NASA Spotlights Ames’ Software, Coronagraph Tools Ahead of Roman Telescope Launch

Days before the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s scheduled Sunday morning, Aug. 30, launch, NASA is drawing attention to a less visible part of the mission: what Ames Research Center helped build for it.

In an Aug. 25 story, “NASA Ames’ Contributions to Roman’s Mission,” NASA Ames said the California center’s role goes beyond general support. Ames detailed mission-relevant software for Roman’s main survey camera, specialized coronagraph tools that could expand the telescope’s exoplanet work, and supercomputing support for both.

Roman is scheduled to launch Sunday morning on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA says the observatory will study dark energy, dark matter, exoplanets, and the formation and growth of galaxies over cosmic time.

One of Ames’ biggest contributions is ROSALIA, short for Roman Sky Analyst for Low Surface Brightness Imaging and Astronomy. NASA Ames said the software, developed under Ames principal investigator Pamela Marcum, is designed to predict and remove stray and background light from images taken by Roman’s Wide Field Instrument, the telescope’s main camera.

That includes zodiacal light — sunlight scattered by dust in the solar system — which can wash over astronomical images. By modeling and subtracting that unwanted glow, ROSALIA is meant to improve science that depends on detecting extremely faint structures with low surface brightness, and to help shape observing plans before Roman takes the images.

That matters because Roman’s Wide Field Instrument is built for sweeping surveys rather than narrow snapshots. NASA says it will have a field of view about 100 times that of Hubble and could measure light from about 1 billion galaxies over the mission. Cleaning up faint background contamination is central to getting the most out of that wide-field view.

Ames also highlighted a very different contribution on Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument, a technology demonstration managed and built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to test advanced starlight-suppression techniques for direct exoplanet imaging. Ames said it developed masks and wavefront-control software, in collaboration with JPL, for Multi-Star Wavefront Control, or MSWC.

The goal is to suppress light from multiple stars at once. That is notable because coronagraphs are typically optimized for single-star systems, while NASA says roughly half of Sun-like stars are in multi-star systems. If starlight from more than one star can be controlled, Roman’s coronagraph could potentially observe targets that are usually much harder for that kind of instrument.

NASA Ames said the MSWC masks are included on the Roman Coronagraph flight instrument as an added capability beyond Roman’s baseline observing modes. But the agency also stressed an important caveat: those multi-star modes are not part of Roman’s baseline coronagraph observing plan. They could be used only if additional observing time is granted after the coronagraph completes its primary technology demonstration phase.

“In order to get from where we are to where we want to be, we need the Roman Coronagraph to demonstrate this technology,” Rob Zellem, Roman Space Telescope deputy project scientist for communications at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a JPL news release last year.

Beyond those two headline contributions, NASA Ames said the center provides leadership and support for the hardware working group in the Roman Coronagraph Participation Program. Ames’ Advanced Supercomputing Division also contributed high-performance computing tools, along with data-pipeline and mission-operations guidance and simulations supporting both MSWC feasibility and Roman data processing.

Taken together, the Ames work touches Roman’s two distinct scientific sides: the Wide Field Instrument for massive sky surveys and the coronagraph for testing future-looking exoplanet imaging techniques. NASA says Roman will operate near the Sun-Earth L2 point, about 1 million to 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, with a primary mission lifetime of five years.