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Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

science.nasa.gov

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Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#81

Post by ghgr »

delichon wrote: post #79
ghgr wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

Data from all of Roman’s surveys will be made public as soon as it is processed, with no periods of exclusive access. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/roman-space-telescope/nasas-ro...

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.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#82

Post by jeltz »

jryle70 wrote: post #19
dfxm12 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People shouldn't be shocked that employees of the US government can deliver things ahead of schedule and under budget. The problems are that anyone gave Musk/doge the time of day and that we're too used to the president giving no bid contacts to incompetent donors.

> the president giving no bid contacts to incompetent donors Are you talking about SLS? Oh maybe you'd say that is "Senate Launch System", it's complicated, job program, 50 states sharing, and so on?

At least it works unlike Starship. But yes both SLS and Starship are handouts to political donors.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#83

Post by sajithdilshan »

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.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#84

Post by pmdr »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #39
Morromist wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is mostly funded by Starlink. Yes, Musk is a crappy character, but that's not a reason to make things up. This isn't Reddit.

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.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#85

Post by inemesitaffia »

Morromist wrote: post #41
ChocolateGod wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starship is mostly funded by Starlink. Yes, Musk is a crappy character, but that's not a reason to make things up. This isn't Reddit.

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.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#86

Post by inemesitaffia »

Morromist wrote: post #54
ralfd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it is a publicity stunt it was not lobbied by Elon Musk. Also Jeff Bezos Blue Origin got more money for the Artemis program.

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?

Artemis was announced under Trump 1, but the contract was awarded by Biden. The concept is older than SpaceX.

That should be enough clue.

The Chinese car ban (not just electric mind you) was at the instigation/behest of Unions and Ford in particular. Another Biden thing

Blue Origin matters because they got more money to do less.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#87

Post by inemesitaffia »

jeltz wrote: post #82
jryle70 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the president giving no bid contacts to incompetent donors Are you talking about SLS? Oh maybe you'd say that is "Senate Launch System", it's complicated, job program, 50 states sharing, and so on?

At least it works unlike Starship. But yes both SLS and Starship are handouts to political donors.

But the Starship contracts were awarded by Biden.

And unlike SLS weren't no-bid

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#88

Post by enriquto »

ghgr wrote: post #81
delichon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data from all of Roman’s surveys will be made public as soon as it is processed, with no periods of exclusive access. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/roman-space-telescope/nasas-ro...

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.

that's horrifying! what if you want to work on the processing algorithms themselves? can't you access the raw input data?

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#89

Post by ButlerianJihad »

nightsd01 wrote: post #67

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

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.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#90

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

nightsd01 wrote: post #67

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

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.
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