Tom Barclay
Community Science Opportunities with the Roman Space Telescope


Good morning, everyone.
Thanks for inviting me. And I think obviously the long term future of exoplanets is looking bright with flagship observatories on the horizon in terms of habitable worlds, but I think aerial mission and the upcoming flagship Roman mission shows that the nearer term future for Exp Planet science is.
Also extremely, extremely exciting and bright.
I'm going to talk to you about the Roman Space Telescope.
I have too many slides because I talked asked to talk about what's going on and the amount going on is staggering.
So one of the takeaways is there is an unbelievable amount of things going on with Roman right now and there's many sessions at this meeting and there's just lots to learn, lots to do and we're making great progress.
The kind of top line headline I want to put my conclusions and takeaways here is that Roman is making great progress and we expect to be ready.
Launch in 21/20/26 for a start of science operations post commissioning in the first half of 2027 and that's extremely exciting.
We've gone through numerous important reviews this week, or perhaps next week we hope to transition from the NASA Phase C to Phase D.
Phase D is the integration and test phase that ends with the end of commissioning.
So we're now in the phase of the mission that includes launch and commissioning.
So that's incredibly exciting.
We just completed a mission.
Our Mission operations review and there were no issues in that. So we're ready to proceed with our ground systems as well as our Space Flight hardware.
And that really is really making good progress.
A big milestone that's just occurred is the delivery of reports from our survey definition teams, and I'll go through what those surveys are. But those reports are now final and they're being.
And the next steps of the process.
To define what Romans major observing programs will look like has started.
And I'm going to move here so I can read my screen.
There's many, many engagement opportunities. If you're looking for opportunities to get funded, there are two big calls this year.
Yeah. One is out with the deadline in March.
The second is our first general investigation of program call coming out towards the end of this year.
There are, as a Roman science collaboration, which we're going to fully announce on Tuesday at the Roman town hall.
But I'm kind of soft mentioning it here and we have working group, so if you want to get involved in the Marin mission, make real tangible impact on the mission and what we do and what we observe and how we take that data. There are working groups partic.
I'll mention the calibration working group.
And then finally, in terms of hardware, all the major hardware components are now at got it and I've got some fantastic photos near the end of this that I'll probably have to go through fairly quickly.
Just to touch on what our mission objective is.
These are major mission objectives and I've put boxes around those that I think are exoplanet or exoplanet adjacent focused, and the top mission objective there for me is the absolutely for me the most important what is Roman space coscope.
Do we do wide field surveys in the infrared?
So there's lots of great science specific things we want to do, but our major goal is designing a great opportunity up observatory.
Taking fantastic new data that can survey the sky in infrared wavelengths, so obviously the next two bullets are cosmology focused.
It's fantastic science.
It's not exoplanet science.
I'm not going to touch upon it here, but the next one down is exoplanet census.
This is our big microlensing exoplanet program, and there's been touched upon some of this already.
We have a large general astrophysics program. This is where.
Both peer reviewed proposed.
Programs through the General Investigative program come in.
It's also programs that are defined by the community that aren't our kind of core mission goal science.
And there's one of these that I'll touch upon has already been selected, and I'm not going to talk too much in this talk about our chronograph technology demonstration.
Some of this was mentioned yesterday.
There's also experts in this program in this audience.
Max from the program is here.
Can answer more of your questions.
But to to meet these science objectives?
That we need to do, we have put together what our we think our observing program will look like.
So the majority of Romans observing plan will be pre selected survey programs that are defined by our science community.
So the three of these are the wide area survey. So this is single E park, but multiple colours and and spectroscopy of a large fraction of the sky.
We're talking thousands of square degrees.
A smaller survey with time domain component repeating the same field of order every five days and then a survey of the galactic bulge.
And this is where the exoplanet demographics program comes in. Looking at a few square degrees at very high stellar density regions, enabling detection of exoplanets.
Study of transiting exoplanets. Microlensing. Exoplanets. Stellar astrophysics.
Black holes all sorts of exciting science.
At least 25% of our science time is going to be to this general astrophysics program, which is other survey.
And then there's going to be a minimum of 90 days for a chronograph technology demonstration that will occur in the 1st 18 months of the mission.
So the way this is going to come together is that we have these three core community survey these collectively take up of order 75% of the time. They are the exact definition of that is to be defined. These reports from these committees have come in Prob.
The most exoplanet focused here is the galactic Time domain survey. The chairs of that committee are probably known to many people.
This audience, Jesse Christianson and Daniel Huber.
They've done a great job there.
And delivered that report. We're going to release these reports within the next, possibly next week. Maybe the week after, but this calendar month for everyone to read, there's a big, big caveat on that. And we're putting that caveat together before we release that. And that is the surve.
Definitions write these reports and they write these recommendations.
But these aren't what our final observing program. These go to a higher level committee called the Roman Observation Time Allocation Committee. The road TAC who've just got spun up and are just working now.
And they their job is to take these reports.
And combine them, merge them, work out where the conflicts are, and turn that into a full planned observing program.
So these these are ways to get involved with with the program that have have passed.
Now we they're all open calls. A community is leading these and defining these. But the results of these are really ways to you can really understand what what we're doing. And then I mentioned there is we've predefined one of our general astrophysics surveys and that's when we announ.
Earlier this year.
Last year, we're doing a galactic plane survey, and so this is the 4th program that I've already started studying the definition of and the galactic plane Definition committee is really up to speed and working hard on that definition process.
So the way this galactic plane survey came about is that we put out a call for White Papers asking the science community. Should we define one of our general astrophysics early so that the Community can organise together, come up with a plan, and announce that to the rest.
Of the science community before the general investigative program.
The primary call we put together a committee to assess these the committee with loud Voice said.
We really like community.
Idea of community defined large projects without a single Pi. We think you should do this and we think that the topic of it, the first one of these you do should be a galactic plane survey.
There's a great history of NASA using our missions to do galactic plane surveys.
The split Sir Glimpse program is really, truly ground breaking.
The committee is now defining the what those observations look like, as in exactly where will it point.
What filters do we use?
What cadence do we use?
Is there a time domain component?
The committee's working on that as we speak.
And will release their report in April. I think this year or at least early this year to read and that will also go to our rotat committee to to, to assess and look where they how that fits in with the with the other surveys.
I'm really excited about what Romans view of the galactic plane is going to is going to look like.
I was pressing the wrong button, that's why the way the we support the observations in these core community science observations is with what we call project infrastructure teams.
So these teams job isn't to do the science or lead the science. They are there to support the science community and support us in the mission and the science centres at Space Telescope and IPAC.
In being able to define and achieve achieve the science by bring pipelines around the algorithms.
Data supporting structure.
So there are five funded project infrastructure teams that we funded in 2023. Four of these are based on.
Mission goals from Astro 2010. A fifth one was selected, led out of Caltech by Mansi Caswell on transient astrophysics, called the Rapid Survey.
But I wanted to mention what we're doing with exoplanet focus projects and what we've funded so far. And because we've got lots of funding, calls come up.
Give you an idea of what was supported so far and hopefully inspire you to to try and get involved and get supported to do your own your own projects and lead them. The top ones. Just the infrastructure project infrastructure team to do the micro engine project led by.
Scott Gowdy there's also a transiting exoplanet large wide field science program led by Alisa Cantana and Robbie Wilson.
That I think there's a multiple talks on that they're looking for membership.
They want people to get involved.
This is a great way to.
Understand how to do translating exoplanets in Roman. There's modelling predicting we might find 100,000 new transiting exoplanets with a Roman Space Telescope.
I put this as exoplanet adjacent, but stellar rotation is very very important for people in this room.
There's a funded programmes led by Jamie Taylor and Zack Clayton studying what Roman can do for star rotation.
And there's also an Astro seismology program we're funded, led by Mike Pinsono.
I mentioned this multiple upcoming calls for proposals.
There's a lot on this slide, but the take away is there's a deadline in March of this year.
There's two categories of funding.
One is to do science activities to prepare for wide field science.
Using a wide field instrument, there's two sides of these and we expect to select approximately 12 programmes.
There's also a second call for membership of the coronagraph participation program.
Which currently has seven funded folks out the US and we're looking to bring on approximately another three, three teams to our chronograph participation program.
And very excitingly towards the end of this year, the first general astrophysics general investigative program, Paul goes out.
This will be led the management. This is led by IPAC building on their experience for things like Spitzer and other programs, and a big difference between what we're doing on Roman and the way that other UV.
Optical flagships. Astrophysics. Flagship work.
Is that our funding is very much on dominantly, not tied to Pi ING observation observing programmes.
Think of us much more in the mode of a test mission, in that you write science proposals for funding to do science observations, and most of that funding will go to observations for either data that is already in the archive or data that's planned to be taken through.
Either core community surveys.
General astrophysics surveys, so that's quite a change in how we think of how programs are funded here.
From what?
What people are used to there will also be this general astrophysic survey.
So you can propose new observations.
It's quite likely that in our first call for proposals, we'll prioritize programmes that benefit from being observed early.
An example of something that benefits from being observed early is something trying to do.
Say astronomy, where you want observations at the beginning of the mission and towards.
It's the end of the mission.
So you get along as a long baseline as as possible and in terms of funding, I don't have an exact number here, but our total budget for our general investigative program is commensurate with other astrophysics fly ships, which to say in real terms it's a substantial amount of.
Funding available for the science community to support science.
One of the great ways that you can get engaged and involved in Roman right now is through our working group.
I put a URL on there and I think these slides will go online.
We have this Roman forum which is a space that you sign up to and you have access to what all the working groups are.
You can sign up to the working groups.
There's lots of information behind this. This page on the structure and the format. These technical working groups.
One I wanted to mention, and I touched upon it earlier as a calibration working group, they have had a major product.
They've been developing, that's going to be out.
Very, very soon, which is what we call the touchstone fields.
So the touchstone fields are fields we observe very regularly.
We'll observe them throughout commissioning and then we'll observe them on a very regular cadence to aid in calibration, you know, with photometric calibration, spectroscopic calibration, and astrometric calibration of our mission.
So what this team's actually been doing is defining fields that are going to be observed and studied, probably better than any field in the sky.
And so when I talk about these teams making real tangible.
Benefits to NASA missions this this is a great example of what they've done.
And they're really, really crucial to what we do.
This is really a teaser slide because this is going to be announced on Tuesday at the Roman town hall, but we're forming the Roman science collaboration.
This is voluntary.
You don't have to be in this if you want to engage with Roman, but this is an opportunity to benefit from a large group of people all working together, all pushing with the same goals, all understanding the same rules for for publications for.
Working together for collaborations.
It's based on collaborations on missions like Fermi missions like Tess, others have had.
Voluntary opt in collaborations that have really benefited its members.
So we're forming that the Co spokespeople for this are Jessica Liu and David Weinberg.
So if you know them, reach out to them.
We'll hear more about this at the Roman town hall.
Right. Roman's big data and this is a slide that Rachel beaten created.
But it's fantastic explaining what we do.
Hubble's 30 Year Archive 172 terabytes Romans 5 Year archive 20,000 terabytes.
That means we eclipse Hubble's entire archive in about two weeks of data observations.
And actually we have very, very greatly eclipsed that already with integration and test data we've collected on the ground. Roman's data volume is like nothing.
Most of you have seen before, and that means that we need to think about doing science differently.
So something that is going to be rolled out publicly very soon, but is going through various stages of slow roll out to the community is what is now known as the Roman research Nexus, which previously known as the Roman science platform.
This is the way we expect most people to interact with Roman data.
It is. It looks like a Jupiter lab environment, but it sits on top of.
Cloud compute? Serious cloud compute.
So you have all the data from the mission there right next to where your compute, but it should feel like you're doing data analysis.
On your own computer and there's lots of tutorials and lots of ways to learn that, but those are thanks for everyone for coming for this meeting at the same time, there is your colleagues in a different meeting learning about the Roman research Nexus.
And they're kind of being used as our test testers to to learn what works, what doesn't, and.
What we need to improve on and how community's going to use this, this is a new thing for us and it's going to be a learning process on both sides, but I think we're very excited to see this kind of transition in how we do science.
I mean running out of time, so I'm going to be relatively quick.
The Community participation program.
This is the way that you the the chronograph will be organised.
The leadership is made-up of NASA folks, funded folks from the previous Rosa's call and from the future Rosas Call International Partners.
There's currently more than 50 members.
There's numerous working groups listed here if you're interested in these, reach out to the working group leads.
There's major engagement activities.
From them there's a sash of those here at AA S There's a a splinter session on Tuesday that would be great to attend.
They're announcing a Community interest survey and late and a release of a primer document. There's ways to get funded, and later this year there's going to be white paper calls.
The CPP is the way that the science community engages with the Roman croonagraph.
So that this is the place to to be involved in.
All right.
Very quickly, I'll go through Roman hardware status because it's very exciting.
This is a picture of what?
The Roman spacecraft looks like at the bottom you have a bus.
The step up from that you have an instrument carrier with the instruments in it.
Above that, you have the telescope surrounded by a barrel assembly and on top of that the the player aperture cover and solar arrays. His pictures of the spacecraft bus got it currently surrounded by an EMI thing.
Chamber on the right an instrument carrier.
So this was in September of this year.
This is the.
Installation and integration of the chronograph instrument.
The chronograph instrument on the right there is at the end of a long boom being inserted into the instrument carrier.
The instrument carrier is what holds the instruments in precise position on the right hand side.
There you can see a different angle of the CHRONOGRAPHIC instrument on the end of the boom.
So that was October.
The picture of it fully integrated, you can tell which pictures I took and which pictures the press images because they're not well, white balanced. If I took them.
So this is what I took, but there's chronographed instrument integrated into the.
Instrument carrier the telescope arrived in late November last last year, so this is a picture of the telescope as it arrived being worked on.
Had various rollovers and changed the angle of spacecraft.
The the telescope was at whilst they took it out of its.
Carrier that it came from Rochester on to to to, to Maryland.
So this is two more pictures of the telescope there and and the one on the left is just a telescope. The one on the right is the telescope integrated with the instrument carrier.
So in the right picture, there's the chronograph instrument, the instrument carrier and the telescope.
This is the integration in December. About a month ago, of the wide field instrument into the instrument carrier.
So at the end of that and the right picture, you have the integrated payload assembly, the instrument carrier 2 instruments and the telescope.
All right, very quickly.
This is the integrated payload assembly. You spacecraft bus payload assembly.
You get the final spacecraft and then this is the final spacecraft.
And this was as of late last year.
The full skipper spacecraft integrated payload assembly.
We'll go through environmental testing this year.
All right, I'll put my final slides.
And thanks everyone.