This Working Group is charged with identifying science questions that can be addressed by exploiting synergies between the two new major survey facilities coming this decade: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory (Rubin) and the NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman). The Working Group reports to the STScI Director, Ken Sembach, and the NOIRLab Director, Pat McCarthy.

Rubin and Roman will transform our view of the wide-field sky, with similar sensitivities, but complementary in wavelength, spatial resolution, and time domain coverage.  Rubin provides wide, deep, multi-band seeing-limited optical imaging with a daily cadence of observations.  Roman provides wide, deep, multi-band diffraction-limited near-infrared imaging with grism and prism low-resolution spectroscopic capabilities.  Each of these projects has defined their individual core science goals and technical requirements.  In addition, substantial effort has been made towards examining how these surveys could be combined to improve our measurements of dark energy and dark matter, e.g., improvements in photometric redshifts, weak-lensing shear measurements, the galaxy power spectrum, galaxy cluster selection, time-delays in strong-lensing systems, and SN Ia distances. 

With this working group, we aim to explore Roman-Rubin synergies beyond the well-covered topic of Dark Energy.  The Working Group will investigate which general astrophysics areas would benefit most from Roman-Rubin joint analysis, what science questions could be uniquely be addressed by Roman-Rubin working together, and how the coordination of observations, data analysis and data archiving could best realize these synergies. 

WG members: Suvi Gezari (STScI, Chair), Misty Bentz (Georgia State), Edo Berger (Harvard), Kishalay De (MIT), Decker French (University of Illinois), Robert Jedicke (Hawaii IfA), Aaron Meisner (NOIRLab), Michelle Ntampaka (STScI), Ekta Patel (Berkeley), Dan Perley (Liverpool), Robyn Sanderson (UPenn/Flatiron), Irene Shivaei (Arizona)

Ex-officio representatives: Željko Ivezić (Rubin), Harry Ferguson (Roman), Neill Reid (STScI), Beth Willman (AURA, NOIRLab)

1. The Observatories

Vera C. Rubin Observatory

High level information is available on this Factsheet

For further information on the Rubin Observatory science goals see here; additional technical information is available here.

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

High level information is available on this Factsheet and here ; information on the Roman partners in given here.

For further information on the Roman Space Telescope science goals see here; additional information on technical resources is linked from here.

2. Community Pitches

The working group has issued a call for "science pitches" from the community to be submitted here by August 31, 2021.

Some example "science pitches" from the Working Group shown here

Please contact romanrubin@stsci.edu with any questions.

3. The Whitepaper

The working group has submitted their Whitepaper to the STScI and NOIRLab Directors, and have posted to the arXiv


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