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 Definition Working Group: Coming Soon. This soon-to-be formed Working Group will provide a forum for discussions of survey designs, associated simulations, and science motivators, including but not limited to Roman's community-defined surveys (the Core Community Surveys and a General Astrophysics Galactic Plane Survey).
