Observing program
What Roman will observe
The Core Community Surveys as recommended by ROTAC, April 2025. Each survey links its source.
5
Programs
9
Defined tiers
8
Named fields
5,141.2 deg²
Footprint defined
603.32 days
Time allocated
0
Survey products
Survey design only — no exposure schedule is published this far ahead. Products land at MAST with no proprietary period, and will list under their tier here.
The surveys haven't started
MAST already lists 141,156 commissioning products from Roman, but none belong to a survey yet. Leave an address and I'll write when the first survey data reaches the archive, not before.
Core Community Survey
High Latitude Wide Area Survey
Dark energy, via weak lensing and galaxy clustering
Four nested tiers over more than a tenth of the sky. Wide tiers supply the galaxy shapes weak lensing needs; deep tiers calibrate them and reach the earliest galaxies.
Core Community Survey
High Latitude Time Domain Survey
Dark energy, via Type Ia supernovae
180.32 days total
Source ↗Two fields revisited every few days to catch supernovae rising and fading, with prism spectroscopy to classify them. Target: ~25,000 Type Ia below redshift 2.
Core Community Survey
Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey
The exoplanet census, via microlensing
440 days across the 5-year mission
Source ↗Six fields toward the Galactic centre, imaged every twelve minutes for weeks at a time. Microlensing events are brief and unrepeatable — the cadence is the experiment.
General Astrophysics
General Astrophysics Surveys
Everything else — community-proposed science
25.5% of science observing time
Source ↗A quarter of science time, awarded competitively through open Calls for Proposals. Which programs run is decided by peer review, not yet a matter of record.
No tiers or fields are defined for this program — by design. Which observations run is decided competitively, not fixed in advance.
Technology demonstration
Coronagraph Technology Demonstration
Prove on-orbit starlight suppression for future missions
A technology demonstration: deformable mirrors suppress a star's light to prove the contrast a future mission needs to image an Earth-like planet.
No tiers or fields are defined for this program — by design. Which observations run is decided competitively, not fixed in advance.