Introduction to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope#
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) is a NASA flagship mission with an expected launch in mid-2026. Roman is equipped with the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) as its primary instrument, as well as the Roman Coronagraph. The WFI has a large field of view, approximately 200 times larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 infrared detector. When compared to other space observatories, like Hubble Space Telescope, the scale of data collection will be magnitudes larger than what has been possible before. For example, in the first five years of operations, the estimated volume of Roman’s data archive is 20 petabytes (PB), which is roughly 20,000 terabytes (TB), compared to Hubble’s 172 TB during 30 years of operations.
During its mission, Roman will conduct different surveys of the sky including the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey, and the Galactic Plane Survey. Each of these surveys will contribute to our understanding of the Universe, as well as serving Roman’s primary missions of studying and discovering exoplanets, and measuring dark matter and dark energy.
Data from Roman will be stored and available to users via the Roman Archive in the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), with WFI data stored in Advanced Scientific Data Format (ASDF). Instructions on how to access and utilize the Roman data is available throughout the Roman Nexus Workflows and Tutorial Notebooks.
Welcome to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope!