NASA has announced that it will launch the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope into orbit in September 2026, eight months ahead of schedule.
The new space telescope is expected to deliver 20,000 terabytes of data to astronomers over its life, adding to the 57 gigabytes of daily imagery from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's nightly data gathering.
Astrophysicist Brant Robertson has been working with Nvidia to apply graphics processing units (GPUs) to analyze large datasets from these missions, including developing a deep learning model called Morpheus that can identify galaxies.
Robertson is now switching the architecture of Morpheus to transformers, allowing it to analyze several times more area and speeding up its work. He is also working on generative AI models trained on space telescope data to improve ground-based observations.
The pressure is on for global demand for GPU access, with Robertson building a GPU cluster at UC Santa Cruz but facing outdated infrastructure as more researchers want to apply compute-intensive techniques to their work.