The data, up to 1.4TB/day raw compressed, is planned to be fully open, every observation is public as soon as it is processed with no embargo. You can just download it and start looking for Rama or Oumuamua or plan your exoplanetary real estate empire or make a really big sandbox game. I at least want somebody to make me a cool screen saver.
You could easily be the first person to see a galaxy.
I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.
> every observation is public as soon as it is processed with no embargo
That's a big deal. Do you have any source for that? (I couldn't find it in the ones you linked). This is great for humanity as a whole, but... poor grad students who now need to rush to publish their papers even sooner.
Thank you! From talking to a contact working with JWST, it sounds a bit trickier in practice. The data are public, but with Roman the idea is that you must process them on their computers rather than download everything locally, and you pay for the compute/storage you use.
If their platform allows any kind of processing as it sounds then anyone could just dump the data. So I don't see why they would not allow downloads for local processing.
Reading between the lines, I assume they aren't reasonably capable of serving up ~TB scale data to hundreds (thousands? more?) of separate clients per day. The usual fix for this would be something like an AWS requester pays bucket.
To your question specifically, in such a scenario they would charge an obscene amount for the bandwidth so you would be strongly incentivized not to download hundreds of GB of data from them.
The questions is, how much are you willing to pay (because the cost of this is not free, especially in this cloud era), and what is the scientific return for access to the uncalibrated data? There is significantly more value in a well designed pipeline for everyone (which is where anyone who would work on the pipeline would slot in) than bespoke pipelines which are poorly built and unmaintainable.
> When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.
> I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.
My favorite part about this is that since names are largely a social construct, given the right situation, we could just nullify all the paid names and start again.
Sure, whoever does this will lose a lot of credibility. But say a disliked president signs an order forcing his country to stop accepting names that were paid, it only takes nobody reinstating it. And the rest of the world also giving up on the names, of course.
So you can totally fund space exploration this way, and then society can decide that it sucked and nullify it after the buyer is dead and unable to protest. I guess the family could, but...
For some tasks, surveys in particular, field of view is critical. You would need many Hubble telescopes to do what Roman can do mapping everything out there.
"What really makes Roman stand out is that it is designed for wide-field imaging. The cameras on telescopes can often only detect objects in a very small patch of sky. If we use the size that the full moon appears in the sky as our guide, Hubble’s field of view is often smaller than that —meaning each picture it takes is of a patch of sky smaller than the full moon. Webb’s instruments often are even smaller than Hubble’s. Each picture taken by Roman, however, will be larger than the full moon, allowing it to survey more of the sky much faster than Hubble or Webb."
The Rubble and NGR have the same size mirror but they are constructed differently. The former is not sharp over the entire field of view, the latter is - that coupled with a much, much larger camera (nearly 300MP) lets it record images at least equal to to HST but over a very wide field of view.
As to speed, it is not just the camera view that makes NGR faster but also physical factors such as not having to wait for earth to get out of the way.
Hubble in certain circumstances can see narrow and far. If you express this as a cone, you can extrapolate a volume.
It might be very useful to have something that can search wide and maybe not as far; nearer Earth dangers perhaps. Express that as a wider cone and extrapolate volume.
Part of the story is everyone being shocked at being under budget and ahead of schedule. I don't know everything, but I think this is reasonably attributable to the fact that this is a retrofit of an obsolete spy satellite. The leftovers of the security sector will be the most advanced scientific space surveyor. I have to wonder what things would look like with different priorities.
This is true. The telescope is much more than just the primary mirror.
Roman has two science instruments, a wide-field imager (“WFI”) and a coronagraph (“CGI”) and they were both built by NASA for this purpose (optics, electronics, detectors, deformable mirrors).
The WFI optics includes filters and a prism and grism for spectroscopy, and of course the very large CCD arrays.
The coronagraph is a rather special tech demo and allows imaging of exoplanets (Jupiter-like) while blocking the light of the host star. (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/coron...). It’s a precursor to HWO which is mentioned down-thread.
From what I can gather it is much more than just the primary mirror but the entire platform sans classified parts, which were replaced with NASA's optics and sensors.
Adversity forces a scientific budget and for jobs to be created in related research areas. For some reason we don’t find it important to maintain that level of funding when there’s no adversity.
If we’re playing what-if, consider the contributions those spy satellites made to keep the Cold War cold and provide for decades of Pax Americana and a security umbrella over Europe that they didn’t have to pay for.
Hubble was the result of an open competition between a variety of companies and technologies. But the winners were the people who built the KH-11 spy satellite, who could offer the cheapest and best proved options because of their experience with KEENAN.
Both KH-11 and Hubble had similar sized mirrors, but that wasn't because of design reuse, it was because that was the biggest primary mirror you could fit in the Space Shuttle cargo bay (1). In actual fact no KH-11 went into space on a Shuttle, but the plan up until the Challenger disaster had been for the STS to carry all US satellites into space, including the KH-11, which was designed around that cargo bay.
1: The space shuttle cargo bay was sized the way it was for NRO payloads, but it seems clear that the USAF wasn't thinking about KEEENAN when they requested that size- a design like that would be better if it was wider and didn't need to be nearly as long. My suspicion is, when NASA asked them what size they wanted for the bay, they took the last design they had- the just cancelled KH-10 Manned Orbiting Laboratory, and used that.
No, Hubble didn't reuse any components from spy satellites. However, the chosen mirror diameter was decided by the size of the mirrors being produced for the Keyhole programme, as it meant NASA would be able to reuse Perkin-Elmer's existing fabrication facility.
Musks company provides not only the most cost effective but also the most reliable access to space that is currently unparalleled by any other company.
We should thank the government for spending tax money efficiently.
You should blame the legacy aerospace companies whom purposely inflate contracts and take forever to do things for there being a lack of competition, not Musk.
As I see it Musk is lobbying the goverment to give him money to do useless stuff & expensive in space like land on the moon again - basically redirecting funds away from useful stuff like the James Webb Telescope for publicity stunts. Not any different from the legacy aerospace companies, who also lobbied like crazy, except on a bigger, dumber scale.
Starship isn't actually operational. I'll let you look at their plans for it and you can tell me if they involve doing things the goverment would pay for like landing on the moon and building space stations or not.
>redirecting funds away from useful stuff like the James Webb Telescope for publicity stunts
The point is this isn't happening.
Almost everything you're complaining about happened under Biden, who Musk wasn't on good terms with.
SpaceX is the cheapest provider of the services it offers, and the government is a large customer but has been less than half of revenue since before 2024.
If the government wants to build a space station (Vast, Axiom, Voyager) or land something(Firefly, Intuitive Machines) or someone on the moon(SpaceX, Blue Origin) , it will find contractors that can do all or part.
The contractors here are BAE Space & Mission Systems (fka Ball Aerospace), L3Harris, and Teledyne. i.e the "NASA" money always ends up at some corp. And complaining about SpaceX stealing money is ignorance.
It's worth noting that the primary contractor for the ISS is Boeing, but Leidos and KBR are involved.
Musk used to be reddit's darling. People's newfound hate for him seem to cloud their judgment and make them forget what made Musk their darling in the first place.
How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks?
Of course there have long been plans to go back to the moon because its a cool fun thing to do and whoever happens to be president would likely be well remembered for taking credit for it. That doesn't give it credibility as a useful endeavor.
> How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks?
Humans have intuition and curiosity, they can spot something quickly in the distance that looks peculiar, go to it and quickly inspect it.
More science was done on the few hours spent on the Moon by astronauts than all the lunar and Mars robotic missions (lasting decades) combined. Robots won’t be comparable to human exploration until we have general AI and that’s far away. Otherwise you’d have a lot more robotic exploration on Earth.
I see. And how do you you know that elon, a notably close supporter of the president didn't have anything to do with the Artemis program? I notice that Chinese electric vehicles are essentially banned in the US, but probably that had nothing to do with Elon as well right? And what does it matter if Blue Origin also made money on the Artemis program?
> How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt?
You've just changed your argument as I addressed your previous argument. Which clearly demonstrates that you don't have actual arguments against the Artemis program, rather you have some personal problem with Elon Musk.
That's fine, we all have our personal heros and villains. But don't be so disingenuous with your arguments or your reasoning.
I will never understand why NASA doesn't build at least two copies of expensive space telescopes like this. One single launch failure and boom (literally), the entire project is a failure?
It wouldn't double the cost assuming they do it with even a modicum of efficiency and intelligence. And hey - assuming that the launch goes smoothly, you can get double the benefit
The RST has an 8ft mirror. The mirrors have to be ground and polished in a clean room to tolerances that are the highest in the world. I vaguely recall it's a square law or worse - for radius-to-time-to-polish. So you're paying for time, and you're paying for the expertise of one or two custom built places that can manufacture them.
They have often indeed made “flight spare” copies of the main instruments.
When I worked for Mars Global Surveyor, one of the museum-pieces in the lobby was a glass case with the Viking spectrometer flight spare.
The flight spares were exceedingly useful when the spacecraft had some kind of trouble during its mission, because you could mock-up the flight spare in a lab and replicate many situations very closely, and propose solutions based on the mockups.
Because the incentives are not properly aligned. The US has historically wagered big money on singular missions, which given the cost per launch makes perfect sense. Now that costs per launch are decreasing rapidly, and critically launch availability is also increasing, the opportunity for scale is presenting itself.
I guess for one thing, these launches don't tend to fail and second, they actually do make duplicate missions sometimes. See Voyagers 1 and 2, Spirit and Opportunity and Curiosity and Perseverance.
Whatever the reason, it seems specific to the intersection of space and telescope. Space probes, landers, and crewed vehicles all get made in multiples, as well as ground based telescopes like Keck or the gravitational wave observatories.
I'm really excited about observations we're about to see over the next decade. Bringing NGR online and combining with Rubin, Hubble, and JWST will give us imagery and hopefully new discoveries and understanding.
I had the fortune of letting some of my neighbors through a telescope for the first time for the partial lunar eclipse. I say fortune, because it is amazing to be a part of someone having that experience that never disappoints. Even if they've seen images from NASA/ESA, putting your eyeball directly to the 'scope is much more meaningful.
P.S. I didn't post this at top level ... it was in response to a silly joke about the Romans which has since been flagged by dang ... apparently my comment was relocated to the top level but it's redundant here as this link was already given in the post (which I didn't see when I made this comment.)
I watched a documentary on how this telescope is going to be used with JWST. Basically the Nancy Grace telescope is a wide field high resolution telescope where they would photograph the same location in space over multiple days.
Since it’s high resolution and wide space it would still capture a huge area in detail and then they would basically use the photos taken over days/weeks to cancel out the stars/galaxies that appeared on every photo and only take the diff. That would give the anomalies like supernova, etc. and then they would focus JWST on that anomaly to zoom in and observe it closely.
This video linked from the site is quite good at adding a sense of scale to the undertaking. I also love that Roman will be supported by Hubble and Webb.
I'm wondering what are the considerations for having multiple detectors instead of a single large one! Does anybody have an idea? is it just because it's easier?
The primary detector is the wide-field instrument, which, believe it or not, takes pictures with a wide field of view. The secondary detector is the coronagraph instrument, which uses a bunch of funky filters to block out the light from the star to see the halo around it.
Edit: These are the detectors, which are the cameras. There is only one mirror assembly (with two mirrors) that focuses light into these instruments.
did not know and it's horrific Roman started as a billion dollar spy satellite sitting in a warehouse unused, but okay we got the crumbs from $20 Trillion in military spending I guess
oh and while the smallest planet Roman can image will be Jupiter-sized, Roman's successor would be able to image earth-like planets
except The Habitale Worlds Observatory Space Telescope HWO was scheduled for 2040 and now will not happen in my lifetime because DOGE got that one, Congress awarded it $150 Million and DOGE changed it to $5 Million
"mbps" is a meaningless abbreviation. You need to consistently and correctly use capital letters when communicating technical terms. You cannot "e e cummings" your way into effective writing.
500 megabits per second works out to 5.4 terabytes per day. No idea where you get 1.5, unless you were thinking of 500Mb/hour!
The GP is alluding to the fact that the prefix "m" means milli-, not mega-. But that's pointless pedantry. Nobody would ever think that you meant 0.5 bits per second, and bit isn't a SI unit anyway.
No, your cable modem would be 1.08 terabytes per day.
Does it stop making sense when your calculations for the Roman telescope indicate slower speeds than your connection, which you say is 1/5th the speed?
Now, since the Roman telescope will be at an L2 point, signal acquisition will always be subject to the Earth's rotation. So there will be multiple ground stations involved across the globe.
If the quoted rate by NASA of 1.5 terabytes per day is accurate, then it will not be downlinking 24/7, but in bursts. 500Mbps is also the max, where the actual range will be 250-500. We'll need to account for RFI and packet loss, etc.
Is it really 500 Mbps of data headed to Earth 24x7? I'd be very interested to see any available public info about the earth station infrastructure being set up for that.
Is it really just a 1 minute launch window? That seems incredibly tight. If there's any hitch in the countdown, that would pretty much mean a scrubbed launch. Not being well versed in orbital mechanics, why would the window be so short?
Not unusual, and there are likely a number of contributing factors.
Falcon launches to the ISS typically have an instantaneous launch window (roughly, when the plane of the ISS's orbit sweeps over the launch site). If they miss it, they try again about a day later.
Falcon (both Heavy and its little sibling Falcon 9) uses subcooled densified propellants which limit how long it can sit waiting for launch while fueled before the LOX warms and expands too much.
A short window means they only have to compute and verify and program one trajectory.
It is important to point out, since you did not note the timezone with that quote, that the launch is actually scheduled for NET 07:26am EDT or 11:26:00 UTC.
You can get live countdowns and updates at https://www.spacex.com/launches which will link to first-party livestream coverage during the launch.
No need to go through third-party and advertising-laden dot-com sites.
The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are intolerant to countdown holds late in the sequence. In particular, after propellant has been loaded, there must be no delay in launch. Any countdown holds will necessarily turn into a scrub for the day, as the propellant must be completely unloaded and the process restarted to prepare for launch. With the instantaneous window, it'll either be "go/no-go" at 07:26am EDT, or they'll go-around to another opportunity on Monday morning, around 07:22am.
The timezone has no bearing on the the one minute wide window. This was not posted as an advertisement of launch time. I provided the link the info was taken. If you click on it, it shows you the localized time. Not really sure why you feel like this was the important part of the question.
Based on that, I guess the one upside would be that you have the window available every day as the L1/L2 positions never move relatively. Unlike a launch to Mars or other solar system body where you definitely want everything to be lined up efficiently.
> but Musk still needs to send it out of orbit without explosions, so here's hoping
The Falcon Heavy has made 12 launches and all of them have been successful. It's built using the same engines as the Falcon 9, which has become the boringly reliable workhorse of space launch, and the rocket cores are very similar in design. I'd bet on a successful launch, and probably on a successful landing of the side boosters.
(Do we really need to politicize launch vehicles, of all things?)
> except The Habitale Worlds Observatory Space Telescope HWO was scheduled for 2040 and now will not happen in my lifetime because DOGE got that one, Congress awarded it $150 Million and DOGE changed it to $5 Million
I was so excited for this. It was the one thing I really wanted to see happen in my own lifetime.
The NASA budget was $5M as a placeholder, but Noel Hinners cut it to zero to light a fire under the community, instead of a bogus pretend-its-still-happening number.
The Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) flight software is a surprisingly massive at over 100,000 source lines of C++ code, which is significantly larger than typical JPL payloads. It is running on a a LEON4 (SPARC) processor on a radiation-hardened Frontgrade Gaisler GR740 board, using Wind River's VxWorks.
Is this a joke or just a demonstration of ignorance? The name Obamacare was not given to it by Obama, but by opponents of the law. The Obama administration just leaned into it. Blame conservatives if the name bothers you, not Obama and his administration from the time.
Reread my comment. I said he leaned into it. If you are unfamiliar with that phrase it means (in this context) that he accepted and adopted the term, but he did not coin it. Which was your original, false, claim.
You could easily be the first person to see a galaxy.
I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.