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 WGs are dedicated towards optimizing and calibrating specific aspects of Roman’s Wide Field Instrument (WFI). Calibration Working Group: A forum for discussion on issues concerning performance and data quality of the WFI. As part of this work, the WG will: maintain knowledge of expected calibration accuracies; follow ground tests and support evaluation of their results as appropriate; Develop on-orbit calibration plan tailored to meeting Mission science objectives, including resource estimates; Create ad-hoc study teams to address specific questions (e.g., RCS performance requirements). The WGwill provide a venue for members of the broader science community to engage in discussions of, and provide feedback regarding, the needed capabilities, scope, and accessibility of calibrating the WFI instrument. External Synergies Working Group: A forum for providing information on efforts to maximize synergies between Roman’s surveys and other current and upcoming facilities and surveys, and enabling discussion of opportunities to realize such synergies. Observation Strategies Working Group: A forum for discussions of survey designs, associated simulations, and science motivators. It provides a mechanism for the scientific community to discuss and collaborate in order to explore the technical and scientific aspects of planning surveys with Roman’s Wide-Field Instrument (WFI), including but not limited to Roman’s community-defined surveys (the Core Community Surveys and a General Astrophysics Galactic Plane Survey). The WG will provide a forum to explore the most efficient use of the observatory when planning surveys and to discuss issues and proposed solutions related to the planning and scheduling of WFI surveys. Photo-z Working Group: A forum on discussion on how to best calculate photo-z for catalog products. Simulations Working Group: A forum for discussion of all issues related to the simulation of astrophysical data from the WFI. As part of this work, the WG will discuss: the creation of astrophysically- and cosmologically-motivated observational scenes; the mechanisms, processes, tools, and technical specifications needed for translating those scenes into realistic mock WFI data; and the capabilities of simulation tools being developed by the Science Operations Center (SOC) and the Science Support Center (SSC). The WG also provides a forum for the discussion of using simulated data to develop, test and refine data processing algorithms and to organize and coordinate data challenges. The WG will provide a venue for members of the broader science community to engage in discussions of, and provide feedback regarding, the needed capabilities, scope, and accessibility of simulated WFI data. Software Working Group: A forum for discussion of all issues related to the processing, distribution and analysis of the data from the WFI. 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. Time Domain Working Group: A forum for discussion of all issues related to enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of Roman’s time-domain science. As part of this work, the WG will: communicate time-domain strategies amongst various teams; avoid redundant efforts; optimize time-domain science techniques, including PSF-matching, image-differencing, template construction, source detection, catalog matching, and forced photometry; and refine workflow managers, alert systems, database tools, platform strategies, and machine learning datasets tailored to time-domain science.