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Comment by delichon | original | Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
[−]delichon · 2026-08-29 Sat 23:54 UTC · link
The data, up to 1.4TB/day raw compressed, is planned to be fully open, every observation is public as soon as it is processed with no embargo. You can just download it and start looking for Rama or Oumuamua or plan your exoplanetary real estate empire or make a really big sandbox game. I at least want somebody to make me a cool screen saver.

You could easily be the first person to see a galaxy.

I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.

[−]Carrok · 2026-08-30 Sun 04:45 UTC · link
> When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.
[−]enahs-sf · 2026-08-30 Sun 07:31 UTC · link
On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
[−]ghgr · 2026-08-30 Sun 05:59 UTC · link
> every observation is public as soon as it is processed with no embargo

That's a big deal. Do you have any source for that? (I couldn't find it in the ones you linked). This is great for humanity as a whole, but... poor grad students who now need to rush to publish their papers even sooner.

[−]delichon · 2026-08-30 Sun 07:31 UTC · link

  Data from all of Roman’s surveys will be made public as soon as it is processed, with no periods of exclusive access.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/roman-space-telescope/nasas-ro...
[−]ghgr · 2026-08-30 Sun 07:51 UTC · link
Thank you! From talking to a contact working with JWST, it sounds a bit trickier in practice. The data are public, but with Roman the idea is that you must process them on their computers rather than download everything locally, and you pay for the compute/storage you use.
[−]enriquto · 2026-08-30 Sun 09:53 UTC · link
that's horrifying! what if you want to work on the processing algorithms themselves? can't you access the raw input data?
[−]WASDx · 2026-08-30 Sun 16:09 UTC · link
If their platform allows any kind of processing as it sounds then anyone could just dump the data. So I don't see why they would not allow downloads for local processing.