Scientists used a retired supercomputer to prep for NASA’s Roman mission — Argonne Theta supercomputer created nearly four million simulated images

OpenUniverse-powered simulations of the parts of the sky that will be seen by Vera C. Rubin Observatory (left half) and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope (right half).

Ahead of NASA's upcoming launch of the Grace Roman Space Telescope for the "Roman Mission," researchers are using the Argonne Theta supercomputer to run OpenUniverse-powered simulations of the cosmos. The simulation is being run for the to-be-launched Grace Roman Space Telescope and the grounded Chilean Vera C. Rubin Observatory. According to Jim Chiang, who helped create the simulations, "OpenUniverse lets us calibrate our expectations of what we can discover with these telescopes [...by giving] us a chance to exercise our processing pipelines, better understand our analysis codes, and accurately interpret the results so we can prepare to use the real data right away once it starts coming in."

As cutting-edge and high-concept as this may sound, OpenUniverse is an open-source Solar System simulator leveraging OpenGL that has existed for about 24 years. The classic version of OpenUniverse also inspired other planetarium software.