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The Universe in a box: preparing for Euclid’s survey
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By NASA
Research Astrophysicist and Roman’s Deputy Wide Field Instrument Scientist – Goddard Space Flight Center
From a young age, Ami Choi — now a research astrophysicist at NASA — was drawn to the vast and mysterious. By the fifth grade, she had narrowed her sights to two career paths: marine biology or astrophysics.
“I’ve always been interested in exploring big unknown realms, and things that aren’t quite tangible,” Choi said. That curiosity has served her all throughout her career.
In addition to conducting research, Ami Choi shares science with the public at various outreach events, including tours at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. This photo captures one tour stop, outside the largest clean room at Goddard.Credit: NASA/Travis Wohlrab As a student at University Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois, Choi gravitated toward astrophysics and was fascinated by things like black holes. She studied physics as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, though she says math and physics didn’t necessarily come easily to her.
“I wasn’t very good at it initially, but I really liked the challenge so I stuck with it,” Choi said.
Early opportunities to do research played a pivotal role in guiding her career. As an undergraduate, Choi worked on everything from interacting galaxies to the stuff in between stars in our galaxy, called the interstellar medium. She learned how to code, interpret data, and do spectroscopy, which involves splitting light from cosmic objects into a rainbow of colors to learn about things like their composition.
After college, Choi read an article about physicist Janet Conrad’s neutrino work at Fermilab and was so inspired by Conrad’s enthusiasm and inclusivity that she cold-emailed her to see if there were any positions available in her group.
On October 14, 2023, Ami took a break from a thermal vacuum shift to snap a selfie with a partial eclipse. She was visiting BAE, Inc. in Boulder, Co., where the primary instrument for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was undergoing testing. Credit: Courtesy of Ami Choi “That one email led to a year at Fermilab working on neutrino physics,” Choi said.
She went on to earn a doctorate at the University of California, Davis, where she studied weak gravitational lensing — the subtle warping of light by gravity — and used it to explore dark matter, dark energy, and the large-scale structure of the universe.
Her postdoctoral work took Choi first to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where she contributed to the Kilo-Degree Survey, and later to The Ohio State University, where she became deeply involved in DES (the Dark Energy Survey) and helped lay the groundwork for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — NASA’s next flagship astrophysics mission.
“One of my proudest moments came in 2021, when the DES released its third-year cosmology results,” Choi said. “It was a massive team effort conducted during a global pandemic, and I had helped lead as a co-convener of the weak lensing team.”
Choi regularly presents information about NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to fellow scientists and the public. Here, she gives a Hyperwall talk at an AAS (American Astronomical Society) meeting.Credit: Courtesy of Ami Choi After a one-year stint at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where Choi worked on SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer)—an observatory that’s surveying stars and galaxies—she became a research astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She also serves as the deputy Wide Field Instrument scientist for Roman. Choi operates at the intersection of engineering, calibration, and cosmology, helping translate ground-based testing into flight-ready components that will help Roman reveal large swaths of the universe in high resolution.
“I’m very excited for Roman’s commissioning phase — the first 90 days when the spacecraft will begin transmitting data from orbit,” Choi said.
Choi, photographed here in Death Valley, finds joy in the natural world outside of work. She cycles, hikes, and tends a small vegetable garden with a friend from grad school. Credit: Insook Choi (used with permission) She’s especially drawn to so-called systematics, which are effects that can alter the signals scientists are trying to measure. “People sometimes think of systematics as nuisances, but they’re often telling us something deeply interesting about either the physics of something like a detector or the universe itself,” Choi said. “There’s always something more going on under the surface.”
While she’s eager to learn more about things like dark energy, Choi is also looking forward to seeing all the other ways our understanding of the universe grows. “It’s more than just an end goal,” she said. “It’s about everything we learn along the way. Every challenge we overcome, every detail we uncover, is an important discovery too.”
For those who hope to follow a similar path, Choi encourages staying curious, being persistent, and taking opportunities to get involved in research. And don’t let the tricky subjects scare you away! “You don’t have to be perfect at math or physics right away,” she said. “What matters most is a deep curiosity and the tenacity to keep pushing through.”
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Sep 09, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be a discovery machine, thanks to its wide field of view and resulting torrent of data. Scheduled to launch no later than May 2027, with the team working toward launch as early as fall 2026, its near-infrared Wide Field Instrument will capture an area 200 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s infrared camera, and with the same image sharpness and sensitivity. Roman will devote about 75% of its science observing time over its five-year primary mission to conducting three core community surveys that were defined collaboratively by the scientific community. One of those surveys will scour the skies for things that pop, flash, and otherwise change, like exploding stars and colliding neutron stars.
These two images, taken one year apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, show how the supernova designated SN 2018gv faded over time. The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will spot thousands of supernovae, including a specific type that can be used to measure the expansion history of the universe.Credit: NASA, ESA, Martin Kornmesser (ESA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble), Adam G. Riess (STScI, JHU), SH0ES Team Called the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, this program will peer outside of the plane of our Milky Way galaxy (i.e., high galactic latitudes) to study objects that change over time. The survey’s main goal is to detect tens of thousands of a particular type of exploding star known as type Ia supernovae. These supernovae can be used to study how the universe has expanded over time.
“Roman is designed to find tens of thousands of type Ia supernovae out to greater distances than ever before,” said Masao Sako of the University of Pennsylvania, who served as co-chair of the committee that defined the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey. “Using them, we can measure the expansion history of the universe, which depends on the amount of dark matter and dark energy. Ultimately, we hope to understand more about the nature of dark energy.”
Probing Dark Energy
Type Ia supernovae are useful as cosmological probes because astronomers know their intrinsic luminosity, or how bright they inherently are, at their peak. By comparing this with their observed brightness, scientists can determine how far away they are. Roman will also be able to measure how quickly they appear to be moving away from us. By tracking how fast they’re receding at different distances, scientists will trace cosmic expansion over time.
Only Roman will be able to find the faintest and most distant supernovae that illuminate early cosmic epochs. It will complement ground-based telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which are limited by absorption from Earth’s atmosphere, among other effects. Rubin’s greatest strength will be in finding supernovae that happened within the past 5 billion years. Roman will expand that collection to much earlier times in the universe’s history, about 3 billion years after the big bang, or as much as 11 billion years in the past. This would more than double the measured timeline of the universe’s expansion history.
Recently, the Dark Energy Survey found hints that dark energy may be weakening over time, rather than being a constant force of expansion. Roman’s investigations will be critical for testing this possibility.
Seeking Exotic Phenomena
To detect transient objects, whose brightness changes over time, Roman must revisit the same fields at regular intervals. The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will devote a total of 180 days of observing time to these observations spread over a five-year period. Most will occur over a span of two years in the middle of the mission, revisiting the same fields once every five days, with an additional 15 days of observations early in the mission to establish a baseline.
This infographic describes the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey that will be conducted by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The survey’s main component will cover over 18 square degrees — a region of sky as large as 90 full moons — and see supernovae that occurred up to about 8 billion years ago.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center “To find things that change, we use a technique called image subtraction,” Sako said. “You take an image, and you subtract out an image of the same piece of sky that was taken much earlier — as early as possible in the mission. So you remove everything that’s static, and you’re left with things that are new.”
The survey will also include an extended component that will revisit some of the observing fields approximately every 120 days to look for objects that change over long timescales. This will help to detect the most distant transients that existed as long ago as one billion years after the big bang. Those objects vary more slowly due to time dilation caused by the universe’s expansion.
“You really benefit from taking observations over the entire five-year duration of the mission,” said Brad Cenko of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the other co-chair of the survey committee. “It allows you to capture these very rare, very distant events that are really hard to get at any other way but that tell us a lot about the conditions in the early universe.”
This extended component will collect data on some of the most energetic and longest-lasting transients, such as tidal disruption events — when a supermassive black hole shreds a star — or predicted but as-yet unseen events known as pair-instability supernovae, where a massive star explodes without leaving behind a neutron star or black hole.
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This sonification that uses simulated data from NASA’s OpenUniverse project shows the variety of explosive events that will be detected by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and its High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey. Different sounds represent different types of events, as shown in the key at right. A single kilonova seen about 12 seconds into the video is represented with a cannon shot. The sonification sweeps backward in time to greater distances from Earth, and the pitch of the instrument gets lower as you move outward. (Cosmological redshift has been converted to a light travel time expressed in billions of years.) Credit: Sonification: Martha Irene Saladino (STScI), Christopher Britt (STScI); Visualization: Frank Summers (STScI); Designer: NASA, STScI, Leah Hustak (STScI) Survey Details
The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will be split into two imaging “tiers” — a wide tier that covers more area and a deep tier that will focus on a smaller area for a longer time to detect fainter objects. The wide tier, totaling a bit more than 18 square degrees, will target objects within the past 7 billion years, or half the universe’s history. The deep tier, covering an area of 6.5 square degrees, will reach fainter objects that existed as much as 10 billion years ago. The observations will take place in two areas, one in the northern sky and one in the southern sky. There will also be a spectroscopic component to this survey, which will be limited to the southern sky.
“We have a partnership with the ground-based Subaru Observatory, which will do spectroscopic follow-up of the northern sky, while Roman will do spectroscopy in the southern sky. With spectroscopy, we can confidently tell what type of supernovae we’re seeing,” said Cenko.
Together with Roman’s other two core community surveys, the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey and the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will help map the universe with a clarity and to a depth never achieved before.
Download the sonification here.
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 in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, 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 Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
By Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Aug 12, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
Scientists predict one of the major surveys by NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope may reveal around 100,000 celestial blasts, ranging from exploding stars to feeding black holes. Roman may even find evidence of some of the universe’s first stars, which are thought to completely self-destruct without leaving any remnant behind.
This simulation showcases the dynamic universe as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could see it over the course of its five-year primary mission. The video sparkles with synthetic supernovae from observations of the OpenUniverse simulated universe taken every five days (similar to the expected cadence of Roman’s High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, which OpenUniverse simulates in its entirety). On top of the static sky of stars in the Milky Way and other galaxies, more than a million exploding stars flare into visibility and then slowly fade away. To highlight the dynamic physics happening and for visibility at this scale, the true brightness of each transient event has been magnified by a factor of 10,000 and no background light has been added to the simulated images. The video begins with Roman’s full field of view, which represents a single pointing of Roman’s camera, and then zooms into one square.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and M. Troxel Cosmic explosions offer clues to some of the biggest mysteries of the universe. One is the nature of dark energy, the mysterious pressure thought to be accelerating the universe’s expansion.
“Whether you want to explore dark energy, dying stars, galactic powerhouses, or probably even entirely new things we’ve never seen before, this survey will be a gold mine,” said Benjamin Rose, an assistant professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, who led a study about the results. The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Called the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, this observation program will scan the same large region of the cosmos every five days for two years. Scientists will stitch these observations together to create movies that uncover all sorts of cosmic fireworks.
Chief among them are exploding stars. The survey is largely geared toward finding a special class of supernova called type Ia. These stellar cataclysms allow scientists to measure cosmic distances and trace the universe’s expansion because they peak at about the same intrinsic brightness. Figuring out how fast the universe has ballooned during different cosmic epochs offers clues to dark energy.
This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI In the new study, scientists simulated Roman’s entire High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey. The results suggest Roman could see around 27,000 type Ia supernovae—about 10 times more than all previous surveys combined.
Beyond dramatically increasing our total sample of these supernovae, Roman will push the boundaries of how far back in time we can see them. While most of those detected so far occurred within approximately the last 8 billion years, Roman is expected to see vast numbers of them earlier in the universe’s history, including more than a thousand that exploded more than 10 billion years ago and potentially dozens from as far back as 11.5 billion years. That means Roman will almost certainly set a new record for the farthest type Ia supernova while profoundly expanding our view of the early universe and filling in a critical gap in our understanding of how the cosmos has evolved over time.
“Filling these data gaps could also fill in gaps in our understanding of dark energy,” Rose said. “Evidence is mounting that dark energy has changed over time, and Roman will help us understand that change by exploring cosmic history in ways other telescopes can’t.”
But type Ia supernovae will be hidden among a much bigger sample of exploding stars Roman will see once it begins science operations in 2027. The team estimates Roman will also spot about 60,000 core-collapse supernovae, which occur when a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses under its own weight.
That’s different from type Ia supernovae, which originate from binary star systems that contain at least one white dwarf — the small, hot core remnant of a Sun-like star — siphoning material from a companion star. Core-collapse supernovae aren’t as useful for dark energy studies as type Ias are, but their signals look similar from halfway across the cosmos.
“By seeing the way an object’s light changes over time and splitting it into spectra — individual colors with patterns that reveal information about the object that emitted the light—we can distinguish between all the different types of flashes Roman will see,” said Rebekah Hounsell, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and a co-author of the study.
“With the dataset we’ve created, scientists can train machine-learning algorithms to distinguish between different types of objects and sift through Roman’s downpour of data to find them,” Hounsell added. “While searching for type Ia supernovae, Roman is going to collect a lot of cosmic ‘bycatch’—other phenomena that aren’t useful to some scientists, but will be invaluable to others.”
Hidden Gems
Thanks to Roman’s large, deep view of space, scientists say the survey should also unearth extremely rare and elusive phenomena, including even scarcer stellar explosions and disintegrating stars.
Upon close approach to a black hole, intense gravity can shred a star in a so-called tidal disruption event. The stellar crumbs heat up as they swirl around the black hole, creating a glow astronomers can see from across vast stretches of space-time. Scientists think Roman’s survey will unveil 40 tidal disruption events, offering a chance to learn more about black hole physics.
The team also estimates Roman will find about 90 superluminous supernovae, which can be 100 times brighter than a typical supernova. They pack a punch, but scientists aren’t completely sure why. Finding more of them will help astronomers weigh different theories.
Even rarer and more powerful, Roman could also detect several kilonovae. These blasts occur when two neutron stars — extremely dense cores leftover from stars that exploded as supernovae — collide. To date, there has been only one definitive kilonova detection. The team estimates Roman could spot five more.
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope will survey the same areas of the sky every few days following its launch in May 2027. Researchers will mine these data to identify kilonovae – explosions that happen when two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole collide and merge. When these collisions happen, a fraction of the resulting debris is ejected as jets, which move near the speed of light. The remaining debris produces hot, glowing, neutron-rich clouds that forge heavy elements, like gold and platinum. Roman’s extensive data will help astronomers better identify how often these events occur, how much energy they give off, and how near or far they are.Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Olmsted (STScI) That would help astronomers learn much more about these mysterious events, potentially including their fate. As of now, scientists are unsure whether kilonovae result in a single neutron star, a black hole, or something else entirely.
Roman may even spot the detonations of some of the first stars that formed in the universe. These nuclear furnaces were giants, up to hundreds of times more massive than our Sun, and unsullied by heavy elements that hadn’t yet formed.
They were so massive that scientists think they exploded differently than modern massive stars do. Instead of reaching the point where a heavy star today would collapse, intense gamma rays inside the first stars may have turned into matter-antimatter pairs (electrons and positrons). That would drain the pressure holding the stars up until they collapsed, self-destructing in explosions so powerful they’re thought to leave nothing behind.
So far, astronomers have found about half a dozen candidates of these “pair-instability” supernovae, but none have been confirmed.
“I think Roman will make the first confirmed detection of a pair-instability supernova,” Rose said — in fact the study suggests Roman will find more than 10. “They’re incredibly far away and very rare, so you need a telescope that can survey a lot of the sky at a deep exposure level in near-infrared light, and that’s Roman.”
A future rendition of the simulation could include even more types of cosmic flashes, such as variable stars and active galaxies. Other telescopes may follow up on the rare phenomena and objects Roman discovers to view them in different wavelengths of light to study them in more detail.
“Roman’s going to find a whole bunch of weird and wonderful things out in space, including some we haven’t even thought of yet,” Hounsell said. “We’re definitely expecting the unexpected.”
For more information about the Roman Space Telescope visit www.nasa.gov/roman.
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 in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, 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.
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Jul 15, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.gov Related Terms
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By NASA
Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions Mars Home 2 min read
Sols 4556-4558: It’s All in a Day’s (box)Work
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Right Navigation Camera on June 2, 2025 — Sol 4558, or Martian day 4,558 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 12:23:56 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Sharon Wilson Purdy, Planetary Geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
Earth planning date: Friday, May 30, 2025
When you are scheduled to participate in Science Operations for the rover’s weekend plan, you know it’s going to be a busy morning! Assembling the activities for Friday through Sunday (Sols 4556 through 4558) was no exception. I participated on this shift as the “keeper of the plan” for the geology and mineralogy theme group where I worked with members of the science and instrument teams to compile a set of observations for the rover to complete over the weekend. The rover continues to drive over a surface of shallow, sometimes sand-filled depressions that are separated by raised ridges — informally known as the “boxwork structures.” On this Friday, we were tasked with assessing the ground in our immediate vicinity to determine if the low-lying bedrock in the hollows was suitable for drilling.
With a focus on packing the plan with remote sensing activities to understand the bedrock around us, we used the ChemCam laser to analyze the chemistry of two bedrock targets, “La Tuna Canyon” and “Cooper Canyon,” that were also documented by Mastcam. ChemCam and Mastcam also teamed up to image an interesting dark ridge nearby named “Encinal Canyon.” Mastcam created stereo mosaics to document the nature of the candidate drill sites that were near the rover, in addition to the “Blue Sky Preserve” stereo mosaic that beautifully captured the nature of the boxwork structures in front of us. The environmental theme group included some of their favorite activities in the plan to monitor the clouds, wind, and the atmosphere.
Curiosity has successfully completed numerous long drives (about 20+ meters, or 66 feet and beyond) in the past several weeks but this weekend the rover got a bit of a reprieve — the rover will drive approximately 7 meters (about 23 feet) to get situated in front of a possible drill site. I’m eagerly looking forward to seeing what unfolds on Monday!
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Last Updated Jun 03, 2025 Related Terms
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Sols 4541–4542: Boxwork Structure, or Just “Box-Like” Structure?
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Left Navigation Camera on May 14, 2025 — Sol 4539, or Martian day 4,539 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 00:57:26 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Ashley Stroupe, Mission Operations Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Earth planning date: Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Today we came into another strange and interesting workspace (see image above) that is as exciting as the one we had on Monday. This is our first arrival at a potential boxwork structure — a series of web-like, resistant ridges visible in orbital images that we have been looking forward to visiting since we first saw them. Today’s observations will be the first step to figure out if these ridges (at least the one in front of us) is part of a boxwork structure. Unfortunately, we can’t quite reach their targets safely today because one of the rover’s front wheels is perched on a small pebble and might slip off if we move the arm. Instead, we will take a lot of remote sensing observations and reposition the rover slightly so that we can try again on Friday.
But before repositioning, Curiosity will start off by taking a huge Mastcam mosaic of all terrain around the rover to help us document how it is changing along our path and with elevation. Mastcam then will look at “Temblor Range,” which is a nearby low and resistant ridge that also has some rover tracks from where we previously crossed it. Mastcam is also imaging a trough that is similar to the other troughs we have been seeing locally and that have multiple possible origins. Then, Mastcam will image the AEGIS target from the prior plan. ChemCam is taking a LIBS observation of “Glendale Peak,” a rugged top portion of the ridge defining the potential boxwork structure, which is to the right of the workspace, and an RMI mosaic of Texoli butte. Mastcam follows up the ChemCam observation of Glendale Peak by imaging it.
In parallel with all the imaging is our monthly test and maintenance of our backup pump for the Heat Rejection System (the HRS) The HRS is a fluid loop that distributes the heat from the rover’s power source to help keep all the subsystems within reasonable temperatures. We need to periodically make sure it stays in good working order just in case our primary pump has issues.
After all the imaging, the rover will bump 30 centimeters backwards (about 12 inches) to come down off the pebble and put the interesting science targets in the arm workspace. This should leave us in a position where it is safe to unstow the arm and put instruments down on the surface.
On the second, untargeted sol of the plan, we have some additional atmospheric science including a large dust-devil survey, as well as a Navcam suprahorizon movie and a Mastcam solar tau to measure the dust in the atmosphere. We finish up with another autonomous targeting of ChemCam with AEGIS.
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Last Updated May 19, 2025 Related Terms
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