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By NASA
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help scientists better understand our Milky Way galaxy’s less sparkly components — gas and dust strewn between stars, known as the interstellar medium.
One of Roman’s major observing programs, called the Galactic Plane Survey, will peer through our galaxy to its most distant edge, mapping roughly 20 billion stars—about four times more than have currently been mapped. Scientists will use data from these stars to study and map the dust their light travels through, contributing to the most complete picture yet of the Milky Way’s structure, star formation, and the origins of our solar system.
Our Milky Way galaxy is home to more than 100 billion stars that are often separated by trillions of miles. The spaces in between, called the interstellar medium, aren’t empty — they’re sprinkled with gas and dust that are both the seeds of new stars and the leftover crumbs from stars long dead. Studying the interstellar medium with observatories like NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will reveal new insight into the galactic dust recycling system.
Credit: NASA/Laine Havens; Music credit: Building Heroes by Enrico Cacace [BMI], Universal Production Music “With Roman, we’ll be able to turn existing artist’s conceptions of the Milky Way into more data-driven models using new constraints on the 3D distribution of interstellar dust,” said Catherine Zucker, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Solving Milky Way mystery
Scientists know how our galaxy likely looks by combining observations of the Milky Way and other spiral galaxies. But dust clouds make it hard to work out the details on the opposite side of our galaxy. Imagine trying to map a neighborhood while looking through the windows of a house surrounded by a dense fog.
Roman will see through the “fog” of dust using a specialized camera and filters that observe infrared light — light with longer wavelengths than our eyes can detect. Infrared light is more likely to pass through dust clouds without scattering.
This artist’s concept visualizes different types of light moving through a cloud of particles. Since infrared light has a longer wavelength, it can pass more easily through the dust. That means astronomers observing in infrared light can peer deeper into dusty regions.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Light with shorter wavelengths, including blue light produced by stars, more easily scatters. That means stars shining through dust appear dimmer and redder than they actually are.
By comparing the observations with information on the source star’s characteristics, astronomers can disentangle the star’s distance from how much its colors have been reddened. Studying those effects reveals clues about the dust’s properties.
“I can ask, ‘how much redder and dimmer is the starlight that Roman detects at different wavelengths?’ Then, I can take that information and relate it back to the properties of the dust grains themselves, and in particular their size,” said Brandon Hensley, a scientist who studies interstellar dust at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Scientists will also learn about the dust’s composition and probe clouds to investigate the physical processes behind changing dust properties.
Clues in dust-influenced starlight hint at the amount of dust between us and a star. Piecing together results from many stars allows astronomers to construct detailed 3D dust maps. That would enable scientists like Zucker to create a model of the Milky Way, which will show us how it looks from the outside. Then scientists can better compare the Milky Way with other galaxies that we only observe from the outside, slotting it into a cosmological perspective of galaxy evolution.
“Roman will add a whole new dimension to our understanding of the galaxy because we’ll see billions and billions more stars,” Zucker said. “Once we observe the stars, we’ll have the dust data as well because its effects are encoded in every star Roman detects.”
Galactic life cycles
The interstellar medium does more than mill about the Milky Way — it fuels star and planet formation. Dense blobs of interstellar medium form molecular clouds, which can gravitationally collapse and kick off the first stages of star development. Young stars eject hot winds that can cause surrounding dust to clump into planetary building blocks.
“Dust carries a lot of information about our origins and how everything came to be,” said Josh Peek, an associate astronomer and head of the data science mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. “Right now, we’re basically standing on a really large dust grain — Earth was built out of lots and lots of really tiny grains that grew together into a giant ball.”
Roman will identify young clusters of stars in new, distant star-forming regions as well as contribute data on “star factories” previously identified by missions like NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope.
“If you want to understand star formation in different environments, you have to understand the interstellar landscape that seeds it,” Zucker said. “Roman will allow us to link the 3D structure of the interstellar medium with the 3D distribution of young stars across the galaxy’s disk.”
Roman’s new 3D dust maps will refine our understanding of the Milky Way’s spiral structure, the pinwheel-like pattern where stars, gas, and dust bunch up like galactic traffic jams. By combining velocity data with dust maps, scientists will compare observations with predictions from models to help identify the cause of spiral structure—currently unclear.
The role that this spiral pattern plays in star formation remains similarly uncertain. Some theories suggest that galactic congestion triggers star formation, while others contend that these traffic jams gather material but do not stimulate star birth.
Roman will help to solve mysteries like these by providing more data on dusty regions across the entire Milky Way. That will enable scientists to compare many galactic environments and study star birth in specific structures, like the galaxy’s winding spiral arms or its central stellar bar.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will conduct a Galactic Plane Survey to explore our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The survey will map around 20 billion stars, each encoding information about intervening dust and gas called the interstellar medium. Studying the interstellar medium could offer clues about our galaxy’s spiral arms, galactic recycling, and much more.
Credit: NASA, STScI, Caltech/IPAC The astronomy community is currently in the final stages of planning for Roman’s Galactic Plane Survey.
“With Roman’s massive survey of the galactic plane, we’ll be able to have this deep technical understanding of our galaxy,” Peek said.
After processing, Roman’s data will be available to the public online via the Roman Research Nexus and the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, which will each provide open access to the data for years to come.
“People who aren’t born yet are going to be able to do really cool analyses of this data,” Peek said. “We have a really beautiful piece of our heritage to hand down to future generations and to celebrate.”
Roman is slated to launch no later than May 2027, with the team working toward a potential early launch as soon as fall 2026.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
Download additional images and video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
For more information about the Roman Space Telescope, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/roman
By Laine Havens
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Sep 16, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A ship plows through rough seas in the Bering Sea in the aftermath of Typhoon Tip, one of the largest hurricanes on record. The Sentinel-6B satellite will provide data crucial to forecasting sea states, information that can help ships avoid danger. CC BY 2.0 NOAA/Commander Richard Behn Sea surface height data from the Sentinel-6B satellite, led by NASA and ESA, will help with the development of marine weather forecasts, alerting ships to possible dangers.
Because most global trade travels by ship, accurate, timely ocean forecasts are essential. These forecasts provide crucial information about storms, high winds, and rough water, and they depend on measurements provided by instruments in the ocean and by satellites including Sentinel-6B, a joint mission led by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) that will provide essential sea level and other ocean data after it launches this November.
The satellite will eventually take over from its twin, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, which launched in 2020. Both satellites have an altimeter instrument that measures sea levels, wind speeds, and wave heights, among other characteristics, which meteorologists feed into models that produce marine weather forecasts. Those forecasts provide information on the state of the ocean as well as the changing locations of large currents like the Gulf Stream. Dangerous conditions can result when waves interact with such currents, putting ships at risk.
“Building on NASA’s long legacy of satellite altimetry data and its real-world impact on shipping operations, Sentinel-6B will soon take on the vital task of improving ocean and weather forecasts to help keep ships, their crews, and cargo safe”, said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, lead program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich and Sentinel-6B are part of the Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission, the latest in a series of ocean-observing radar altimetry missions that have monitored Earth’s changing seas since the early 1990s. Sentinel-6/Jason-CS is a collaboration between NASA, ESA, the European Union, EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), and NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). The European Commission provided funding support, and the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales) contributed technical support.
Keeping current
“The ocean is getting busier, but it’s also getting more dangerous,” said Avichal Mehra, deputy director of the Ocean Prediction Center at the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland. He and his colleagues produce marine weather forecasts using data from ocean-based instruments as well as complementary measurements from five satellites, including Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. Among those measurements: sea level, wave height, and wind speed. The forecasters derive the location of large currents from changes in sea level.
One of the planet’s major currents, the Gulf Stream is located off the southeastern coast of the United States, but its exact position varies. “Ships will actually change course depending on where the Gulf Stream is and the direction of the waves,” said Mehra. “There have been instances where, in calm conditions, waves interacting with the Gulf Stream have caused damage or the loss of cargo containers on ships.”
Large, warm currents like the Gulf Stream can have relatively sharp boundaries since they are generally higher than their surroundings. Water expands as it warms, so warm seawater is taller than cooler water. If waves interact with these currents in a certain way, seas can become extremely rough, presenting a hazard to even the largest ships.
“Satellite altimeters are the only reliable measurement we have of where these big currents can be,” said Deirdre Byrne, sea surface height team lead at NOAA in College Park.
There are hundreds of floating sensors scattered about the ocean that could pick up parts of where such currents are located, but these instruments are widely dispersed and limited in the area they measure at any one time. Satellites like Sentinel-6B offer greater spatial coverage, measuring areas that aren’t regularly monitored and providing essential information for the forecasts that ships need.
Consistency is key
Sentinel-6B won’t just help marine weather forecasts through its near-real-time data, though. It will also extend a long-term dataset featuring more than 30 years of sea level measurements, just as Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich does today.
“Since 1992, we have launched a series of satellites that have provided consistent sea level observations from the same orbit in space. This continuity allows each new mission to be calibrated against its predecessors, providing measurements with centimeter-level accuracy that don’t drift over time,” said Severine Fournier, Sentinel-6B deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
This long-running, repeated measurement has turned this dataset into the gold standard sea level measurement from space — a reference against which data from other sea level satellites is checked. It also serves as a baseline, giving forecasters a way to tell what ocean conditions have looked like over time and how they are changing now. “This kind of data can’t be easily replaced,” said Mehra.
More about Sentinel-6B
Sentinel-6/Jason-CS was jointly developed by ESA, EUMETSAT, NASA, and NOAA, with funding support from the European Commission and technical support from CNES.
A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL contributed three science instruments for each Sentinel-6 satellite: the Advanced Microwave Radiometer, the Global Navigation Satellite System – Radio Occultation, and the Laser Retroreflector Array. NASA is also contributing launch services, ground systems supporting operation of the NASA science instruments, the science data processors for two of these instruments, and support for the U.S. members of the international Ocean Surface Topography and Sentinel-6 science teams.
For more about Sentinel-6/Jason-CS, visit:
https://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/jason-cs-sentinel-6
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Earth (ESD) Earth Explore Explore Earth Home Agriculture Air Quality Climate Change Freshwater Life on Earth Severe Storms Snow and Ice The Global Ocean Science at Work Earth Science at Work Technology and Innovation Powering Business Multimedia Image Collections Videos Data For Researchers About Us 5 Min Read NASA Data, Trainings Help Uruguay Navigate Drought
Uruguay’s Paso Severino Reservoir, the primary water source for Montevideo, on June 13, 2023, captured by Landsat 9. Credits:
NASA Earth Observatory/ Wanmei Liang Lee esta historia en español aquí.
NASA satellite data and trainings helped Uruguay create a drought-response tool that its National Water Authority now uses to monitor reservoirs and guide emergency decisions. A similar approach could be applied in the United States and other countries around the world.
From 2018 to 2023, Uruguay experienced its worst drought in nearly a century. The capital city of Montevideo, home to nearly 2 million people, was especially hard hit. By mid-2023, Paso Severino, the largest reservoir and primary water source for Montevideo, had dropped to just 1.7% of its capacity. As water levels declined, government leaders declared an emergency. They began identifying backup supplies and asked: Was there water left in other upstream reservoirs — mainly used for livestock and irrigation — that could help?
That’s when environmental engineer Tiago Pohren and his colleagues at the National Water Authority (DINAGUA – Ministry of Environment) turned to NASA data and trainings to build an online tool that could help answer that question and improve monitoring of the nation’s reservoirs.
“Satellite data can inform everything from irrigation scheduling in the Great Plains to water quality management in the Chesapeake Bay,” said Erin Urquhart, manager of the water resources program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “NASA provides the reliable data needed to respond to water crises anywhere in the world.”
Learning to Detect Water from Space
The DINAGUA team learned about NASA resources during a 2022 workshop in Buenos Aires, organized by the Interagency Science and Applications Team (ISAT). Led by NASA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Department of State, the workshop focused on developing tools to help manage water in the La Plata River Basin, which spans multiple South American countries including Uruguay.
At the workshop, researchers from NASA introduced participants to methods for measuring water resources from space. NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing (ARSET) program also provided a primer on remote sensing principles.
DINAGUA team supervisor Jose Rodolfo Valles León asks a question during a 2022 workshop in Buenos Aires. Other members of the Uruguay delegation — Florencia Hastings, Vanessa Erasun Rodríguez de Líma, Vanessa Ferreira, and Teresa Sastre (current Director of DINAGUA) — sit in the row behind. Organization of American States “NASA doesn’t just deliver data,” said John Bolten, NASA’s lead scientist for ISAT and chief of the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We collaborate with our partners and local experts to translate the data into information that is useful, usable, and relevant. That kind of coordination is what makes NASA’s water programs so effective on the ground, at home and around the world.”
The DINAGUA team brought ideas and provided guidelines to Pohren for a tool that applies Landsat and Sentinel satellite imagery to detect changes in Uruguay’s reservoirs. Landsat, a joint NASA-U.S. Geological Survey mission, provides decades of satellite imagery to track changes in land and water. The Sentinel missions, a part of the European Commission managed Copernicus Earth Observation program and operated by ESA (the European Space Agency), provide complementary visible, infrared, and microwave imagery for surface water assessments.
From a young age, Pohren was familiar with water-related challenges, as floods repeatedly inundated his relatives’ homes in his hometown of Montenegro, Brazil. It was extra motivation for him as he scoured ARSET tutorials and taught himself to write computer code. The result was a monitoring tool capable of estimating the surface area of Uruguay’s reservoirs over time.
A screenshot of the reservoir monitoring tool shows the Paso Severino’s surface water coverage alongside time-series data tracking its variations. Tiago Pohren The tool draws on several techniques to differentiate the surface water extent of reservoirs. These techniques include three optical indicators derived from the Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 satellites:
Normalized Difference Water Index, which highlights water by comparing how much green and near-infrared light is reflected. Water absorbs infrared light, so it stands out clearly from land. Modified Normalized Difference Water Index, which swaps near-infrared with shortwave infrared to improve the contrast and reduce errors when differentiating between water and built-up or vegetated areas. Automated Water Extraction Index, which combines four types of reflected light — green, near-infrared, and two shortwave infrared bands — to help separate water from shadows and other dark features. From Emergency Tool to Everyday Asset
In 2023, the DINAGUA team used Pohren’s tool to examine reservoirs located upstream from Montevideo’s drinking water intake. But the data told a tough story.
“There was water available in other reservoirs, but it was a very small amount compared to the water demand of the Montevideo metropolitan region,” Pohren said. Simulations showed that even if all of the water were released, most of it would not reach the water intake for Montevideo or the Paso Severino reservoir.
Despite this news, the analysis prevented actions that might have wasted important resources for maintaining productive activities in the upper basin, Pohren said. Then, in August 2023, rain began to refill Uruguay’s reservoirs, allowing the country to declare an end to the water crisis.
From right to left: Tiago Pohren, Vanessa Erasun, and Florencia Hastings at the second ISAT workshop in March 2024. Organization of American States Though the immediate water crisis has passed, the tool Pohren created will be useful in the future in Uruguay and around the world. During an ISAT workshop in 2024, he shared his tool with international water resources managers with the hope it could aid their own drought response efforts. And DINAGUA officials still use it to identify and monitor dams, irrigation reservoirs, and other water bodies in Uruguay.
Pohren continues to use NASA training and data to advance reservoir management. He’s currently exploring an ARSET training on how the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission will further improve the system by allowing DINAGUA to directly measure the height of water in reservoirs. He is also following NASA’s new joint mission with ISRO (the Indian Space Research Organization) called NISAR, which launched on July 30. The NISAR satellite will provide radar data that detects changes in water extent, regardless of cloud cover or time of day. “If a drought happens again,” Pohren said, “with the tools that we have now, we will be much more prepared to understand what the conditions of the basin are and then make predictions.”
Environmental engineer Tiago Pohren conducts a field inspection on the Canelón Grande reservoir, the second-largest reservoir serving Montevideo, during the drought. Tiago Pohren By Melody Pederson, Rachel Jiang
The authors would like to thank Noelia Gonzalez, Perry Oddo, Denise Hill, and Delfina Iervolino for interview support as well as Jerry Weigel for connecting with Tiago about the tool’s development.
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Last Updated Sep 10, 2025 Related Terms
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Hubble Spies Galaxy with Lots to See
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the galaxy NGC 7456. ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker While it may appear as just another spiral galaxy among billions in the universe, this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals a galaxy with plenty to study. The galaxy, NGC 7456, is located over 51 million light-years away in the constellation Grus (the Crane).
This Hubble image reveals fine detail in the galaxy’s patchy spiral arms, followed by clumps of dark, obscuring dust. Blossoms of glowing pink are rich reservoirs of gas where new stars are forming, illuminating the clouds around them and causing the gas to emit this tell-tale red light. The Hubble observing program that collected this data focused on the galaxy’s stellar activity, tracking new stars, clouds of hydrogen, and star clusters to learn how the galaxy evolved through time.
Hubble, with its ability to capture visible, ultraviolet, and some infrared light, is not the only observatory focused on NGC 7456. ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite imaged X-rays from the galaxy on multiple occasions, discovering many so-called ultraluminous X-ray sources. These small, compact objects emit terrifically powerful X-rays, much more than researchers would expect, given their size. Astronomers are still trying to pin down what powers these extreme objects, and NGC 7456 contributes a few more examples.
The region around the galaxy’s supermassive black hole is also spectacularly bright and energetic, making NGC 7456 an active galaxy. Whether looking at its core or its outskirts, at visible light or X-rays, this galaxy has something interesting for astronomers to study!
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Hubble Homes in on Galaxy’s Star Formation
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the asymmetric spiral galaxy Messier 96. ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Belfiore, D. Calzetti This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a galaxy whose asymmetric appearance may be the result of a galactic tug of war. Located 35 million light-years away in the constellation Leo, the spiral galaxy Messier 96 is the brightest of the galaxies in its group. The gravitational pull of its galactic neighbors may be responsible for Messier 96’s uneven distribution of gas and dust, asymmetric spiral arms, and off-center galactic core.
This asymmetric appearance is on full display in the new Hubble image that incorporates data from observations made in ultraviolet, near infrared, and visible/optical light. Earlier Hubble images of Messier 96 were released in 2015 and 2018. Each successive image added new data, building up a beautiful and scientifically valuable view of the galaxy.
The 2015 image combined two wavelengths of optical light with one near infrared wavelength. The optical light revealed the galaxy’s uneven form of dust and gas spread asymmetrically throughout its weak spiral arms and its off-center core, while the infrared light revealed the heat of stars forming in clouds shaded pink in the image.
The 2018 image added two more optical wavelengths of light along with one wavelength of ultraviolet light that pinpointed areas where high-energy, young stars are forming.
This latest version offers us a new perspective on Messier 96’s star formation. It includes the addition of light that reveals regions of ionized hydrogen (H-alpha) and nitrogen (NII). This data helps astronomers determine the environment within the galaxy and the conditions in which stars are forming. The ionized hydrogen traces ongoing star formation, revealing regions where hot, young stars are ionizing the gas. The ionized nitrogen helps astronomers determine the rate of star formation and the properties of gas between stars, while the combination of the two ionized gasses helps researchers determine if the galaxy is a starburst galaxy or one with an active galactic nucleus.
The bubbles of pink gas in this image surround hot, young, massive stars, illuminating a ring of star formation in the galaxy’s outskirts. These young stars are still embedded within the clouds of gas from which they were born. Astronomers will use the new data in this image to study how stars are form within giant dusty gas clouds, how dust filters starlight, and how stars affect their environments.
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