 top of the hour and so let's get started. So hello everyone and welcome to the March NASA Night Sky Network member webinar. We're hosting tonight's webinar from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in Wild and Woolly, San Francisco, California today. We're excited to welcome our guest speaker from the much more sedate, whether in Baltimore, Dr. Brandon Lawton from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Welcome to everyone joining us on YouTube. We're very happy to have you with us. These webinars are monthly events for members of the Night Sky Network. For more information about the NASA Night Sky Network and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, check the links in the chat. And so I think Kat might have those queued up and we'll put those in in just a moment. Before we introduce Dr. Lawton, here is Dave with just a couple of announcements. Hey, not much tonight. Just want to let y'all know that we got a couple weeks left to order extra outreach pins if you need them. And we got information on how to qualify and all that in the last few newsletters. It's on the Night Sky Network homepage. A lot of you have already ordered them. And in April, we're going to send everyone out that hasn't ordered any in advance. They're standard three free pins for all your work if you have reported on events in that you've held at least two events that you've held in 2022. And then I'm going to start working on this year's pins. And I'll put the link in the chat. Let's say I just saw someone say, signing in from Scotia, which is remarkable. Hello, I'm in Potsdam. And there's pins. There, there I reverse the order. Yeah, that's the link for the pins if you need it. You all know the deal at this point. And if you don't just send me an email at or me or cat or Vivian at night sky info at astro society.org. And that's it for me really. Right. Thanks, Dave. Cat, we've got the Eclipse ambassadors going. And so what do we know about our need to get all of these fine folks to apply? So thank you for that. So if you are an amateur astronomer or you are in a club, which you all are, otherwise, you would not be here today. If you know an undergrad student that is actively enrolled in a college, if they are over the age of 18, we would absolutely love it if you applied for the Eclipse ambassador program that is eclipse ambassadors.org. You can also find that on the ASP website. And right now we are processing applications once a week. And we're making partnerships every two weeks. And to be honest, the states that we do need some help in would be in Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming and Louisiana. So if you have any contacts or connections in those states, we would love it if we made some partnerships with them. And we've actually started up the workshops too. So we're, you know, we're, we're rolling along. So thanks, Kat. Absolutely. For those of you on zoom, you can find the chat window and the Q&A window at the bottom edge of the zoom window on your desktop. Please feel free to greet each other in the chat window or to let us know that you're having technical difficulties. Also make sure that you select everyone and not just host and panelist so that we can all see your green. All of your questions that you have for Brandon tonight, please put those in the Q&A window. That will really help us to be able to keep track of your questions. And, and if we have duplicate ones, that also helps for that. Again, as Kat mentioned, you can also send us an email at night sky info at astrosociety.org if you're having any technical challenges this evening. Again, welcome to the March webinar of the NASA Night Sky Network. This month we welcome Dr. Brandon Lawton to our webinar. Brandon Lawton is a PhD scientist with more than 10 years of experience in the astronomy communications and outreach field. He's a project scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Space Telescope Science Institute is the science operation center for the Roman mission and is located at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. We've heard from several people from Space Telescope over the years. And so this is Brandon's first time for one of our webinar webinar. I can't talk tonight for one of our webinars. Brandon manages the portfolio of Space Telescope public outreach projects for the Roman mission in addition to leading several NASA data and authentic experience efforts for NASA's universe of learning program. Brandon has a research background and study in the interstellar medium of galaxies near and far, including star formation. Brandon earned his PhD from New Mexico State University in New Mexico. So please welcome Dr. Brandon Lawton. Thank you, Brian. I am super excited to be here with you all to share in NASA's next flagship mission, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. I have a nice model as well here. I know that we're all super excited about the James Webb Space Telescope and everything it's bringing, but we have another one on the way. And so I want to share some of the amazing things that the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will do. So I'm going to go ahead and share my presentation now and swap displays. Okay. So hopefully you all can see that. Yep, looks good. Great. All right. So I think it'll be very clear shortly why I have titled this, why we have titled this presentation, Expanding Our View. But and I think also it'll hopefully be clear by the end of this presentation what this sort of graphic element you see on the left is for Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, what that shape represents. But let's go ahead and get into talking about this telescope. So the the big picture here, the first big takeaway that we I want to share with you around, you know, what makes this telescope special? The big thing is its field of view, right? Its eye on the sky. So you may not recognize how actually how small of a view on the sky Hubble and James Webb and so on have, right? So one thing that we we tell people is if you hold a dime up at arm's length, up to the sky and you look at at the dime, the size of Hubble's field of view or what it can see in anyone pointing on the sky is the equivalent to the eyeball of the president on the dime, right? So Hubble and Webb have done and are doing exquisite science. But what Roman brings is a bigger picture. Roman has 200 times the infrared view that that Hubble has. So imagine Hubble quality data in the near infrared. And but it but 200 times that view. And so I think you quickly get to see or you can imagine sort of what this might do for astronomy and for scientists. I'm trying to explore the universe. Of course, I don't want to get too far into talking about this telescope without talking about the namesake for this telescope, Nancy Grace Roman. So Nancy Grace Roman was NASA's first chief of astronomy. She joined NASA in 1959 when the agency was only six months old. She championed the space based astronomy, which eventually led to the Roman Space Telescope. And she also advanced space based astronomy and general astrophysics knowledge. And the telescope bearing her name will take up the legacy by addressing some big questions that are crucial for the field today. So you know, one of the other things that that Nancy Grace Roman has done as has been not just for Roman, but her entire tenure when she was at NASA, she really helped push science at NASA. And you know, we wouldn't I think it's fair to say and I think other people have said this that we wouldn't have a Hubble Space Telescope, for example, without Nancy Grace Roman. And so she really set the foundation and she did other things as well. She she helped set foundations for making sure that the data that we get from our telescopes is public, right? So it's not it's not hidden to just scientists and so on. And so she really set the way for opening up science at NASA for not just scientists, but for everyone to appreciate what we're learning from the universe. So here's a here's a diagram to bring everyone up to speed on the history of major space based missions for for NASA astrophysics. These come out of what's called decadal surveys that happen every 10 years. And the the astronomy community, the scientific community gets together and prioritizes what they think needs to happen. And then and then what has happened, you know, from that is NASA has worked with the science community to create a space telescope to address those science needs. And so all of these telescopes on here have come out of that process, this community based process from the astronomy community to essentially address the current scientific needs by building space telescopes. So 1990 Hubble was launched. In 1999, Chandra Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched. 2003 Spitzer was launched. And of course, we all know on Christmas Day 2021, James Webb Space Telescope was launched. And like I said, the next big flagship to come is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is going to be launched by May of 2027. I like this quote on the screen, by the way, to from Nancy Grace Roman, which basically gets at this idea that scientific research and engineering is a continuous series of solving puzzles. So as we have these space telescopes, explore, observe, collect data from the universe, we get fundamental new questions from mysteries of what we see. And that drives exploration design and exploration with new technology to try to answer those questions. But inevitably, that new technology, those new observations provide more questions. So we need to design new technologies, new instruments, new telescopes to try to address those. And that has really been what has been driving the development of these telescopes. And that is no different for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. So this gets, this sort of encapsulates a comparison between the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. And the big takeaway here, I think what I want you all to come away with is that these telescopes all complement each other, none of them replace the other. You know, now that we're having Roman or web, it's not like Hubble is not needed. Hubble is very much has its own thing that cannot be duplicated by Roman or web. And so some of that information is conveyed on this picture here. One is on the very far left, you get a sense of the size of the mirrors of the telescopes. Now, as a reminder, right, telescope mirrors are incredibly important. I don't have to tell you all this. You all know this as well as I do, if not more. But the larger your mirror essentially or lens on the telescope, the larger your collecting area, right. And so if you have a larger mirror, you can collect more photons from objects in the universe. It allows you to really see a larger mirror allows you to see fainter objects in the universe. So you'll notice on here that Hubble and Roman have the same size mirror. And so they have the same collecting area. And so that's why I say, you know, that's partly why I say that Roman is going to produce Hubble quality data. Web has a larger mirror. So what that's really allowing is for web, it's going to see much fainter. It's more sensitive to seeing the faintest objects in the universe, right, particularly in the infrared and infrared light. And so that's why one of James Webb's big science goals is to find, you know, the first galaxies in the universe. So look back really far in the universe to find the most distant galaxies, the first galaxies, they're going to be incredibly faint to do that work, right, because they're so far away. Light spreads out over over the distance of the universe. So they're incredibly faint. You need a big mirror to try to do that work, right. So I think web will likely have the record holder as we're currently seeing being broken almost every day, it seems like, but the current, the record holder for the most distant galaxy, for example, discovered. Now, if you go down to the wavelength part of this image here on the bottom, right, these are the, essentially, the energies or wavelengths of light, the colors of light that each telescope can collect. And we don't show all of the types of light here, right. We don't have x-rays or so on, but we have the three types of light that these telescopes can observe. Ultraviolet, visible light, like our eyes can see, and infrared light. And you'll notice that Roman sits kind of covers what Hubble and Webb can do. It's, Roman is really situated in the near infrared and a little bit of visible, okay. Webb really takes you out into the mid-infrared to near and mid-infrared. So a broad look at the infrared universe, that's really up Webb's alley. Hubble is critical for our window into the ultraviolet universe, right. So Hubble also, of course, continues to do great work in visible and near infrared observations. But in addition, it is our one really high resolution window into the ultraviolet universe, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Now let's get up to the top right. Here's the field of view. Again, how much of the sky the telescope, the telescope's cameras can see at any one, at any one time. And you'll notice Webb and Hubble down there. That's their sort of field of view. That's their eye on the sky. And then you see this shape, which is the Roman field of view. And that Roman field of view, which I'll talk more about in the upcoming slides, that shape has to do with the number of detectors stitched together to make the camera. But Roman is a very different kind of telescope from Hubble and Webb. You'll notice Hubble and Webb say targeted observations. For Hubble and Webb, they're really meant to target an object or a region of the universe and study it in tremendous detail. Hubble and Webb each have four science instruments with multiple, multiple modes and all sorts of ways that you can observe the target. And so if you want to know every detail about whatever you're looking at, it's a galaxy, say, you might want to use Hubble and Webb to do targeted observations to learn everything you can about that target. Roman is a survey instrument or survey telescope. Roman, with its large field of view, will allow it to snap large pictures of the sky in the near infrared. In addition, Roman is a very fast telescope. So Roman has incredible speed, which will allow it to map large portions of the sky. So what Roman can do faster than Hubble and Webb is move its pointing to a new patch of sky, take an image, move, take an image, move, take an image. So the large field of view in coordination with its speed will allow Roman to get Hubble quality data across large patches of sky. All right. So I'm going to go through quickly some facts and figures for the telescope. I do put on here a nice interactive. You can explore yourself if you go to this page that our Goddard colleagues have set up. This will tell you this interactive will explain the hardware of the telescope. So I'm going to talk mostly about the science for Roman. But if you want to know more about the hardware, I encourage you to go to this site. But just some basic facts and figures, right? There's a the camera is the main science camera is a 300 megapixel camera. It has one advanced coronagraph, which I'll talk about in a minute. Its primary mission is scheduled for five years. Of course, after the five years has typical NASA takes a look at the missions and at any mission after his primary mission is over and determines if it wants to do an extended mission and continue to do science. But its primary mission is for five years. It will be at Lagrange point two, which is a location about 930,000 miles from Earth. It's the same general location that the James Webb Space Telescope is located. And it's it's beyond the moon. So it's it's it's almost a million miles. And it's beyond the moon. But it trails with Earth as Earth goes around the sun. So it sticks. It doesn't trail, but it sticks with Earth as Earth goes around the sun. So so so but that's what Roman and Webb both do. The primary mirror is 410 pounds, which which sounds like a lot. And it is it is a lot. But one thing to note is that's about one quarter of the weight of the Hubble mirror. And the Hubble mirror is the same size. So there have been some technology advantages there in terms of being able to more cheaply get it off the ground and so on. All right, so I'm going to quickly go over the two main Roman instruments. There's the wide field instrument, which is its which is the main science instrument. And there is the coronagraph instrument, which is a technology demonstration instrument. So we'll start with the wide field instrument. This is the primary science instrument for Roman. And so it will allow for survey style observations. It has 18 near infrared light detectors. Again, a 300 megapixel camera, about 200 times Hubble's infrared field of view. It also allows for two spectroscopic capabilities. So if you want spectra, it allows for that as well. And you'll notice on the lower right of your screen there that snapshot of this animation, that is those 18 squares are the 18 individual detectors that essentially stitched together work together to make one large camera, this wide field instrument. And so this is really the power, right? So this this the light from the light from whatever you're observing goes through the optics of the telescope, and then gets of course projected down onto these 18 detectors. And then the coronagraph instrument is a technology demonstration instrument. It's a first of its kind design in space. I'll play a think I can play a little, a little, a little video here. There's it's a first of a kind design in space. It is meant for direct detection of faint exoplanets. Now, the way a coronagraph works as you're seeing on this video on the screen is you essentially take a physical mask and you put it in front of the light coming from a bright star or a bright object, whatever it is a bright point source in the sky like a star. And you essentially mask out the brightness of the star so that you can try to see faint exoplanets going around that star. It's very similar in my mind if you ever drive around on a on a dark night, or you're walking around on a dark night, and someone with bright headlights comes at you and you put your hand in front of your eyes to block out the headlights so that you can see what's going on around you, right? You want to dim that light that's blinding you so you can see what's going on around you. That's basically what a coronagraph does. It blocks out the light from the star so that you can see what's going on around it. And by that, by doing that, you can start to pick out perhaps some some planets going around that that distant star. Now, what's what why this is a technology demonstration is, is that there are some technologies on this coronagraph that have not that have not been in place in a space based telescope before. Most notably, the deformable deformable mirrors that are in the coronagraph instrument itself. So much like adaptive optic systems on earth based telescopes will have sort of changed the shape of the mirror slightly to overcome the atmospheric distortions that cause starlight and other things to sort of twinkle right in space. You have these distortions that are coming from the optics that are trying to block out that central star. And so you can use you can use these sort of adaptive or these adaptive optics if you will or these deformable mirrors to change shape in real time to overcome that. And what that does for you is it further suppresses the starlight of that central star so you can see even fainter planets. Why this is a technology demonstration is for that reason. But it's also for the reason that the goal here is we want to get part way to being able to in future missions observe Earth like planets at Earth Sun distances around other stars, right? This coronagraph is meant to get us part way there. So it's really meant to detect more like Jupiter sized planets directly around other stars at Jupiter, you know, Jupiter Sun distances. So that's that's that's that's why it's a technology demonstration where we're trying to show that we can do it. And then we'll build off of it the success of this hopefully right and then use even more of this and more refinement with higher technology versions of this in future missions. All right, so let's get to the science with Roman what what kind of science will Roman be able to do? The first is I want to I want to put a I want to point out that because it's a survey telescope, it's not going to do observations in most of the observations won't be sort of the traditional way that, for example, Hubble and web do observations that are targeted. So the way that Hubble and web work, it are right that scientists write a proposal. They say, Oh, I want, you know, Hubble or web or whatever to look at this target for this much time. And because I have the science to do, right? Well, with this large field of view, you can do so much science by just doing these large surveys. And so what what instead what's going to happen is the astronomy community. In fact, this process is just getting further refined now. But the astronomy community is going to come together to define around three primary surveys. And then I'll talk about a fourth option if as well at the end. But the first primary surveys is called this high latitude wide area survey. And essentially, this gives you an idea, the full moon is a for scale there. And as you back out this high latitude wide area survey, will cover a potential area of about 2000 square degrees. Now that is tremendous. I mean, if you think about Hubble quality data, but 2000 square, square degrees, that is, that is a lot of data, right? That is, that is a lot of information. And so obviously, to do that, you if you remember that interesting shape for the camera, you have to take an image, move the telescope, take an image with the telescope and you sort of build up a picture over however big this potential survey area will be. But it'll be something like 2000 square degrees in size. So that's the high latitude wide area survey. And what the reason it's high latitude, what they mean by high latitude is high latitude out of the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. So this is a survey meant to get at galaxies or be able to at least observe galaxies outside of our Milky Way, right? And it will enable us to sort of piece together a three dimensional picture of of our universe, right? Where galaxies are located in space, position and distance and so on. And so that's, that'll is going to help us build sort of a big picture of space. But of course, 2000 square degrees, you're going to capture a lot of other things in this in this survey as well. And then there's the another core community survey where it will be a high latitude, but it will be time domain. So here, the interest is to capture the dynamic universe, things that sort of go off in the night that you might not expect. I think we're used to thinking about the universe, or at least a lot of people are used to thinking of the universe as a very static place, right? The it's, it's, it's not changing. It's the same. When the truth is it's very dynamic. Things are happening all the time on time scales of hours to days to weeks to months and so on. And the issue is you wouldn't catch that if you're not taking repeated observations of the same patches of sky over and over and over again. And that's really what this survey will do. It will be again high latitude so it can look at things past our own galaxy, but time domain so we can catch things. Of course, some things that it will catch are represented in this sort of artists illustration of type one a supernovae. So supernovae we of course, we've known about for a very long time. These are exploding stars, right? They've essentially reached the end of their life, or they they reached some certain threshold right of mass and they explode. And we'll catch supernovae going off all throughout these in all throughout these time domain surveys. Another thing is we might catch like what's on the right here. Here's a demonstration if you see these little blips going off of these really rare events called hypernovae. And these are cataclysmic events of of high compact objects of like remnant stars and so on colliding together that are extremely energetic, but are also seemingly extremely rare because we don't catch them very often. In fact, there's only I think one we've caught we think several but there's only one confirmed I think hypernovae. Maybe that's gone up since since I've looked at this, but they're very they're very small numbers of these that we've actually caught. And these will tell us, you know, just hypernovae by themselves will tell us something about the energetic universe and where some of the heavy elements may come from in the universe and so on. But even more to the point, we might catch things that we aren't expecting at all. Things that we never have caught before. And you don't know what you're going to catch until you till you start looking. And this little display at the bottom here is really meant to be sort of a nominal supernova survey region. If you were looking for supernovae, the credit folks here that I put down here were interested in looking for supernovae. And so they came up with sort of a nominal idea for how they might stack the images and repeat the observations over time to try to catch supernovae. But like I mentioned before, these these core surveys are just being defined now they're being defined for catching time domain things generally not just supernovae. And so the actual implementation of the survey is still to be decided. But in this nominal idea here, we're talking about about five square degrees in the red sort of circle that are fully covered and the blue circle and additional three square degrees. So it's it's very much a smaller area than the 2000 square degrees that was the wide area survey. But again, it's getting at time domain it's repeating the observations over and over again to catch things that are going off in the night sky that we would not have otherwise caught. By the way, what we really cool about this too is with these time domain surveys, we're going to start being able to play movies of the universe, right? If you're doing this over several years, there are very interesting things that you can do in the time domain, you can actually watch as supernovae light echoes go out with time, you can watch as nebulae expand or change with time. So we're going to get we're going to get some really interesting, essentially videos or movies of the universe. And then the last core community survey is this galactic bulge time domain. This is another time domain survey, but this time we're not avoiding the galaxy, we're going we're looking directly in the center of the galaxy, which is what this animation on the left is trying to show, which is basically reporting right at the bulge of the Milky Way right at the center. One of the reasons to do that, there are many reasons why you might want to do that. But one of the reasons that sort of got got this sort of core community survey going, the interest was in finding exoplanets. And in particular, finding exoplanets or planets around other stars in a way that hasn't really been fully utilized before. So if you're if you're familiar with the Kepler Space Telescope or the TESS space telescope, they find exoplanets by what's called the transit method primarily where as you stare at the stars, you might see a dip in the light over time because a planet might have crossed in front of the star. If the orientation of the planet in the star system is just right, a planet may have crossed in front of the star and dim the light. And then you can infer that there might that there's a planet, right, and roughly this the size and so on. Now that's really good for planets that are close to their star, right, because planets that are close to the star will orbit their star much faster. And so there's more likelihood that you'll catch it passing in front of the star and maybe even multiple times. But also the relative size of the planet and the star because they're closer, a little bit higher. So so you'll get a little bit more light being blocked and so on. So it's a it's a way of catching up. It's better at catching those planets that are close to the star. That's why that that method has caught so many planets that would be like within, for example, the orbit of Mercury in our own solar system, right? The the technique Roman will use when it stares in a time domain survey at the Galactic Bulge is called microlensing, which is meant and I'm going to play this and maybe pause it, which is but it's displayed in this visualization on the right. So before I hit play, I want to note that the space telescope, the Roman Nancy Grace Roman space telescope is here on the left of this visualization. And in the middle, you'll see this planet and actually that's not visible to us, right? We don't know it's there, right? That's what we're trying to detect. It's the planet's dim. You can't detect planets. You can't just detect planets like that very easily, right? They're very dim. So we need another way to find out that it's there. And microlensing is that technique where the telescope is actually staring at all these background stars like it's staring at the star back here. And as this planet passes between us and that background star, the light from that star will be bent just ever so slightly by the gravity of that intervening mystery planet. And what that looks like to us, it's almost like a funhouse mirror effect, what that looks like to us is we're actually seeing that star brighten and maybe even duplicate its appearance on the sky. So I'll hit play and you can kind of see as you'll see this, that's actually one star that appears to brighten and be two stars as the planet passes in between us. And so if we look at a whole field of stars and we monitor how their brightness changes, we will we will capture these microlensing events. And what's great about the microlensing events is it's going to allow us to build in the family picture of exo of planets around other stars. The transit technique found these planets that are closer to their star predominantly. This microlensing technique works better for planets that are further from the star at roughly earth, sun distance and beyond. So the colder planets. So we'll be able to build in the picture of how common are perhaps earth sized planets, how common are Jupiter type planets and so on by these techniques. We're sort of building in the family portrait. I will say there's a lot of other science that will be done with this survey. By staring at stars, you'll learn a lot about the stars themselves. There's also the transit technique which will still work in this survey. So you'll find planets that way as well. So this survey opens up a lot of scientific potential. And then the last about 25% of Romans time will be open for the astronomy community to propose additional surveys. And those additional surveys can cover all areas of astrophysics. And so what I put on the screen here are just some of the areas of astrophysics that Roman will address. From evolution of the universe, galaxies mapping dark matter, how galaxies assemble, Milky Way structure, precision astrometry, which is actually measuring the positions of stars and how they move spatially on the sky, globular clusters, gravitational wave counterparts. So this is something called multi messenger astronomy. But after when we receive these mysterious gravitational waves from the universe, we can follow up and find them with Roman or maybe Roman even finds them first in one of their images. And we go back and look at it. Astro seismology, so how stars essentially starquakes or how stars themselves, the motions of stars themselves and how they move planetary planetary system diversity. So looking at our planetary system as well as other planetary systems and looking at how diverse they are. Again, direct imaging of exoplanets, things in our solar system like mapping the Kuiper belt, the outer solar system, all those small icy bodies out there. You know, Roman will be staring out and doing surveys. And of course, no matter where it stares, it has to by definition stare through our solar system. So it will be capturing lots of these things just traveling around the Kuiper belt and or cloud and so on. And I'm just going to go through a few examples here. Of and I want to be cognizant of time. So if I'm running, if I'm running a little long, just go ahead and let me know. But I did want to touch on a few specific brand and we're getting a lot of questions. And so we want to save, you know, at least 10 minutes in maybe a little bit more for questions. Okay, so do you think 10 minutes more? Is that? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Great. So I'll rush. I'll rush, but I'll go through these these little little quickly. But I wanted to walk through some more science cases. So planets by the 1000. So again, I talked a bit about this already, but there are so many exoplanets waiting to be discovered. And again, many exoplanets found so far are gas giants. Roman will discover how common smaller rocky planets are how common are unusual. Our own solar system is compared with the rest of the galaxy. Roman will use the techniques of microlensing like I talked about. So that that's I already talked about. We also have, of course, direct imaging. So here is actually a direct imaging from Earth from the Keck telescope on Earth of a four exoplanet system. So you'll actually when I hit play, you can see a coronagraph has masked out the central star. So it looks dark. And they put a little star symbol in there. So you know where it is. But that's not actually a picture. That's just a nice little symbol. But when you hit, when you hit play, you can actually see these four blobs three close and one further out going around star, right? And so Roman will have a next generation coronagraph and we'll be able to do this to much greater detail. Of course, I mentioned our cosmic neighborhood. Here is our solar system with the sun in the center. And Roman will be pointing away from, you know, Roman cannot just like James Webb and Hubble, it cannot point towards the sun that would not be good for the telescope. So it will be pointing away, but no matter which direction it points by definition, it points out of the solar system. So we'll be capturing a lot of a lot of objects that are just going around the outer solar system and tracking and being able to pin point and locate them. Stars by the billions. Here's an example of what you can do with Roman. Again, you see these 18 squares. Those are the detectors that make up the camera. And the Roman field and one Roman pointing. So here's one Roman pointing in the Korean Nebula. And what I and what I point out here in that blue rectangle is one of the largest mosaics that Hubble has ever taken. And that is a Hubble image, that large blue rectangle. It took Hubble, many pointings to create that. And you can see in one Roman pointing, you get much more than that. And so in one snapshot, if you will, in one image with Roman, you get the entire lifecycle of stars. You can feel you'll see in the Korean Nebula stellar birth places where stars are being born, you'll find star clusters regions where stars are born together and you'll find stellar death like Ada Karen, a where stars are dying. You can find that all in just one image, let alone an entire survey with Roman. This is a very and I apologize if this is very bright on your screen, but it's a very I find it a very amazing image. This is actually a simulated image of what the core of our galaxy would look like with that one core community survey I look like I mentioned. This is actually a simulated image of what Roman would see. So you even see the spikes on the bright stars, the 12 diffraction spikes, that's what the spikes, the fraction spikes from Roman will look like. Of course, we don't know exactly what the image will look like, but it's a simulated image to give us an idea of what to expect. Look how many stars are in this image. Right. Look at how many stars are in this image. It's it's there with with this survey that we're talking about over 200 million stars could be observed by Roman in this time variable survey. And what's even more amazing is when you look at this image to note that this is this image you see right here is actually one 140th one Roman field of view. It's a tiny piece of a Roman field of view. Okay. So this is the kind of image imagery we're going to get from Roman. When we do things like looking at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy. All right. And then we can also look at stars and nearby galaxies. Here's the Andromeda Galaxy. And these are also simulated images of cutouts you see on the on the three cutouts on the right, where we sort of zoomed into regions. But you'll notice that we can actually start to really map giant galaxies like Andromeda which is our nearest big galaxy to us. And it would only take, you know, a handful of pointings from from Roman to to actually map out. And you can see individual stars in the Andromeda Galaxy. When you when you do this, just to note Hubble did a map of a region of the Andromeda Galaxy. And, you know, hundreds of pointings to do that and to get to what you can do with with one Roman pointing here. All right. And moving on to galaxies, galaxies by the millions. Here's an example of what you could do. Here's another zoom in. Here's an image of what's called what's been named Rubin's Galaxy after Vera Rubin. It's a very large galaxy. It's fairly isolated. And this Hubble image you see in the white square in the center. And again, you see one Roman field of view with its 18 individual detectors acting as one camera. And what's great about this is, you're right, with one Hubble pointing, we can really get at, you know, what's going on in the center of this galaxy. But really, galaxies, if you include all of a galaxy are made up of more than that. And with Roman, you can actually reach out into the outskirts of these galaxies and understand what's going on and what's called the halo of these galaxies. What are the stars gas and dust that exist well beyond that that that small area that you see in the Hubble image and start to understand how galaxies behave on larger scales. And then here's an image that gets at galaxy morphology, just noting that with what if you look at sort of a cluster of galaxies with with Roman, you'll see all sorts of galaxies of different types of shapes. And we can really start to piece together how galaxies change with time. There are morphologies, how they develop their diversity and so on. And then here's the famous in blue, that little tiny square in blue is the famous Hubble ultra deep field. That funny shape in white is all of Hubble's observations of that region. And then one pointing from Roman, right, you can you can see all of that. And so there is an interest of possibly doing, you know, sort of a deep field with Roman. That has been one idea that has been brought forth. And so you could see how much more the universe you could see if you did a if you did a Roman deep field relative to a Hubble deep field. And then I will play this quickly, but just note that just note that I didn't mention anything about spectroscopy, but Roman will also be able to do a spectrum of image of everything in its field of view. So here's a visualization of sort of the Hubble ultra deep field like flying through and you can get spectra of each individual galaxy. But what's amazing with Roman is it uses a kind of spectrograph that's called like a prism and a grism. It has to it has a prism and a grism, but they both basically allow you to get a spectrum of every single thing in that field of view. Right. So look at all of the spectra you'll get. So why are spectra great? Why do you want to look at the rainbow of colors of these galaxies? Well, by examining a galaxy spectrum, you can learn about its distance, the ages of its stars, star formation history, how many heavy chemical elements it contains and more. So spectra really give you a great deal of information. A few slides on fundamental physics. These this is probably the most complicated graphic that I have, but I will take a minute to explain it. It is one of one of Romans big science mysteries, why it was sort of originally designed. And one of the things one of the science mysteries it's going to explore is dark energy and what is causing the universe, the universe's expansion to accelerate with time. And one of the ways that we can get to that is by mapping the positions of galaxies with on the sky and with distance to sort of get the large scale structure of galaxies and by mapping the large scale structures of galaxies and comparing it to things like the cosmic microwave background, which is the earliest view of our of our universe before there were galaxies. We can start to understand how dark energy works in the nature of dark energy. And so that's basically what this is trying to show. This is a simulation where all of those pink little dots, each little dot, which are too small to see individually on here are an individual galaxy. And the idea is, is that Roman is going to be able to essentially do this work. It's going to map out the positions of individual galaxies in such a way that we can get that structure of the universe. And you're sort of the way this this this graphic is you're sort of looking back in time as you look away from Roman here. Of course, the mystery of dark energy will also be done by observing supernovae. So that's why supernovae are of such interest. Supernovae will let us allow us to track the expansion rate of the universe at different epics in the universe's history. But I'll go. I know we're running out of time, so I'll go through this quickly. The nature of dark matter is another big thing where when we observe large portions of the sky, we're going to see all these sort of what we call gravitational lensing events. Again, background background objects sort of they're light doing funny tricks because the light gets bent by gravity. And a lot of a lot of most of the cause of that gravity on large scales is from dark matter. And so by looking at how light bends through the universe, we'll be able to actually map out dark matter and better figure out, you know, where is it and what's going on there? And I just want to say new physics expect the unexpected. There are lots of things that we won't know, particularly with this time domain area of astrophysics, opening up the universe to seeing things in that dynamic universe. There's a lot to learn there. And I'm going to skip this and I'm going to go to just a few one or two slides here at the end. If it hasn't struck you yet, hopefully it it reaches you on this slide. This is a really big data mission. We are one of the challenges of the of the Roman mission, which is a good challenge to have is we will have so much data to give you some comparison. The first 30 years of Hubble from 1990 to 2020 got us 172 terabytes of data from the five year primary mission alone from Roman will get us 20,000 terabytes of data. Right. So we're talking about having to employ new ways of understanding how to comb through that data, find what's interesting in the data astronomers need to find new techniques and so on. And I do want to end with sort of partners in exploration. Again, Roman is a survey telescope that has certain abilities that that that are going to let us have a new view and expanded view of the universe. But it's really going to open the window of understanding by how it will work with other space telescopes, how it will complement other space telescopes. So you can see here from the ground up to above the atmosphere to space telescopes. That's sort of what's going on on the Y axis, if you will these and on the X axis, you'll see different wavelengths of light, different colors of light. So these different telescopes are positioned here based off of how far off the ground they are and which types of light they collect. And so you can see that we need a whole fleet of space telescopes to do what we're doing. I will also mention one other big telescope that's coming online in the next couple years, the Vera Rubin Observatory. So you see Rubin on the ground there. It's a ground based telescope. It's also a big survey based telescope. So there's a lot of interest in what Rubin and Roman can do together. And I think I will just end it here and I'm happy to to take questions. And there are a lot of them. There's going to be a little bit of work here to try to combine some of these and then just sorting through so that we can find the new ones. And so, you know, a little bit of patience here, everyone. And but let's start out with a couple of things. A number of people were very interested in the sensors and how it appears that there's gaps between them. And yeah, can you address that a little bit? Right. So the gaps between them are essentially what what the technology is allowed to essentially stitch them together. Right. So that's sort of a unnecessary evil, if you will, for for doing doing it in that way. The detectors are sort of next generation infrared detectors. And they're they're sort of in the same family line as those used on like James Webb, but they're sort of the next generation of detectors for the telescope. Those those gaps are sort of what we need to stitch them together. Unfortunately, we don't have, you know, the technology to just make one giant sensor that would work properly. The other thing is they actually they're actually creating. It's really hard to make these detectors, right? When if you make these detectors, I mean, just any detector, you're going to have defects on detectors, you're going to have things that might make it less science worthy than others. So they're actually creating tens of these, right? And they're creating the 18 that are the flight worthy flight worthy detectors. And the ones that have the most, you know, the fewest issues with them, right, that you might need to worry about and so on. And so they've basically already done that. They've they've selected the 18 detectors and so they will stitch them together in that formation. The gaps will show up in the images, right? We won't get data. We won't get data in those gaps. However, depending on the survey, a lot of those gaps will be filled in because when you slew or move the telescope, you get slightly offset and you can start to fill in those gaps. And in fact, that's what's done on a lot of images with with Hubble and with James Webb and other telescopes is if you want to build up a mosaic, if you will, of many pointings, you have to fill in these gaps from these detectors. I notice on one of the graphics that you had that it showed that basically the field was rotating. And it seemed like, you know, eventually you would have that complete picture. Yeah, absolutely. So you can you can rotate the telescope, you can slew the telescope, move it around, get the whole picture. Depending on the science case, the gaps are more or less needed to be filled in. So what I mean by that are a lot of the science cases for Roman are just getting large numbers of things, population studies, if you will, statistics. So if you want to get a large number of galaxies, right, it may not be so important for you to fill in the gaps, right? You're not for the science case, you're not interested necessarily in making the biggest picture, if you will, you're just trying to get as many galaxies as you can. And so if you overlap the camera too much, then you're not getting new areas of the sky covered, right? And so the gaps may not be that detrimental to you, whereas other science cases, you might want a full picture, you might want to fill in the gaps. So the science cases will depend on exactly how those gaps are how the gaps are treated, how the slew is done with the telescope and so on. OK. And the same with the sensors for a minute, we had a question here is the telescope moved to each sensor or all 18 sensors basically exposed at the same time. They're all exposed at the same time. So they're all essentially it's all the light comes on all of the detectors at the same time and then they're all read out at the same time. So they're treated as one essentially one large camera. So kind of staying with this idea about about the mirror and so is there are the mirrors within the Roman space telescope, are they going to be tweaked at all? Is there any ability to do any adaptive or active optics with them? No, I don't believe the mirrors themselves will have any adaptive optics. It's not like James Webb where there are the individual mirror segments. There's one solid mirror for for Roman as well as one secondary mirror for Roman. But all of those things, of course, will be tested before launch to make sure that they're working as one optical system as it should. OK, so one of the things that I noticed that a lot of the questions that came in were you know, I used to notice this and when I was teaching and I'd give kudos to people for my students to ask questions that anticipated the next thing. And so a lot of the thing you know, a lot of people ask questions and anticipation. Here's a good one that I actually thought of. And so the Roman mirror is the same size as the Hubble mirror, yet you said that one image of the Roman is a much greater area. And so could you explain how it is that and I know that you referred to this and so people that that picked up on on the thought about it being a fast telescope, it's related to that. So could you explain that a little bit more? Yeah, what? Oh, yeah, that's a great question. And what I'll say is it's interesting if and there are diagrams online. I don't have one to bring up right now. But if you actually looked at, for example, what Hubble, what the Hubble mirror sees of the sky, it's actually much larger, much, much, much larger than what any instrument sees, right? Because what it the instruments all have essentially a piece of the sky, they have their own individual view of the sky. The mirror collects light from a larger area of the sky, right? And so what we're talking about is we're talking about the field of view of what an instrument sees, not what the mirror sees. Now that the instruments on Hubble see smaller field of view and the reason and that's because there's so many instruments on Hubble. They have to essentially pick off different parts of what's coming from the mirror. If one, if you essentially looked at, if you took an instrument that looked at and maximized the entire field of view of the whole mirror, you wouldn't be able to fit any other instruments in there, right? And so interestingly, what Hubble can do is Hubble can use one instrument to look at one part of the sky and at the same time with a separate instrument observe a different part of the sky. Because it's all it's all coming from that same mirror, but it's all the instruments themselves have different fields of view of the sky. What Roman is trying to achieve is Roman is trying to maximize a much greater area with a single field of view of what's coming off of that mirror, if you will. So it's looking at, it has a much larger footprint for that instrument than any of Hubble's or Webb's instruments do. In addition, of course, it is a very fast telescope, so it can slew and look across the sky as well, which helps. Right. A number of people are also very interested in the location at L2 and noted that, yeah, it's in the same position as the Webb telescope. And so what's kind of the orbital dynamics? They're not going to interfere with each other. And then also one person asked about interference with other objects in near-Earth orbit or even geosynchronous orbit. Yeah. So there are actually a lot of telescopes placed at the general L2 point. It's actually quite a large region of space. And so there's a lot of room out there to put them in. And it's not like a single static space. They actually do like an orbit around this L2 point. And so there's not a concern around Roman impacting with another known telescope, for example. Now the near-Earth asteroid or other material rocks and things that might be flying through our solar system, that is, of course, always a concern. And what's interesting is we're learning more and more about that, the more telescopes we put out there. Like we've learned a great deal from James Webb already in terms of minor impacts. Nothing that has harmed the telescope, but minor impacts that it gets from solar system, small, tiny meteorite type things, right? So it's definitely a concern. I would say it's not a concern, though, from the calculations, right? It's not a concern that they think will harm or lessen with any. There's not a concern that will lessen the primary lifespan of Roman, I would say that. So the concern of it being hit by something so dramatic that it would knock the telescope out of commission, it's not something that in a five year primary lifespan is a big concern. So one question also here and because of where it is and because the web scope is unable to be have any repair missions. And so that's similar for the Roman telescope, correct? Correct. It is not planned to be necessarily serviced, but we never say never with any of our telescopes. I mean, as we as we've seen with news about, you know, what could happen with Hubble in the future, we never say never, but certainly there is a big challenge with servicing a telescope at L2. And so it's not in the plans for its five year primary mission to be serviced. I can say that. We never know when Elon Musk will get to, you know, do something that wouldn't surprise me in the least. We are past seven o'clock. I'm just going to go with and I apologize to everyone whose questions we're not getting to. We want to be respectful of Brandon's time here. But I do want to ask this question. It has to do with the with the data. And some people are very interested in the data availability. And then we also had a question about any citizen science opportunities planned for. Yeah. Yeah, that's those are great points. One thing I didn't mention is all of Roman's data, 100 percent of it is nonproprietary, which is different than Hubble and Web, for example, where a lot of Hubble and Web's data, right, is proprietary, which means the scientists that propose to take the observations gets the data themselves for 12 months or whatever would have you. Roman is is going on a very different model. It's all going to be 100 percent open access to everybody, all scientists, all public. That the data that accessing the data or how to use the data to do your science is a very real challenge. And that's something that at where I work at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is a science operations center for Roman, as well as our colleagues at Caltech IPAC, which is the science support center for Roman, our two science centers are working together to understand how to make that, you know, data available in a way that's easy to access. One thing that's going to happen is the data will be accessible via the cloud. So the data will be available on the cloud. So the expectation is that not just the data, but also the tools for scientists to explore the data is going to be on the cloud. The expectation is that we do not want people to download terabytes of data to their local hard drive and try to do science that way is just unfeasible. And so we're looking at new models for how the science can be done online on the cloud. And so that's a very that's a very different model. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. This is just absolutely wonderful. And I'm putting in the in the chat a link to a survey. We would appreciate all the people that are still on here to which is still almost everyone to go and fill that out. It helps us to improve the webinar series and helps us give a little bit of feedback. Brandon, I think that what I'll do is because there's a lot of other questions here, I will copy them into a document and send them to you. And if you wouldn't mind, you know, kind of scanning through them and then we can post some additional answers on the outreach resource page on the Night Sky Network webinar or Night Sky Network web page. Yes, you wouldn't mind doing that. I'd be happy to. Yeah. So that's all for tonight, everyone. Thank you, Brandon, for joining us this evening. And thank you, everyone, for tuning in. You can find this webinar along with many others on the Night Sky Network website. Also on the Night Sky Network YouTube channel, each webinar's page features additional resources and activities and the links. If you didn't get the links during this, then I believe we have all the links on that page as well. And we will get some answers to some of the questions up there, too. And also join us for our next webinar on Thursday, April 27th when Dr. Shadia Habal will share with us some of the science associated with solar eclipses, kind of a timely thing. And we're almost one year out from the total solar eclipse on April 8th of next year. So keep looking up and we will see you next month. Good night, everyone. Thank you. All right. Well, this is fantastic. So this is a gosh, I hate leaving all these questions there at some point. You can't go on all night. Yeah. No, I totally understand. I'm happy to.