Roman Research Nexus
This is the RDox home of the Roman Research Nexus, a science platform available for the scientific community to facilitate searching, retrieving, viewing, analyzing, and sharing Roman data products in the cloud.
What is the Roman Research Nexus?
The Roman Research Nexus (RRN or Nexus) is an instance of JupyterHub (a multi-user version of JupyerLab) hosted on Amazon Web Services and is developed by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) Science Operation Center (SOC) at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). The Nexus is a science platform focusing on collaboration and ease of access, bringing tools, resources, and the science community together to explore scientific frontiers. The mission of the Nexus is to enable the community to perform transformational science on the data from Roman by providing a rich computing environment in the cloud that will allow broad, low-barrier access to data, compute, and software resources.
What does the Nexus offer to the users?
Roman’s Wide Field Instrument (WFI) is expected to generate approximately 30 PB of data during its five-year primary mission. The Nexus is designed to provide users with proximity to the data by running services in the same data center that houses the Roman data.
The Nexus provides users with a stable software environment to ensure reliable access and performance. It includes the Roman SOC Data pipelines, data simulation tools, and many commonly used Python packages. In addition to the pre-configured environment, users can create personalized environments and install software to meet their science needs.
The Nexus provides users with a variety of tutorials in the form of Jupyter Notebooks, which demonstrate how to use simulation tools and data processing software, as well as how to visualize and analyze the WFI data. These tutorials are combined into "Workflows" to show particular scientific use cases that users can adapt to both new and existing research projects.
The Nexus helps users navigate a cloud framework, facilitating a smoother transition and more efficient use of cloud capabilities. With the accessible and scalable cloud resources, the Nexus provides a platform to accelerate science with Roman and new methods for scientific discovery. It also serves as a gathering space for communities to collaborate, fostering interaction and shared learning among users.
How do I access the Nexus?
The Nexus is located at https://www.roman.science.stsci.edu. Access is currently limited to Roman project partners and users who have attended a Nexus workshop. Public release is expected in the summer of 2025.
Upon logging into the Nexus, users will see a landing page similar to the figure below. A MyST account is required to access the Nexus. Users can work individually or as part of a team.
Figure of the Roman Research Nexus Landing Page
The landing page of the Roman Research Nexus. A user needs a MyST account to use the Nexus. Users without can create one by clicking on the "Create New MyST Account" button.
Once logged in to the Nexus, users are prompted to choose either an individual or a team account, as well as the server size to spawn, as shown in the figure below.
Figure of the Roman Research Nexus Account Page
The account page of the Roman Research Nexus. Upon logging in, users are asked to choose the account type and the server type to spawn. The account type can be either a personal or a team account.
When first spawned, the server can take up to 15 minutes to launch. Once successfully launched, the user will see a page similar to the figure below. The Nexus provides comprehensive documentation on its features, available workflows, tutorials, sample data products, and more.
Figure of the Roman Research Nexus Main Page
The main page of the Roman Research Nexus after launching a server. From this page, users can explore the Nexus by reviewing the documentation from the relevant pages listed under the welcome message and the tutorials from the "notebooks" directory under the file list on the left.
What is coming next for the Nexus?
The Roman Research Nexus is under development, including the tools it offers, such as RomanCal, Roman I-Sim, and STIPS. Future updates include real-time collaboration, parallelization tools, and additional science workflows and tutorials.
Public release is expected in summer 2025.
We encourage feedback from the user community about the Nexus. To submit your feedback, please contact us at the Roman Help Desk using the "Roman Research Nexus" category.
For additional questions not answered in this article, please contact the Roman Help Desk.