We have a standard model that is exquisite
at describing the properties of the universe that we live in,
but there are hints of a problem
with that model.
Roman will tell us
if our model is wrong.
Andrew, here we go.
You're good. We're ready.
And what's spectacular about Roman
is Roman will be able to tell us if we were wrong
and put us on the path to figuring out what's right.
Starting run.
This time
a year from today,
we're going to have a different understanding of the universe
than we have right now because of the observations
from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Control reports.
Test complete.
Good afternoon, and welcome
to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
I'm NASA's senior advisor and press secretary,
Bethany Stevens, and I will be your moderator today.
We are joined today by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman,
associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate.
Doctor Nicky Fox,
Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope project manager
Jamie Dunn, and senior project scientist Julie McEnery.
Each of today's participants will provide
brief remarks about our progress on the Nancy Grace Space
Nancy Grace
Roman Space Telescope,
and then we will open the floor to questions.
If you're joining us online, please press Star One
to join the question.
Queue on the phone bridge with that administrator.
The floor is yours. Great. Thank you Bethany.
Good afternoon everybody.
As you can see behind me,
the impressive Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
is now fully assembled, has completed testing,
and is undergoing the final preparations
before it will be shipped to Kennedy Space Center to soon
take its place among America's Great Observatories,
alongside Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope.
Now, our team dedicated over a decade of their lives
and millions of hours to make this project a reality.
Because of their hard work, I have the privilege
of announcing today that we are
now targeting, in early September, launch
eight months ahead of schedule and under
budget to everyone at Goddard and across all our centers.
Congratulations.
I hope each of you take pride in what you've accomplished.
Roman's Accelerated development is a true success
story of what we can achieve
when public investment, institutional expertise,
and private enterprise come together
to take on the near impossible missions that change the world.
Unlocking the secrets of the universe
and attempting to answer the question are we
alone is inherent in just about all we do here at NASA?
At our recent ignition event, we made a commitment to pursue
gold standard science as quickly as we possibly can, knowing
the world is waiting for the headlines
that only NASA is capable of making.
Today marks a milestone of NASA delivering upon that promise.
Roman will investigate dark matter, dark energy,
and the structure of the universe itself
and accelerate the future of discovery
of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system.
It's it's surveying capabilities are over 1000 times
faster than Hubble, and can chart
200 times more sky in a single image.
And what would take Hubble 2000 years to process
Roman can do in a year.
The images it captures will be so large
there is not a screen in existence
large enough to show them.
Roman will give the earth a new atlas of the universe.
I think it's worth pausing for a moment
and just think about how really incredible that is.
The farther we reach into space, the greater
our curiosity to understand the great unknown.
So to our workforce force and commercial partners
making today's rare announcement possible.
Thank you for bringing us to this moment.
For the researchers and scientists
that will analyze the data from Roman.
Your work will soon begin.
And for those that built this telescope, let's get ready
for what comes next.
Thank you. And I'll hand it over now to Doctor Fox.
Thank you so much.
Administrator Isaacman,
I could not be more excited to be here today
in front of this fully stacked and complete Nancy Grace Roman
space telescope. And doesn't she look beautiful?
I mean, honestly, just gorgeous.
We're on track as administrator, said
to launch early in September.
And that is
I can't stop saying it ahead of schedule and under budget.
And I want to give praise again to this incredible team.
Team NASA,
totally brought it, together with all of our partners
in industry and academia and our international partners.
It is an amazing day
to see what happens when we come together
and work in such an effective way.
Since early in 2020, the Roman team has worked
almost around the clock to develop
and test the spacecraft and the hardware,
completing the flagship mission in just six years,
which is a true testament to the agency's commitment to do
science cutting edge science even faster.
Their work ethic and their teamwork in
combination with the lessons
learned from our long history at NASA,
a developing space based flagship observatories are
why we're sitting in
such a good spot today with all eyes on the launch pad,
about eight months earlier
than we'd actually expected, which is so good.
Well done.
And this is just the beginning.
We want to get more science into space, launch
at a faster rate, and increase the pace of discovery
as we prepare to launch more cutting edge missions.
The Nancy Grace,
Roman Space Telescope is a sheer powerhouse.
It is literally a speed machine.
The speed at which
we'll be scanning the sky, delivering vast amounts of data
and returning results will be at an unprecedented rate.
Never done before.
Hubble gathered 172TB of data in its first 30 years.
Roman will downlink 1.4TB of science data every day.
That means it will potentially have about two,
2500TB over the course of its five year mission.
Basically gathering
like a hypothetical stack of science papers that would
reach up to be on the moon, maybe
even as far as Artemus to went.
When, when you apply, what Roman will see.
You know,
we've already confirmed today over about 6000 planets.
Roman will discover tens of thousands of new planets
outside our solar system.
It will reveal billions of galaxies, thousands
of supernova, and tens of billions of stars.
That is an extremely exciting
and literally all of the science that we can use to apply
and build off our interconnected NASA science portfolio.
Roman will help us address the question of how common
solar systems like ours actually are,
while also literally expanding the human mind
to what the universe contains at an astounding rate.
Roman isn't just doing Hubble and Webb's science
faster, however, and I know it's
very easy when we focus on the speed.
It's doing fundamentally different science
that could not be done with either observatory.
Together, the three missions will complement each other,
giving us a more complete picture of the cosmos
and advancing our understanding of the universe.
Where, when Roman is operating on orbit
at the end of this year,
it will also be NASA's first major demonstration
for achieving one of the goals
of the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
Concept for the first telescope designed to find like worlds
in different.
You know, outside
our solar system and different stellar systems
while exploring the broad secrets of the universe.
Right now, Roman has the most stable telescope and the
absolute best coronagraph that has ever flown in space.
The Habitable Worlds Observatory
will rely on even more than that,
and it is so important to us
that we get this coronagraph into space
and get that first milestone towards the next mission.
Because everything we do at NASA
science builds off the successes of what we've done before.
I am so proud that Roman will join kind of
the arc of past, present and now future missions as well.
And it will definitely,
definitely open doors to new cosmic pursuits.
So again, congratulations
to the entire Roman team again, including our private sector.
And academia and our international partners.
This is such an incredible team.
I am so proud of them.
Go, NASA!
Go! Falcon heavy. Go, Roman!
Jamie. Thank you.
Thank you.
So, It's tough, tough words to follow.
And I'm going to be followed up by even tougher words.
So I'm not going to talk about the science
because Julie is going to blow your mind with that.
But I would like to take this opportunity
to, expand a little bit about how we did get here.
And just take this opportunity to thank our team.
As as Nicki and the administrator
have already mentioned it.
There's a lot of work.
Millions of hours is no exaggeration.
That's, actual, actual math.
We could figure it out.
Exactly, but it's many millions.
And, this really is a great example
of what happens when, we as an agency,
work hand in hand with industry and academia.
We we work to each other's strengths.
And, it's really an example of how the, the result is
greater than the sum of all the parts.
So, the, the the amount of, of,
delayed, excuse me, diligence
and, and dedication and commitment to making
this happen is really, it's really fun to be a part of.
And so this team is really proud to have all of you here
to come see this. This.
I can't tell you how excited they are when people come.
Last week, we had been friends and family day.
We had about 700 people come through.
And, watching the kids,
get all excited, you know, get to see spacecraft every day.
So, I just want to again, thank everybody
that made this possible, for everybody that you see.
There's dozens more behind them.
It's not just engineers and scientists.
It's everybody.
It's our financial team. It's our contracts people.
It's our CCM people.
It's everybody. Technicians.
It's it's it's really a great team.
And so this has been, a wonderful experience.
And, I'm glad you guys get to be a part of it
by coming here and saying, we can't wait to launch.
Thank you.
Jeremy.
Hi, everyone.
Current observations hint
that our standard model of the universe is incorrect.
Roman will be able to confirm these
and set us on the path to understanding what's right.
We're going to perform a revolutionary census
of planets around other stars in our galaxy.
We're going to conduct ambitious surveys
that will transform and impact every area of astronomy.
And we can do all this because Roman's primary instrument
combines exquisite performance and sensitivity
with an outstanding ability
to sweep out large regions of the sky.
Previous speakers have mentioned that Roman can survey the sky
a thousand times faster than Hubble.
So to put
this into context, one month of Roman observations
would correspond to a century with Hubble.
So Nicky mentioned
that Roman doesn't do Hubble science faster.
Roman will address entirely new, ambitious science questions.
So that one month of Roman observations
could be used to survey our own Milky Way galaxy,
uncovering up to half the stars in the galaxy
that would itself result in an astronomical catalog of objects
that is much larger than any in existence today.
And that's what just one month of Roman observations.
Our main survey will take more than a year.
It's huge.
If we were to take the single image
that is produced from our main survey
and try and fully display it with a set of, 4K TVs,
you need more than half a million 4K TVs.
And just to give you a sense
of the scale of that, if I was to lay out
those 4K TVs, it would cover 45 city blocks.
Or to pick something that you actually look at.
It would entirely cover.
El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.
I don't suggest we actually cover El Capitan
with a set of 4K TVs, but it gives you
a sense of the scale.
That survey
will detect over 2 billion galaxies,
and we'll use it to study
how the structures in the universe,
the stars, the galaxies, the structures of galaxies
grow, grew and evolved.
We'll also study
how the universe itself has expanded over time.
And these are the keys to unlocking the fundamental nature
of dark matter,
dark energy, and the fabric of the universe itself.
Periodically, we'll point towards the center
of our own galaxy and monitor hundreds of millions of stars.
But we're not going to just image millions of stars.
We're going to find a treasure trove of exoplanets
up to 40 times more than our own today.
So think of this as the largest census
we've ever done of planets in our galaxy.
We have a second instrument, the Roman coronagraph.
And I think if this is doing magic with physics,
we take advantage of the wave properties of light
to cancel out the light of a bright star
so that we can image faint planets next to it.
To do this magic,
we have to have an optical system
that can adjust itself to maintain sufficient precision.
This will be the first time
we've had a system in space with this kind of active optics,
and it will set us on a path
for future observatories to do extraordinary new things.
What makes me
most excited about Roman is its discovery space.
We have 2 billion galaxies.
It means we have 2100 million objects.
We're going to be surveying patches of the sky,
going back over and over and over again
to find new things that go bump in the night.
I very much hope, and in fact, expect
that the most exciting science from Roman
is going to be the things that we didn't expect,
that we couldn't predict.
But that will
set the new, deep questions for future missions to address.
Thank you.
And with that,
we will open the floor to questions.
If anybody in the room has what Jeff will start
with, you.
To begin.
Jeff Foust. Space news.
Question for the administrator.
You and others have emphasized
that Roman has come in under budget, ahead of schedule.
Roman. It's still a multibillion dollar mission.
Is there still room at NASA for large flagship class missions?
When the agency's science budget is facing a significant budget
cut in 2027 and potentially beyond?
Yeah.
Well, Jeff, I,
I certainly understand why, why the question is coming up.
I'll say that, you and everybody else
who's interested in,
kind of my views on the budget and how it impacts the agency.
Plenty of opportunities to hear about it
over the next week since I'm on the grand hearing,
testimony tour, in fact, starting, starting tomorrow.
Nancy Grace Roman is not the last flagship mission for us.
In fact, here at Goddard, we're working on dragonfly.
Goddard is responsible for a lot of the,
tech maturation associated
with the Habitable Worlds Observatory telescope.
We've, we've got a number of signature.
While not necessarily measuring to the flagship
spend category that's being worked on at JPL
right now, like Skyfall, Moonfall, and others.
So science is incredibly important to what we do here.
As I mentioned in my remarks, going out
and trying to unlock the secrets of the universe is fundamental
to NASA's mission.
I expect there'll be plenty of flagship missions in the future.
We'll go back here to this gentleman.
We'll start over here and then move through the room.
And then also, if you could hand the mic back
after answer
or asking your question to our mic runner,
that'll help us get to the next people.
My questions for the administrator. Jared.
There's something online called the Artemis two effect.
As part of the Kerbal Space Program community.
We're all excited about what happened with Artemis two.
Kids, I've talked to fifth graders.
I talked to 100 of them last week.
They're all really excited.
So how do we use this telescope to continue
that excitement for the young generation?
Yeah. Well,
I think it I think it starts with, listening
to some of the great commentary that Julie just said.
I mean, I've got 100 questions coming out of just your
your intro right there.
Look, I am I am thrilled, that the world
kind of paused for a moment and took notice to Artemis two.
And yeah,
I think energize the world's interest in space exploration.
Human exploration tends to do that at times,
but if it's an opportunity to set the stage
for other conversations like Nancy Grace
Roman is about to do, that's fantastic as well.
We put out some, some great, like a video reel on it today
to get people hyped up about it
and won't be long before this telescope
is loaded up on a transport and taken down.
And then it's, of course, being launched by a Falcon Heavy.
That brings a lot of viewers to take interest
where we'll have opportunities there.
Where.
Julie, I sure hope that you're on the,
the live stream for that
mission launch
to get people excited about the kind of science
this mission is going to undertake.
So this is great. This is working really well.
We're thrilled that Artemis
two brought a big audience back to, to NASA.
And now we're going to fill it up
with a lot of exciting missions to come.
Nancy Grace Roman's next up.
I'm going to hand this off
so somebody else right here.
Hi. Nick Alexander for space scout.
You know, Goddard has a long history with telescopes.
We've, you know, seen some great work on Hubble.
We've seen the James Webb Space Telescope come out of Goddard.
What can we do to ensure that legacy, that culture
of telescopes continues to be centered at Goddard Space
Flight Center.
So I think, you know, it is that's where our expertise is
at NASA Science
Goddard is kind of the the heart of NASA's science.
And certainly we look to,
to, to, to to lead the way in a lot of our, big missions.
They clearly have the heart of astrophysics here.
They,
you know, doing a fantastic job clearly, with this, the,
the project office
for the tech maturation program for hab worlds is at Goddard.
And, we expect that to continue
and expect to see them continue to do great things.
We can go right here.
Sorry, Jared, I'm going to hit you up again.
So you're the new administrator, and you have this mission
that you may have heard is under budget on on time.
What lessons can you take away from this?
And, kind of a corollary is this has
this mission has an interesting history.
Where the optics came from originally.
Is are people going to just take that
and say, no wonder cavern under budget or.
So I'm going to stick to the first part of question,
and say that, I'm thrilled
that this mission is getting close to, its ability to launch
so that we can, we can take Jamie here and,
apply him to a number of other exciting projects.
His name I mentioned when we had a chance
to to shake hands in the in the warm up to this,
that your name is continuing to come up quite a bit
as, extremely talented project manager, so.
Yes. Look,
I think that's
actually very important because, we do have success stories
like, like Nancy Grace Roman, coming in ahead of schedule and
under budget.
We certainly have programs that are examples that that are not.
And when you think about that
and you think about going
overbudget or in some cases, extremely unfortunate cases
where programs are are canceled, there is dollars,
there are dollars lost from that that never come back.
And when you total them up, what does that equal?
It equals another Nancy Grace Roman telescope.
Or maybe a second dragonfly for that matter on that.
So I think that, having the, capturing good lessons learned,
we talk about debrief so often we get things,
get things wrong and avoid repeating them.
But when we get things right and have success stories like,
Nancy Grace Roman, let's learn from some of the magic
that, that, created that outcome
and try and apply it to other programs.
And I suspect, I expect Jamie's going to be in, big
demand across, big agency, initiatives going forward
to just take the second.
Can you repeat the question?
So you got the optics from this from another agency,
or somebody's going to say, hey,
no wonder it came in under budget.
Someone might say that, but they'd be wrong.
Seriously, the,
so it's it's one of these things it's difficult to prove.
A negative. So, who knows?
Right. It's a different it's a different beast.
When you start with something,
that you have to completely remodel, if you will, versus
starting from scratch.
It's, honestly, it's anybody's guess which one comes out
ahead, but, that posed its own challenges.
It did not make it easy.
And I'll reiterate that, while I appreciate the accolades,
and I'm the person sitting here, I had,
I only had a very small part to do with this.
It's really it's really our team.
We have a wonderful team.
We've done a good job of bringing
both the experience base from the decades.
Literally decades of,
of experience here at Goddard and again with our partners.
I mean, we've worked with ball
and and L3 Harris on many missions, and others.
Right. Teledyne can't keep going down the list.
And so we
we really have part of the magic,
I think is, is a really good mix of that experience
brought forward over decades combined with, what,
what you would call youthful exuberance.
We have,
we have a lot of, of fresh blood
that's come in and they have just,
you know, knocked it out of the park.
So it's really a good mix of folks that makes this happen.
Thank you.
Hi. Elicia Sauers from Mashable.
I think this is a question probably for Julie.
Nicky.
I'm, I'm wondering, could you give
a practical example of how the flagship,
telescopes will work together on particular observations?
Could you give us an example?
There was a really cool result from Hubble,
I think about a year, maybe two years ago, where
what they thought they were seeing
was a supermassive black hole
that was traveling through space.
And you could see
from the observations, the evidence of that, transit.
And it was extraordinarily lucky
that Hubble was able to catch that
Roman would be able to find some things like that in spades,
because we're serving such a large part of the sky.
And then we can follow up with detailed measurements
with, the James Webb Space Telescope,
now that we know where, where to look.
So you could consider one of Roman's,
roles to be something like a finding chart
for, for the James Webb Space Telescope that we find some of.
We'll find some of the most
extraordinary, unique places in the universe.
And then we can direct
our most powerful scopes to really hone in on the details
and take advantage of Roman's breadth.
And Hubble stepped.
You know,
I can,
I can
I guess I would have gone into wavelength
and that's nowhere near as good as what?
I excuse me, I just want to say
congratulations on an awesome first four months of 2026.
When you go across whether it's science directorate,
obviously Artemis, it's been unbelievable.
So with regard specifically to Roman, though,
we had an announcement, Jared, on the launch date,
I wonder if there were any promotional announcements
coming for the people involved in the project.
Sorry.
When you're saying I would assume some.
Well, I'm wondering who's getting promoted for delivering.
Oh, ahead of schedule and under budget.
Yeah.
So that's,
that's a very good and serious question
because as I mentioned before,
we do want to debrief our success stories
and learn from them and,
and take those lessons and climb
elsewhere and also, one of the
I think it
actually was my first directive that I put out, which was,
you know, recognize, reward
and inspire the top tier, talent within the agency,
when you do have extraordinary outcomes.
So I would expect, to your to your point,
that will certainly come into play here.
We'll move to well.
I will Robinson Smith
with spaceflight Now thanking you all for the time today.
Going back to your opening remarks.
You know, something you said caught my ear, which is
there's things that we got wrong
about our understanding of the galaxy on the universe.
I know based on everything that we've heard today
from from the panel and from others,
we're going to learn a lot more from, Roman.
But what specifically did we get wrong
that this can correct the record on?
Thank you.
I'm just trying to think about how to say this, concisely.
So we have a extraordinarily
good model of how the universe works that describes
the cosmic microwave background at the earliest times
and describes
with great accuracy the universe that we live in today.
And that's included things like the Hubble constant.
It's included things like a cosmological constant
for, for dark energy.
It's included the concept and the effect of dark matter
on the universe that we live in.
But there's been cracks.
We're seeing evidence that the cosmic that the Hubble constant,
as inferred from very early times, is not consistent
with the Hubble constant that we measure closer to now,
which is telling us
that the model
that connects those two things might not be quite right.
We have a slight tension in our expectations
for how structure should grow and evolve.
And excitingly, recently, we've seen evidence
that the cosmological constant might in fact not be constant
and might be varying with time and each one of those results
is not quite by itself
enough to take it to the bank and say that we're wrong.
And what you need is a mission that can, or an experiment
that can probe the universe to about a factor of ten
better than we did before.
And that will allow us to confirm if indeed
Lambda CDM, our standard model, isn't correct
and will leave us with a mission that has, the sensitivity
and the performance
to make the kinds
of observations that we need to start laying out
what the real answer might be
or what an improved model might be.
We'll move up here.
Hi, minutiae of a study with Space.com.
I have maybe a bit of a peculiar question,
and it's an engineering question, but anyone is.
You can chime in.
I feel like often when creating,
you know, space missions, observatories,
you're kind of breaking ground and like the materials
you're using, the temperature that you're testing at.
And there tends to be these like side effects of
like innovation that other fields of science can like,
take advantage of.
So did you find any examples of this during your process?
I mean, who wants to answer? Go.
So you're right.
And I think that with our astrophysics missions,
we really do push the boundaries of what's been done before.
Every time we do new precision optics, we I mentioned
this is the most stable, telescope.
The it has the most cutting edge coronagraph.
It has precision optics.
If you just think about the James Webb space Telescope
that brought about, like, the actual grinding of the mirrors.
Oh, sorry. The polishing, the mirrors, not grinding.
Sorry. Astrophysicist. Polishing of the mirrors.
Would, you know, brought about leaps
in in medicine, in optics, in Lasik.
I mean,
all of the things that with, Roman,
we expect to see the same things.
Can I tell you right now what's going to spin off? No.
But the way that this telescope is constructed, the precision
optics, the stability is absolutely once again
going to push industry and things
that they've had to design and they've had to, like,
change their methods to be able to get to this level
actually benefits everybody.
Because now the whole optics field has improved dramatically.
Move over here.
Hi, I'm Marina Corn with National Geographic.
I think this question is for either
the administrator or Doctor Fox for both.
Looking ahead to the next big space
telescope, the Habitable World Observatory.
We heard from the team today
that they're going to be spending the next few years
looking at the mission concept
and seeing if they can make happen
an $11 billion mission by 2020, like 2045 launch.
If they come to you and say, we can't do that,
what's the next step?
How do you go about making that mission happen?
So I think, you know, the way
we are thinking about habitable worlds.
I mean, somebody mentioned about, you know what,
what made Nancy Grace Roman such a such a, a success.
And a lot of it is making sure that the technology is ready
to, to go.
So before you actually start sprinting
with a mission, you've actually assured
that you can do the mission.
And so with Habitable Worlds, we're putting a lot of focus
right now on maturing the technology.
We've got a lot of our industry partners
actually working on that right now.
There's a big milestone in 2028 when we will actually sort of
step back and look and say, is this mission possible?
If the mission is possible, we will sprint to do the mission
and it will not be 2045 and it will not be $11 billion.
We will put a real budget on a real schedule.
You know, as
the administrator said several times,
we're not interested
in doing something now that's going to launch in the 2040s.
We want to pull that in.
And I think with the with the new focus on doing thing,
you know, faster to science, faster to space,
industry partners have told us
that they are I'm looking at them.
They are up to this challenge.
And they are excited
about doing this, and they don't want to wait
till 2045 to launch this mission either.
We didn't want to wait, to launch the Nancy Grace realm,
and we're eight months ahead of schedule.
I'm going to say that, like, 20 times.
But we, you know, we can't wait to launch this mission.
Everybody felt the urgency.
Everybody was sprinting towards this.
And I think that, you know, now we've shown we can do it.
We have a large mission study that we did at NASA,
where we looked across the entire space portfolio,
and looked at lessons learned, what worked, what didn't work.
What do you need to do? What what shouldn't you do?
What are the barriers? What are the impediments?
And we are really, really, really focused on removing those
and allowing teams to just push and execute.
And so honestly, if if a team comes to me
and says, you know, in 2028, it's 2045
and this much budget, then they won't be getting funded.
Yeah, just that on that.
It's a it's a good question.
This,
this has come up a lot in various circles
that I've had conversations with and through
and including Congress, those in the side that are
extremely supportive of initiative,
like capital worlds and others that get concern based on
pretty much everything you just said.
It's a well, it's a it's a mission
that's going to launch potentially 20 years from now.
And it's, you know, ten plus billion dollars.
And I fear at times that, this isn't necessarily specific
to habitable worlds, but maybe within some history of NASA
that we design programs that are that are too big to fail,
but then they become too costly to truly succeed.
And I don't think that's the right approach.
And maybe, maybe it's believed that
taking that approach is a way to have continuity and survive
between administrations.
And I actually think that the right way to go about it.
And similar to what we're trying to do now
with the moon base, is a lot of littles.
And, to do things in an iterative way to learn
and bring down risk.
And maybe as a result,
the overall project cost in itself could wind up being more.
But what you get out of it is greater and you do it.
And, you know, again, in a, in a faster way.
So, any commentary I've ever, made is with respect
to habitable worlds is, what can we launch sooner to learn,
and help us get to the overall objective
of what Habitable Worlds is, which is extraordinary
and something everybody would want.
And in that respect,
if it turned out over that same 20 year period of time,
the actual program
cost was greater than, say, ten, $10 billion,
but included
three scientific instruments
that ultimately built up to the grand,
you know, the grand exploration asset that we hope habitable
worlds to be.
I think that's how you actually have continuity
through administrations, how you get to data faster
and ultimately de-risk the
the mega telescope that you want out there
searching for, for habitable worlds.
We're going to move over to the phone bridge
for just a moment and start with Nell Greenfieldboyce from NPR.
Having this briefing, you
mentioned the numbers of extrasolar planets that,
the Roman Space Telescope will be able to find.
Could you talk a little bit more about,
what about the planet
this telescope could reveal, like,
particularly with its direct imaging capabilities.
Thank you.
Okay, so, when I was talking about
the large number of planets that we would find, I was
focusing on the planets that we find via indirect, means.
And for that, we can measure things like masses
and radius of the planet from the host star.
So that would give us a complete picture of,
the distribution of planets around stars
from very close in to the star all the way, to the
equivalent of the outer part of our solar system.
And even free floating planets.
The Roman
coronagraph is, is designed as a technology demonstration.
So its primary purpose is to demonstrate,
the technologies needed for a future mission to,
focus on, direct measurements of,
extrasolar planets.
Obviously, the best way of demonstrating
performance for a coronagraph on a path
to finding planets around other stars is to find planets
around other stars with that coronagraph.
But the overall, performance is a little bit more uncertain.
I'm not that familiar with the specifics of what
we are guaranteed to learn from.
From observations with our coronagraph,
just that it's very exciting.
And we'll now move to Manuel Mars Zante
with exploration especially all.
Thank you so much
for sharing.
Roman is going to send us tons of information to Nikki.
I think just you mentioned 1.4TB, terabytes per day.
And I understand that the agency is going to use,
platform called Roman Research Nexus.
Can someone briefly explain how does it work?
And I'm assuming research around the world,
scientists will will have access to it.
Is NASA going to use any kind of AI tool or software
that would help scientists to better process all
this information? Thank you.
Okay, that there
is a lot in, in those questions.
So,
The data archive for Roman
is among the largest in, space based,
astrophysics, and requires a slightly different approach
to using it.
So our model is that we archive the data in the cloud
and people
access the data through, through a science platform.
So you can log in to the science platform.
You're in a Roman specific environment.
It's easy to access the data.
It's easy to visualize the data.
It's easy to use the data.
And that facility is open to everybody.
So for the earlier question on,
how can young people get excited about Roman,
you can get excited about Roman by being on the forefront.
A class in Kentucky can see Roman data
at the same time as a professor in Princeton.
And your access to that data
is through the Roman research nexus.
That same environment also supports, researchers,
all across, all across the country,
where we're working hard to facilitate easy,
quick access to the data,
where you're not wasting time downloading, things
and then discovering that you're that the CPU on your laptop
wasn't sufficient to do anything with it.
So the second part of your
question on AI with Roman,
I personally I think that the field of AI is moving.
So fast, that any answer that I gave now
would probably not be representative of where
the field is in a year, and what we're actually doing with it.
We are using slices of AI and machine learning
in a variety of different scientific,
things that we're doing with Roman.
We're exploring the possibility of a genetic pipelines
where you have AI assisted assist you
with getting to the right place with your analysis
so that a grad student doesn't waste time with, with minutia
and gets, you know, straight
to the interesting parts of, of an analysis.
But I think there is a very good chance that
a deep,
rich, large dataset data set is almost a poster child
for being exploited extremely effectively with, with AI.
And that doesn't mean that the humans are out of the loop.
It just means that you let the computers do the hard work,
and then the exciting, physics bubbles, to the top
for the astronomers and the scientists
and the country at large to enjoy.
We're going to take one last question
from Ken Chang of The New York Times.
Hi. Thank you.
This is for Jamie.
I go through it.
I was wondering, can you give me examples of
what you did better and different than the earlier
space telescopes that weren't ahead of schedule and,
under budget?
Was it something on the front end where you didn't
rely on technologies that weren't ready yet?
Or can you give me examples
of problems that popped up with you able to, you know, fix them
before they became big problems that delayed everything?
Thank you.
Okay.
Let's see.
Well, I'll say a few things.
Another another two biggie,
things in terms of, what led to our success.
The first was the architecture, the overall architecture
and the in the very beginning, this this observatory
was was architected by the team here.
And, basically
it was known going in that this was going to be
a cost cap mission and that,
the programmatic were going to be, a, a major
part of the success criteria
wasn't just the technical scientific performance.
And so there was a lot of work earlier on, but early on put in
by the team
to basically architect something that was achievable.
There were stretches in places, but it was
they were known stretches.
Those were, handled,
you know, in, in, in the early years
in the technology development, like the detectors, the,
the funding,
the resources were put in there
to, to accelerate those developments
and make sure that they were ready.
Once we get to, you know, larger stages of integration.
So that was key.
And another key was, was stability
from, from, I'll say downtown.
You know, it's it's hard to do,
project the big especially when it's really big.
If you don't have stability and if you're funding
is going up and down all over the place and,
you can't plan from year to
year, it makes it really hard to succeed.
And so we've been, very fortunate that
our stakeholders, both at headquarters and, and,
and in Congress have entrusted us to
the resources that we said we need.
And, I like to say
everybody held up their end of the bargain. Right?
We we delivered.
We year after year, we did what we said we were going to do.
And and the resources and the,
and the support from from them was, was always there.
And so that's, it's really a nice way to do it.
Right.
It's, it's, it's, it's less controversial.
It makes it a lot easier to be successful.
So that was that was key as well.
And that concludes this afternoon's
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope briefing.
Thank you all for your participation,
both in this and throughout today.
And please follow Roman's journey at NASA.gov.
Slash Roman,
you should you join.