Scheduled for August 30, NASA's next major observatory is carrying the first active coronagraph sent into space and relying on automated pipelines for its data stream.
NASA aims to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on 30 August 2026, presented as its next major observatory. The instrument embarks the first active coronographer ever sent into orbit: by occulting the bulk of the light of a star, it must allow direct observation of planets in orbit around it. The scientific program focuses on dark matter, dark energy and distant exoplanets.
The challenge is both computer and optical. The large field instrument aligns eighteen 16-megapixel detectors and is expected to produce approximately 20 petabytes of scientific data over the five-year core mission. The Scientific Operations Centre shall finalize the processing lines and the corresponding archiving infrastructure.
Several bricks rely on machine learning: robust identification of candidates in alert pipelines to detect transient and variable objects, separation of true artifact detections, and automated detection of anomalies via a cloud-hosted monitoring tool. Without this filtering, the volume of daily alerts would be out of reach of a human inspection.
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