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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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By European Space Agency
For this new Picture of the Month feature, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has provided a fantastic new view of IRAS 04302+2247, a planet-forming disc located about 525 light-years away in a dark cloud within the Taurus star-forming region. With Webb, researchers can study the properties and growth of dust grains within protoplanetary discs like this one, shedding light on the earliest stages of planet formation.
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By NASA
NASA announced 10 winning teams for its latest TechLeap Prize — the Space Technology Payload Challenge — on June 26. The winners emerged from a record-breaking field of more than 200 applicants to earn cash prizes worth up to $500,000, if they have a flight-ready unit. Recipients may also have the opportunity to flight test their technologies.
NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences (BPS) division is supporting the emerging space economy through challenges like TechLeap. The projects receive funding through the Commercially Enabled Rapid Space Science (CERISS) initiative, which pairs government research goals with commercial innovation.
Two awardees’ capabilities specifically address BPS research priorities, which include conducting investigations that inform future space crops and advance precision health.
Ambrosia Space Manufacturing Corporation is developing a centrifuge system to separate nutrients from cell cultures — potentially creating space-based food processing that could turn algae into digestible meals for astronauts.
Helogen Corporation is building an automated laboratory system that can run biological experiments without requiring astronaut involvement and may be able to transmit real-time data to researchers on Earth without having to wait for physical samples to return.
“The innovations of these small- and midsize businesses could enable NASA to accelerate the pace of critical research,” says Dan Walsh, BPS’s program executive for CERISS. “It’s also an example of NASA enabling the emerging space industry to grow and thrive beyond big corporations.”
Small Packages with Big Ambitions
Every inch and ounce counts on a spacecraft, which means the winning teams have to think small while solving big problems.
Commercial companies play a pivotal role in enabling space-based research — they bring fresh approaches to ongoing challenges. But space missions demand a different kind of innovation, and TechLeap teams face both time and size constraints for their experiments.
Winners have six to nine months to demonstrate that their concepts work. That’s a significant contrast from traditional space technology development, which can stretch for years.
The research serves a larger purpose as well. The technology helps NASA “know before we go” on longer, deep-space missions to the Moon and Mars. Understanding how technologies behave in microgravity or extreme environments can prevent costly failures when astronauts are far from Earth.
Small investments in proof-of-concept technologies can bring in a high ROI. With the TechLeap Prize, BPS is betting that big ideas will come in small packages.
Related Resources
TechLeap Prize – Space Technology Payload Challenge (STPC)
Space Technology Payload Challenge Winners
Commercially Enabled Rapid Space Science Initiative
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By NASA
5 min read
NASA’s Apollo Samples, LRO Help Scientists Predict Moonquakes
This mosaic of the Taurus-Littrow valley was made using images from the Narrow Angle Cameras onboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter has been circling and studying the Moon since 2009. The ancient-lava-filled valley is cut by the Lee-Lincoln thrust fault, visible as a sinuous, white line extending from South Massif (mountain in the bottom left corner) to North Massif (mountain in the top center) where the fault abruptly changes direction and cuts along the slope of North Massif. The Lee-Lincoln fault has been the source of multiple strong moonquakes causing landslides and boulder falls on both North and South massifs. The approximate location of the Apollo 17 landing site is indicated to the right of the fault with a white “x”. NASA/ASU/Smithsonian As NASA prepares to send astronauts to the surface of the Moon’s south polar region for the first time ever during the Artemis III mission, scientists are working on methods to determine the frequency of moonquakes along active faults there.
Faults are cracks in the Moon’s crust that indicate that the Moon is slowly shrinking as its interior cools over time. The contraction from shrinking causes the faults to move suddenly, which generates quakes. Between 1969 and 1977, a network of seismometers deployed by Apollo astronauts on the Moon’s surface recorded thousands of vibrations from moonquakes.
Moonquakes are rare, with the most powerful ones, about magnitude 5.0, occurring near the surface. These types of quakes are much weaker than powerful quakes on Earth (magnitude 7.0 or higher), posing little risk to astronauts during a mission lasting just a few days. But their effects on longer-term lunar surface assets could be significant. Unlike an earthquake that lasts for tens of seconds to minutes, a moonquake can last for hours, enough time to damage or tip over structures, destabilize launch vehicles on the surface, or interrupt surface operations.
“The hazard probability goes way up depending on how close your infrastructure is to an active fault,” said Thomas Watters, senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum in Washington.
Watters is a long-time researcher of lunar geology and a co-investigator on NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) camera. Recently, he and Nicholas Schmerr, a planetary seismologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, developed a new method for estimating the magnitude of seismic shaking by analyzing evidence of dislodged boulders and landslides in an area, as the scientists reported on July 30 in the journal Science Advances. Studies like these can help NASA plan lunar surface assets in safer locations.
Unlike an earthquake that lasts for tens of seconds to minutes, a moonquake can last for hours, enough time to damage or tip over structures, destabilize launch vehicles on the surface, or interrupt surface operations.
There are thousands of faults across the Moon that may still be active and producing quakes. Watters and his team have identified these faults by analyzing data from LRO, which has been circling the Moon since 2009, mapping the surface and taking pictures, providing unprecedented detail of features like faults, boulders, and landslides.
For this study, Watters and Schmerr chose to analyze surface changes from quakes generated by the Lee-Lincoln fault in the Taurus-Littrow valley. NASA’s Apollo 17 astronauts, who landed about 4 miles west of the fault on Dec. 11, 1972, explored the area around the fault during their mission.
By studying boulder falls and a landslide likely dislodged by ground shaking near Lee Lincoln, Watters and Schmerr estimated that a magnitude 3.0 moonquake — similar to a relatively minor earthquake — occurs along the Lee Lincoln fault about every 5.6 million years.
“One of the things we’re learning from the Lee-Lincoln fault is that many similar faults have likely had multiple quakes spread out over millions of years,” Schmerr said. “This means that they are potentially still active today and may keep generating more moonquakes in the future.”
The authors chose to study the Lee-Lincoln fault because it offered a unique advantage: Apollo 17 astronauts brought back samples of boulders from the area. By studying these samples in labs, scientists were able to measure changes in the boulders’ chemistry caused by exposure to cosmic radiation over time (the boulder surface is freshly exposed after breaking off a larger rock that would have otherwise shielded it).
This cosmic radiation exposure information helped the researchers determine how long the boulders had been sitting in their current locations, which in turn helped inform the estimate of possible timing and frequency of quakes along the Lee-Lincoln fault.
This 1972 image shows Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt sampling a boulder at the base of North Massif in the Taurus-Littrow valley on the Moon. This large boulder is believed to have been dislodged by a strong moonquake that occurred about 28.5 million years ago. The source of the quake was likely a seismic event along the Lee-Lincoln fault. The picture was taken by astronaut Eugene A. Cernan, Apollo 17 commander. NASA/JSC/ASU Apollo 17 astronauts investigated the boulders at the bases of two mountains in the valley. The tracks left behind indicated that the boulders may have rolled downhill after being shaken loose during a moonquake on the fault. Using the size of each boulder, Watters and Schmerr estimated how hard the ground shaking would have been and the magnitude of the quake that would have caused the boulders to break free.
The team also estimated the seismic shaking and quake magnitude that would be needed to trigger the large landslide that sent material rushing across the valley floor, suggesting that this incident caused the rupture event that formed the Lee-Lincoln fault.
A computer simulation depicting the seismic waves emanating from a shallow moonquake on the Lee-Lincoln fault in the Taurus-Littrow valley on the Moon. The label “A17” marks the Apollo 17 landing site. The audio represents a moonquake that was recorded by a seismometer placed on the surface by astronauts. The seismic signal is converted into sound. Both audio and video are sped up to play 10 times faster than normal. The background image is a globe mosaic image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Wide-Angle Camera. Red and blue are positive (upward ground motion) and negative (downward ground motion) polarities of the wave. Nicholas Schmerr Taking all these factors into account, Watters and Schmerr estimated that the chances that a quake would have shaken the Taurus-Littrow valley on any given day while the Apollo 17 astronauts were there are 1 in 20 million, the authors noted.
Their findings from the Lee-Lincoln fault are just the beginning. Watters and Schmerr now plan to use their new technique to analyze quake frequency at faults in the Moon’s south polar region, where NASA plans to explore.
NASA also is planning to send more seismometers to the Moon. First, the Farside Seismic Suite will deliver two sensitive seismometers to Schrödinger basin on the far side of the Moon onboard a lunar lander as part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative. Additionally, NASA is developing a payload, called the Lunar Environment Monitoring Station, for potential flight on NASA’s Artemis III mission to the South Pole region. Co-led by Schmerr, the payload will assess seismic risks for future human and robotic missions to the region.
Read More: What Are Moonquakes?
Read More: Moonquakes and Faults Near Lunar South Pole
For more information on NASA’s LRO, visit:
Media Contacts:
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Lonnie Shekhtman
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
lonnie.shekhtman@nasa.gov
About the Author
Lonnie Shekhtman
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Last Updated Aug 14, 2025 Related Terms
Apollo Apollo 17 Artemis Artemis 3 Artemis Campaign Development Division Earth’s Moon Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate Goddard Space Flight Center Humans in Space Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Missions NASA Centers & Facilities NASA Directorates Planetary Geosciences & Geophysics Planetary Science Planetary Science Division Science & Research Science Mission Directorate The Solar System Explore More
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