I watched the launch this morning of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
And almost immediately I became fascinated by what this thing is going to do.
Roman is going to take enormous, extraordinarily detailed images of the universe. But what really caught my attention wasn’t just the pictures.
It was the light.
When Roman switches into spectroscopy mode, it can spread the light from objects across its huge field of view into tiny rainbow-like spectra. Those little rainbows contain information.
They can tell scientists how fast galaxies are moving, what they’re made of, and how far away they are.
Instead of studying one galaxy at a time, Roman will be able to gather this information from vast numbers of galaxies, helping humanity construct an enormous three-dimensional map of the universe.
Think about that.
We are going to map the universe.
And one of the instruments that helps make this possible is called a slitless spectrometer.
That phrase immediately caught my attention.
Unfortunately, my first thought had absolutely nothing to do with astronomy.
It reminded me of my love life. At eighty, without a partner, there is definitely no slit in sight, the field is wide open, and any attempt at precise focus usually produces a completely blurry spectrum.
Zero entry requirements: admission is nonexistent.
Which probably says more about me than it does about NASA.
But after I stopped laughing, another thought occurred to me.
All of this incredible information about our universe is public. NASA, STScI, MAST and other scientific organizations have accumulated mountains of astronomical data that belong, in a very real sense, to all of us.
The problem is that actually getting at it can require knowing about astronomical coordinate systems, scientific archives, observation catalogs, FITS files, APIs, filters, instruments and a whole vocabulary most ordinary people have never needed to learn.
So naturally, I decided to build an app.
With the help of my AI coding partners, ChatGPT and Codex, I’m building a new public BluSup app called:
ROMAN — Explore the Universe
The idea is simple.
You shouldn’t need to be an astronomer to explore the universe.
ROMAN will hide as much of the machinery as possible. Pick something in the sky. Point somewhere interesting. Ask what humanity has already observed there.
And ROMAN goes digging through the public astronomical archives for you.
We can build it right now using existing observations from telescopes and surveys already stored in public archives. Then, as data from the Roman Space Telescope becomes available, ROMAN can grow right along with the mission.
At least that’s the plan.
At this very moment there is a new /roman directory sitting on BluSup, code is being written, things are breaking, things are being fixed, and somewhere inside all of it is still a slitless spectrometer.
I’ll be working on ROMAN throughout the day.
Stay tuned.
We’re going exploring. 🌌🔭🚀
ROMAN is alive.
It’s still being built, but you can already click somewhere in the universe and ask what humanity has observed there.
Explore ROMAN — Explore the Universe
Don’t worry if the science gets complicated. That’s exactly what we’re working to hide.
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