths.
In 2010, NASA was looking at two decades of Hubble’s successful operation and imagining what could be next. A project named the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) began and was formally approved for development in February 2016. It was officially named, in May 2020, in honor of the former NASA chief of astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman. She was referred to as “the mother of Hubble” by her colleagues for her instrumental work getting the U.S. Congress to approve initial funding for the project in 1977.
While the WFIRST project was a twinkle in NASA’s eye, Dr. Ben Rose was earning his B.S. in Physics at Whitworth University in 2012, followed by his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Notre Dame.
“Yeah, I did grow up on Star Trek, and my dad in particular was a big fan,” said Rose, assistant professor at Baylor University. “It was exciting, but I don’t think I decided that I wanted this type of career until closer to middle and high school. I’m lucky that I get to pursue my dreams that I had in high school.
“I’ve never been employed by NASA directly, but some of my work at grad school was on the Hubble Space Telescope data, and also through my advisor, Susan Deustua, at the Space Telescope Science Institute. When I was a postdoctoral researcher, my work was predominantly or fully funded through NASA grants, and those were always administered through Roman. All in all, I’m in my eighth year working on Roman.”
Rose joined Baylor in fall 2023 as an assistant professor. He teaches an introduction to astronomy course for astrophysics majors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Rose’s expertise adds to Baylor’s space research portfolio, which includes the Center for Astrophysics, Space Physics, and Engineering Research (CASPER).
On Christmas Day, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched into an orbit around the Sun, 1 million miles from Earth. It is the most complex and powerful telescope ever launched into space, studying the history of our universe, from the Big Bang to the formation of solar systems, and the evolution of our own solar system.
“James Webb and Hubble are both really targeted telescopes,” Rose said. “Roman is different than those because of its survey mode. It doesn’t want to just look at one object — it wants to scan the night sky and really build a bigger picture. Roman will be observing the sky and downloading data at about a thousand times the rate of Hubble. So in the first year of Roman, we will have as much data as what would’ve taken Hubble a thousand years to collect.”
The wavelength range distinguishes each of these telescopes.
“Hubble goes a lot bluer and all the way into the ultraviolet,” Rose added. “James Webb goes all the way up into the mid-infrared, and that makes it a much cooler telescope that observes space in those much longer wavelength. And Roman is red light and near-infrared — in the middle — overlapping the others.”
There are certain things that you cannot do with Roman that you have to have a Hubble for, and some things you can’t do with either a Roman or Hubble that you need JWST for.
“In a lot of ways, Roman is a great discovery machine because it can survey a large part of the sky, and then we can follow up with Hubble in the ultraviolet and with JWST in the infrared,” Rose said.
The Roman Space Telescope is the culmination of the pioneering efforts of thousands of engineers and scientists. The goal is to launch and steer the telescope into a Sun-Earth orbit approximately 930,000 miles from Earth, pointing in a direction away from the Sun, where it will operate in a quasi-halo orbit. Once in place, Roman starts to collect data and syphon it down to the expectant scientists on Earth.
“I am working with the main standard pipeline that’s managed by the Science Operating Center and Science Support Center, which is hosted by the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center,” Rose said.
The four principal investigators on the team are Rose, Dr. Rebekah Hounsell at the University of Maryland, Dr. Dan Scolnik at Duke University, and Dr. David Rubin at the University of Hawaii. The team they lead is currently comprised of around 80 scientists from more than a dozen higher education institutions. Rose estimates more than 500 scientists are working on the Roman Space Telescope in various teams.
“Our goal is to take that pipeline and offshoot a special branch that will do additional processing for supernovae cosmology measurements,” Rose said.
Because the Roman Space Telescope can record a wide region of the sky, it will be possible to conduct a deeper study of transient phenomena, such as supernovae — specifically Type Ia — which will be key to measuring the expansion of the universe.
“A supernova is a single, powerful explosion, as bright as a galaxy is itself,” Rose said. “We’ll be taking the data in and doing a lot of additional calibration using the standard ‘candle’ method. If you know how bright it is intrinsically and how bright you observe it, you can figure out how far away it is.
“We’re looking for Type Ia supernovae,” he continued. “You have about one and a half solar masses of carbon and oxygen, and it’s right at an instability point. If you add just a little more energy, you can get those carbon and oxygen atoms to start fusing and combining, and you can fuse them up to form iron and nickel. And all that energy that’s released in the nuclear fusion reaction, that thermonuclear explosion, explodes that white dwarf. We can empirically observe the differences, standardize each supernova more accurately, and use it as a distance indicator.”
Soon after a satellite is launched into space, there is a critical initial phase called “commissioning,” during which all subsystems and instruments are checked, calibrated, and made ready for full operational service.
“Commissioning lasts three months, during which we’ll get some images that we can start to take a look at,” Rose said. “There’ll be a press release to say that Roman is fully operational, and we’ll include some results of small science programs we can do right off the bat. My particular project on supernovae probably won’t start until about a year into the mission.”
One of the most significant challenges of the project is to avoid falling behind when the data starts flowing.
“Roman is significantly faster in data collection than Hubble or JWST. So a large part of our infrastructure development is to make sure not only are we precise enough, but we’re fast enough to keep up with the data,” Rose said. “You’re talking about terabytes per day. They’re predicting at least 20 petabytes in the first five years.
“And the scariest part is that while we are testing and developing right now to the best of our ability, it feels like we’re flying blind,” he continued. “Ultimately, we won’t be able to fully test everything until Roman is in orbit.”
NASA has committed to launch the Roman Space Telescope by May 2027, but for those closer to the project, the most recent estimate is September 26, 2026. However, the project has faced financial issues that have threatened its completion.
The proposed budget of President Donald Trump’s first administration zeroed out Roman every year, which would’ve canceled it. However, Congress disagreed every year and kept the budget at the requested rate. Again, in the first round of the proposed 2025 budget, there were severe cuts to NASA astrophysics, including to Roman. The House approved funding for Roman at the requested amount, although the Senate’s approval was for a slightly lower amount. According to Rose, “It’s all good for Roman — everything is on time and under budget.”
Roman’s prime mission is for five years, although it’s been engineered to last for 10 years. The actual lifetime may depend more on the success of the launch.
“JWST had the same five-year prime mission,” Rose said. “But now it looks like it could be a 30-year mission because the launch was so perfect. I’m hoping for 10 or 15 years for Roman, but 30 would be great.”
The mountain of data that will filter back to Earth will be distributed among the scientists now being selected to work on specific topics. One of the main focuses for Dr. Rose and his team will be pair-instability supernova, where energetic photons in the core of a star create electron-positron pairs. The process removes the outward radiation pressure supporting the star, triggering a runaway thermonuclear explosion that destroys the star, leaving a stellar remnant.
“Pair-instability supernovae have been theorized, and there have been some potential candidates that we’ve seen. But nothing really definitive,” Rose said. “If the rates are what we think they are, Roman should observe five to 10 of these supernovae during its time in space.”
The next six years will be a milestone in Rose’s life, and he can’t wait for it to unfold.
“I fell in love with Roman and have decided to make it my career in a lot of ways,” Rose said. “I look forward to the exciting science that happens and then passing that on to the next generation and the next mission.”
