The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is designed to be capable of a set of notional observing programs that form Roman’s design reference mission, and whose execution would fulfill the mission’s top level science objectives.
There are two flavors of observing programs on Roman. These include the Core Community Surveys and General Astrophysics Surveys, undertaken with the Wide Field Instrument (WFI). Funding to work with Roman data, will be competed and selected through future peer reviews. Additionally, a set of technology demonstration observations will be undertaken with the Coronagraph Instrument.
All Roman observations will be publicly available with no period of exclusive access.
General Astrophysics Surveys
There will be opportunities for the general astronomy community to competitvely propose for Roman survey observations. Details are available at General Astrophysics Surveys.
Core Community Surveys
The Core Community Surveys are the High Latitude Wide Area Survey; the High Latitude Time Domain Survey; and the Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey. Links below describe the concepts for these surveys used in the Design Reference Mission.
The actual implementation of Roman’s core surveys are being defined through an open, community-driven process.
All Roman observations will be publicly available with no period of exclusive access.
Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey
High Latitude Wide Area Survey
High Latitude Time Domain Survey
Technology Demonstration
The Coronagraph Instrument on Roman will be a technology demonstation as a pathway to the Habitable Worlds Observatory that will directly image Earth-like planets around other stars. Currently it is expected to be sensitive to a contrast of 10^-8 around a V=5 magnitude stars. For more information, see: CGI
Summary of Notional Observing Programs for the Prime Mission
| Notional Survey | Target region | Primary spectral elements | On-sky time in notional survey plan |
| Galactic Bulge Time Domain (Core Community Survey) |
2 deg2 in a low-extinction area near Galactic center | WFI (W149 filter, occasional use of other filters) | ~ 13 months |
| High Latitude Wide Area Survey (Core Community Survey) |
Extragalactic sky, ~ 2000 deg2 | WFI (Y106, J129, H158, F184, and Grism) | ~ 24 months |
| High Latitude Time Domain (Core Community Survey) |
5-20 deg2 in the continuous field of regard | WFI (TBD filters + Prism) | ~ 6 months |
| General Astrophysics Surveys | Full sky is available | WFI (All elements) | ~ 15 months |
| Coronagraph Instrument Tech Demo Observations | Selected nearby stars | Coronagraph Instrument | ~ 3 months |