Current time at conference location: 6:31 pm CT
Session ID
242
Summary
Set to launch in late 2026, the Roman Space Telescope is designed to open entirely new doors in the fields of cosmology and exoplanet demographics as part of its planned Core Community Surveys. However, the combination of Roman’s astrometric precision, survey sensitivity, and mapping speed also make it ideally suited for surveying broad swaths of the Milky Way’s disk. Uniformly surveying the Galactic plane and bulge with Roman would significantly expand its scientific impact in the fields of stellar populations, star formation, the interstellar medium, and Galactic structure and dynamics, among many others. Roman holds the potential to image tens of billions of stars in heavily dust-enshrouded regions across the Milky Way, enabling dramatic Galactic science with even a single epoch. With multiple epochs, Roman can obtain proper motions, complementing Gaia in heavily-obscured and/or confused regions and acting as a precursor for a potential near-infrared Gaia mission. In this special session, we will bring together the community interested in General Observer investigations of the Milky Way plane with Roman to highlight the broad range of Galactic science cases and outline the survey design factors (coverage, filters, epochs) necessary to achieve them. Attendees will gain an understanding of i) current efforts to design and implement a Galactic plane survey with Roman, ii) the synergies between Roman and complementary photometric, astrometric, and spectroscopic surveys of the plane on the horizon, and iii) ways to be involved in community-driven efforts for organizing a Roman Galactic plane survey. In addition to a series of short talks by subject matter experts, the session will include a thirty minute panel discussion with attendees.

Design Considerations for a Roman Galactic Plane Survey

2:15 PM CT - 2:30 PM CT
Program Number: 242.02
Roberta Paladini, Caltech/IPAC; Robert Benjamin, University of Madison-Whitewater ; Gail Zasowski, University of Utah; Catherine Zucker, CfA; Sean Carey, Caltech/IPAC; David Nataf, JHU; Dante Minniti, Universidad Andres Bello.