Partners

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, and a science team 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.

Jupiter dominates the black background of space. The image is a composite, and shows Jupiter in enhanced color, featuring the planet’s famous Great Red Spot, which appears white with light pink around the edges. The planet is striated with swirling horizontal stripes of green, periwinkle, light pink, and cream. Horizontally across the equator is a wide cream-colored band, whose height extends about 1/7 of the planet. This is the planet’s equatorial zone. The stripes across the planet interact and mix at their edges. Along both of the northern and southern poles, the planet glows in green. Bright red auroras glow just above the planet’s surface at both poles.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

JPL is building Roman’s Coronograph Instrument technology demonstration and is involved with detector validation and developing the Coronagraph’s science capabilities. The Coronagraph will provide the first in-space demonstration of technologies needed for future missions to image and characterize rocky planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. By demonstrating these tools in an integrated end-to-end system and enabling scientific observations, NASA will validate performance models and provide the pathway for potential future flagship missions.

Caltech/IPAC

Caltech/IPAC is home to the Roman Science Support Center. It is responsible for Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument operations, high-level data processing of spectroscopy data from the WFI, high-level data processing for WFI microlensing, and community engagement for Roman exoplanet science and wide-field spectroscopy. Caltech/IPAC will also implement the proposal solicitation and grant management for the General Astrophysics Program which includes observations outside the mission’s core surveys, theory, and archival investigations. Caltech/IPAC also curates telescope and instrument parameters and simulation outputs, and engages the greater scientific community in preparing for science with Roman.  

Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)

STScI is Roman’s Science Operations Center (SOC). The SOC is responsible for the mission’s observation scheduling system, WFI data processing system for the imaging mode, high-level science products for all imaging, and the mission’s entire data archive. STScI has performed pre-formulation, formulation, and design activities for Roman, and continues its role in science operations system engineering, design, science research support, scientific community engagement, and public outreach.