UC Berkeley Astronomers Help Lead NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-seven years after researchers at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory first proposed the concept, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is in orbit following its Aug. 30 launch, with Berkeley astronomers playing a central role in analyzing its wide-field sky surveys.

Designed to image billions of cosmic objects across vast stretches of sky, the Roman Space Telescope examines how planets, stars, and galaxies form and evolve over time while probing the physics of dark energy.

Campus Roots Dating to 1999

UC Berkeley's involvement in the observatory dates back to 1999, when UC Berkeley physics professor Saul Perlmutter and colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory proposed a space telescope dedicated to studying the accelerating expansion of the universe — the discovery for which Perlmutter was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011.

While the mission's scientific scope has expanded significantly since those initial designs, the core architecture remained a wide-field space telescope capable of imaging the sky across multiple filters. Throughout the observatory's development, UC Berkeley scientists have served on mission working groups advising NASA on survey planning and data analysis.

"The attention to careful control of instrumental and astrophysical systematic uncertainties championed by the UCB team has been an integral part of the Roman mission throughout its development," Jeffrey Kruk, deputy senior project scientist for the Roman Space Telescope, said in an email to The Daily Californian.

Leading the Roman Science Collaboration

Today, UC Berkeley astronomy professor Jessica Lu serves as co-founder of the Roman Science Collaboration, an independent organization of scientists working to maximize the scientific return of the telescope's observations and share its benefits across the broader astronomy community.

Kruk noted that the collaboration "serves as a forum enabling investigators with common interests to find one another, share results and techniques, and to foster new investigations."

100 Times Hubble’s Field of View and 48-Hour Open Data

The Roman Space Telescope features a field of view at least 100 times larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. A primary objective of the mission is investigating dark energy, which accounts for roughly 68% of the universe and drives its accelerating expansion, but currently lacks a single consensus physical model.

"Many such models have been proposed but at present the data are not sufficient to distinguish among them," Kruk said. "One of the goals of the Roman mission is to provide data to do just this, both by providing a much larger sample of data and by providing data of better quality than was possible before."

Under NASA's open-science standards for astrophysics missions, every piece of data collected by the Roman Space Telescope is made publicly available within 48 hours of collection. Because the resulting imaging datasets are too large for typical local downloads, NASA is providing an online workspace that allows professional astronomers, high school students, and members of the public to analyze and visualize the observations directly in the cloud without specialized computing hardware.