Penn State Team Builds Software for Roman Telescope

Assistant Professor Charlotte Ward and four graduate students are developing tools to process observations from NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Updated on Nov. 2, 2026 in Space

Wide photograph of a white domed observatory on a dark mountaintop under a star-filled night sky with the Milky Way visible above a distant forested ridge. — Penn State Assistant Professor Charlotte Ward and four graduate students are building software to process images from NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. AI Illustration. Upload story photo >

Penn State Assistant Professor Charlotte Ward and four graduate students are building software that works with observations from NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The team's pipeline processes new images in several steps and stacks multiple observations to resolve the shapes and detail of galaxies.

Why it matters

Roman captures infrared images across a field of view roughly 100 times larger than Hubble's, and NASA expects it to image more than a billion galaxies. Scientists hope the resulting data will help clarify dark matter, dark energy and supermassive black holes.

NASA expects Roman to capture images of more than a billion galaxies, with a field of view roughly 100 times larger than Hubble's. The extraction does not indicate the telescope's current operational status or when first science data will be released.

The players

Charlotte Ward

Assistant professor at Penn State leading software development for Roman observation processing.

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which operates the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The details

Ward's team is developing software that processes data from Roman's infrared images alongside optical observations from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Graduate students Maddy Reich, Miranda Zak, Pei-Jun Huang and Kendall Sippy are contributing to the software and research efforts.

Article on the Penn State students' Roman telescope work published November 2, 2026.

Big Picture

Roman, NASA's wide-field infrared successor-class observatory, is designed to survey far larger patches of sky than Hubble, and Penn State's software work is part of the processing infrastructure that makes such surveys analyzable. The project aims to map more than a billion galaxies to probe dark matter and dark energy.

Roman's galaxy survey is expected to produce a large public-facing data archive that researchers across institutions will use for studies of cosmic structure. Its scientific payoff depends on software pipelines like the one Penn State's team is building.

The takeaway

Large telescope surveys produce value only when the software that cleans, stacks and analyzes their images is ready as the data arrives. Projects like Roman depend on that behind-the-scenes work as much as on the hardware itself.