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NASA Breaking News
Help Refine Data from Space Telescopes with Artifact InSPECtor 11 September 2026 at 15:48

Help Refine Data from Space Telescopes with Artifact InSPECtor

11 September 2026 at 15:48

How do scientists studying space with data from a telescope hundreds of thousands of miles away know that what they are seeing is real? A new NASA project, Artifact InSPECtor, invites you to find out – and by doing so, to help missions like Euclid and NASA’s new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope answer fundamental questions about our universe.

“It’s really cool that we can help teach computers new skills,” said nine-year-old Maeve F. after trying out Artifact InSPECtor. Participants of all ages, including those as young as Maeve, can visit the project to learn how they can contribute to science by training artificial intelligence to remove errors in telescope data.

Here’s how it works.

The Euclid space telescope, a powerful observatory built by ESA (European Space Agency) with critical contributions from NASA, is collecting light from millions of distant galaxies across the universe. It will soon be joined by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a complementary observatory that will capture a similar number of galaxies after it begins science operations, but at different distances and densities across the sky. Together, these telescopes promise to help scientists answer questions about the expansion of the universe and dark energy – the mysterious force causing this expansion.

To collect data to answer these questions, each telescope uses a special instrument called a spectrograph that works like a prism: it splits the light from each galaxy, even very distant ones, into a rainbow of colors. By studying these rainbow patterns, called spectra, scientists can figure out how far away each galaxy is, what kinds of stars it contains, and even information about the supermassive black holes at their centers.

But before that can happen, there’s a problem to solve.

Telescope data contains many “artifacts” – the general name scientists use for signals that come from things other than real astronomical objects like galaxies or stars. Artifacts can be created by light glinting off the telescope’s housing, cosmic rays striking the detector, quirks in the camera or electronics, or other sources. It’s a bit like when a smudge on your phone’s camera lens shows up in a photo, or when a glare from the Sun blocks part of your picture.

To find and remove these artifacts, astronomers have created artificial intelligence (AI) tools that learn to recognize them, similar to how your phone recognizes faces in photos. But recognizing artifacts in data from relatively new instruments is challenging work for the AI, which doesn’t always distinguish them accurately

That’s where you come in! As a volunteer with Artifact InSPECtor, you’ll look at real space telescope data from Euclid and, starting in early 2027, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The project will teach you how to recognize artifacts in data from these telescopes. The work you do will then be used to improve the instructions guiding the AI tool. Working together, you, the AI, the scientists, and these powerful space telescopes will learn more than ever before about how our universe works.

If you want to teach computers new skills and help discover the mysteries of dark energy, use your smartphone, tablet, or computer to visit Artifact InSPECtor and begin today: https://go.nasa.gov/3Uyrguy.

Collage of grayscale space telescope images showing several types of image artifacts, including streaks, curved lines, star-like shapes, and irregular patches. Blue overlays mark pixels identified by an AI model as potentially invalid.

Examples of what artifacts can look like in space telescope data. The blue areas indicate pixels that the AI model thinks are invalid. Artifact InSPECtor volunteers will learn how to verify whether the machine got it right.

Credit: Image data from the ESA/Euclid Q1 Data release. Image processing by Aimee Schechter and Bharath C. Nagam.

Learn More and Get Involved

Artifact InSPECtor

Train the tools used to remove artifacts from the data collected by space telescopes. For anyone with a smartphone or laptop.

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NASA Breaking News
9 Things to Know About NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope 27 August 2026 at 13:47

9 Things to Know About NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

NASA Breaking News

27 August 2026 at 13:47

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 30. While you wait to watch the launch, brush up on some key facts about this wide-view mission.

Teams inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida encapsulate the agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope within the payload fairing on Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, ahead of mating to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Encapsulation shields the spacecraft during rollout, ascent, and the early phases of flight. Roman will investigate dark energy and dark matter, conduct a statistical census of planetary systems, and enable a broad range of additional astrophysics research. Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy is targeted for no earlier than Sunday, Aug. 30, 2026.

NASA/Sydney Rohde (Rocz)

01

The mission is named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, Dr. Nancy Grace Roman.

Roman is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018), NASA’s first chief of astronomy. She championed space-based observatories that could study the universe above Earth’s hazy atmosphere while making their data broadly available to the scientific community.

While she’s known as the “mother” of the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman played an even broader role as the driving force behind NASA’s entire Great Observatories program, which included Hubble along with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the retired Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope.

Her vision and leadership helped establish NASA as a world-class scientific institution and laid the foundation for generations of space telescopes that continue to expand humanity’s understanding of the cosmos.
02

Roman will transform our view of the cosmos by showing us the bigger picture.

Roman will pair a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to scan vast, deep swaths of sky. This flagship mission is designed to help astronomers explore dark matter, dark energy, and planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets.

Since each of Roman’s surveys will sample such a large volume of the cosmos, the mission will also offer practically limitless opportunities for astronomers to conduct a broad range of additional science. From objects in our outer solar system and exploding stars to growing black holes and galaxies by the billions, very little will be beyond Roman’s reach. Roman’s data will be made public as soon as it’s processed, allowing many teams to analyze it simultaneously.
03

The observatory will journey a million miles to join Webb at Lagrange point 2.

Roman will orbit 1 million miles away at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), the same location as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. At L2, gravity from the Sun and Earth works together with an object’s motion around the Sun to hold it roughly in place. This balance will give Roman a relatively steady orbit without using much fuel.

Like Webb, Roman will trace out a large orbit around the actual L2 point — much larger than the Moon’s orbit around Earth — and the two will easily be kept far apart.
04

The spacecraft carries the names of more than a million people.

This summer, everyone was invited to submit their name to be added to a memory card attached to a plaque on the Roman spacecraft. More than 1.3 million people did so and will have their names carried all the way to L2.
05

Roman will scan the skies for at least five years.

Roman will have a primary mission lifetime of five years and is designed to support an additional five-year extended mission. Fuel is expected to be the mission’s life-limiting resource, and while NASA does not currently have an ability to service observatories at L2, Roman is designed to be refuelable.
06

Two instruments will enable myriad discoveries.

The observatory’s Wide Field Instrument is a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will give Roman the same sharpness (angular resolution) as Hubble but with a field of view at least 100 times larger. Using this instrument, each Roman image will capture a patch of the sky about 1.5 times bigger than the apparent size of a full Moon.

Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument is designed to demonstrate the most advanced technologies ever flown in space for directly imaging planets around other stars. It will block the glare from stars and make it possible for scientists to see the faint reflected light from planets in orbit around them, revealing giant worlds that are older, colder, and in closer orbits than the hot, young super-Jupiters direct imaging has mainly revealed so far.
07

Roman joins an international cohort of teamworking telescopes.

Roman will work in tandem with many other NASA-led and international missions to provide the most complete view of our universe yet. Roman’s large panoramas will uncover interesting targets that Hubble could follow up on using infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light to offer a more comprehensive view. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope can then use its larger mirror and more powerful vision to deliver even more detailed, ultra-sharp observations. And Roman can view regions around objects Hubble or Webb observe to offer context.

Euclid, an ESA (European Space Agency) mission with key contributions from NASA, will observe a larger area of the sky than Roman, though with less detail. Since their survey areas will overlap, scientists can use Roman’s higher-quality data to apply corrections to Euclid’s, then extend these refinements over Euclid’s much larger area.

Scientists can also pair Roman’s infrared data with visible-light observations from the ground-based Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a National Science Foundation–Department of Energy collaboration. That will allow astronomers to inch closer to achieving Roman-like quality over Rubin’s much greater sky coverage.

By showcasing technology to directly photograph Jupiter-like exoplanets, Roman will also provide a crucial stepping stone for NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory concept, a flagship space telescope that would be designed to photograph Earth-like planets in other solar systems for the first time ever.
08

Watch the Roman launch live from anywhere.

NASA will stream this event live through a variety of platforms. Learn where to watch online: nasa.gov/live. The launch broadcast will continue until approximately one hour past launch to follow the first several critical milestones post-launch.
09

NASA expects to share Roman’s first images by early 2027.

The Roman team will complete a carefully orchestrated series of deployments, calibrations, and tests in the three months following launch before the observatory reaches its final orbit. Science operations begin once this commissioning period is completed, starting with the release of Roman’s first science images.