An Enthusiastic Community Response to Roman’s Inaugural Proposal Call

Roman promises to open a vast new discovery space with its panoramic field as well as sharp imaging and spectroscopic capabilities. Judging by the tremendous response to the inaugural Cycle 1 Call, the astronomical community is actively preparing a wide range of projects that aim to change our view of the universe. The demand for Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope observations and data analysis is remarkably high, both in terms of the number of proposals submitted and the ambitious scope of the time requests.

We received 374 proposal submissions requesting a total of 14,386 hours of telescope time. With up to 1,200 hours available for this cycle, this represents an oversubscription rate of roughly 12 to 1. The Cycle 1 submissions reflect a strong interest in both utilizing the telescope and mining its expansive datasets.  The proposals break down into the following categories and sizes:

• By Size: The community submitted 122 Small, 165 Medium, and 87 Large proposals.
• By Type: Of the total submissions, 309 proposals focus on data analysis, theoretical investigations, or laboratory astrophysics, while 65 proposals include requests for new Roman observations.

The submissions span a wide variety of astronomical topics, as illustrated in the accompanying pie chart, which display the distribution of proposals submitted across the various science categories.

The Roman user community is robust and global. The Cycle 1 submitted proposals include 2,277 unique investigators, representing 15 countries and 32 U.S. states. These investigators come from a broad range of institutions, highlighting the widespread, international excitement to utilize Roman's groundbreaking capabilities.