The Working Group Concept
In order to maximize the science return and legacy value of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s Wide Field Instrument (WFI), the Roman Project Office charters a number of Working Groups. Each of these Working Groups is dedicated to discussing and advising the Roman Project and its partners on key elements for preparing for WFI data and operations. Examples include calibration and processing of the WFI data, simulations of WFI data, and support for the definition of Roman's Core Community Surveys. While the Working Groups are private, anyone in the scientific community can request membership.
Wide Field Instrument Working Groups
These Working Groups are dedicated towards optimizing and calibrating specific aspects of Roman’s Wide Field Instrument. At this time, three working groups are soliciting members: Calibration, Simulations, and Software.
Calibration Working Group: Advising the Project on issues concerning Wide Field Instrument performance and data quality; Maintaining knowledge of expected calibration accuracies; Following ground tests and support evaluation of their results as appropriate; Developing on-orbit calibration plan tailored to meeting Mission science objectives; Creating ad-hoc study teams to address specific questions; and report regularly to broader Roman community.
Simulations Working Group: Coming Soon. This soon-to-be-formed Working Group will discuss and advise the Project on issues concerning the simulations of observations with the Wide Field Instrument.
Software Working Group: Discussion of issues related to the processing, distribution and analysis of the data from the Wide Field Instrument. This includes discussion of algorithms and software in the pipelines to be operated by the Science Operations Center (SOC) and the Science Support Center (SSC) as well as discussion of the needs and plans for analyzing the data created outside of the SOC and SSC default standard pipelines. The working group will also discuss aspects of support for data analysis beyond the pipelines. This includes topics such as databases and archive services, the computing and data-storage infrastructure to be provided with the cloud-based Roman Science Platform, and community-contributed software and data products.
Survey Working Groups
To enable Roman's broad science goals, the Wide Field Instrument's observing program will include both Core Community Surveys and General Astrophysics Surveys. The majority of Roman’s five-year nominal mission will be devoted to the Core Community Surveys, which include a High Latitude Wide Area survey (HLWAS), a High Latitude Time Domain survey (HLTDS), and a Galactic Bulge Time Domain survey (GBTDS), with a minimum of 25% of the five year nominal mission devoted to General Astrophysics Surveys.
The Core Community Surveys will be capable of meeting the Roman Mission’s cosmology and exoplanet science requirements while leaving significant parameter space available to establish the observational strategies (filters, depth, cadence, etc.) in a way that will enable a broad range of astrophysical investigations.
Core Community Survey Definition Working Groups: Coming Soon. These working groups provide a mechanism for the broader scientific community to discuss and collaborate in order to support and provide input into the work of the Roman Core Community Survey Definition Committees (e.g., by simulating of the impact of observational strategies on various science investigations, or by designing figures of merit or other metrics). The Roman Core Community Survey Definition Committees, one for each of Roman's Core Community Surveys, are composed of members of the science community who are charged with representing the breadth of science the community wants to see enabled with each Core Community Survey. The community survey committees are responsible for crafting potential survey implementations and evaluate them against science metrics, optimizing the observational strategy in order to maximize the science return from the survey, incorporating input from the community. The Core Community Survey Definition Working Groups are one avenue for the community to provide input to the committees.
