NASA has awarded a contract extension to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, to continue acting as the Science Operations Center (SOC) for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The extension covers the period through launch, commissioning, and the first year of operations.

Roman is a NASA observatory that will study essential questions in a wide range of astrophysics topics, such as the evolution of stars, planets, and galaxies, in addition to probing dark energy and detecting thousands of new planets outside our solar system. With a launch commitment no later than May 2027, and launch currently planned for late 2026, Roman will have a five-year prime mission.

Roman is primarily a survey observatory, with some additional observations set aside to demonstrate the technology of a next-generation coronagraph instrument. Roman’s surveys are designed to address a number of key science themes. Up to 75% of its observing time during the first five years of operations will be dedicated to three core community surveys: the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey, the High-Latitude Time Domain Survey, and the Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey. Additional observing time is set aside for general astrophysics surveys that will be selected throughout the course of the observatory’s operations. Observing time will be made available to the astronomical community via a proposal process like that used to assign time on the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes.

These three core community surveys, which together are expected to enable a wide range of science investigations, have not yet been defined in detail. One of STScI’s new responsibilities under the contract will be to engage and coordinate the scientific community in that process.

“Designing those surveys will require critical input from the astronomical community, because you want to be able to satisfy the science requirements for the mission while also maximizing the other science that can be done with those data,” said Cristina Oliveira, deputy head of the Roman Mission Office at STScI.

The scientific community will have multiple opportunities to contribute to the design of the core community surveys observation planning. Astronomers have been invited to contribute short science pitches as well as more involved white papers describing the science that can be done with Roman. A structure of committees will be formed, which will gather input from the community through a variety of activities, including workshops and meetings, before providing final recommendations to the Roman Project in early 2025 for each of the three core community surveys.

“The Roman Space Telescope will provide unique capabilities that will yield scientific results across the full range of astrophysics. It is fully open to a broad community of users, and I am looking forward to their creative uses that will advance our knowledge of the cosmos,” said Nancy Levenson, interim director of STScI.

Besides engaging the scientific community in the definition of Roman’s core community surveys, STScI is also responsible for the systems that will schedule and archive all mission observations, and that will process the imaging data from the Wide Field Instrument (WFI).

“The contract extension will allow us to develop, commission, and operate the systems necessary to deliver science-ready data products,” said Roeland van der Marel, who led the Roman SOC during the mission formulation, design, and early development stages. “Furthermore, an innovative new cloud-based science platform will enable the astronomical community to further analyze these data products to make the scientific discoveries that Roman was designed for.”

The approximately $166 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract extension was issued as a sole-source procurement.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, foreign partners, and science teams comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is expanding the frontiers of space astronomy by hosting the science operations center of the Hubble Space Telescope, the science and mission operations centers for the James Webb Space Telescope, and the science operations center for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. STScI also houses the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) which is a NASA-funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, and is the data repository for the Hubble, Webb, Roman, Kepler, K2, TESS missions and more. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.