A University of Maryland, Baltimore County researcher is part of the team preparing NASA's Roman Space Telescope to tackle one of cosmology's biggest open questions: what dark energy is and whether it changes over time. Rebekah Hounsell, an associate research scientist at UMBC, co-leads and manages the infrastructure team of the Roman Supernova Cosmology project, which includes more than 60 supernova scientists from around the world.
Roman lifted off on August 30 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The telescope's field of view is about 100 times larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope, which allows it to survey large patches of sky at once. Its main job in this area is to collect data on Type Ia supernovae, the exploding stars that astronomers use as standardized markers for measuring distances across the universe.
Today's best studies rely on roughly 1,500 to 2,000 of these supernovae. Roman is expected to detect tens of thousands, many of them far more distant than anything studied so far. That larger and deeper sample matters because scientists still do not know whether dark energy, the force thought to be driving the accelerating expansion of the universe, stays constant or evolves over cosmic time. More data could help settle that question.
The telescope is still in its commissioning phase, and the first public images are expected early next year. The mission plans to release all of its data to the public as soon as it is ready, and citizen-science projects are also planned. Access to the data will be provided through the Roman Research Nexus.
We rewrote this story on 4 November 2026 after an editorial review.
Credit. Based on reporting by Sarah Hansen for UMBC. Is this your work? Write to us.
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