Who We Are
Our Team is comprised of scientists, faculty, admins, postdocs, and students from the US and abroad.
Much of the PITs work focuses on delivering what will become the first ever dedicated gravitational
microlensing survey from a space-based observatory. The survey will discover thousands of bound exoplanets
through high-cadence monitoring of transiting and microlensing signals. The survey will also discover many
free-floating planets, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, and isolated black holes toward the center of the galaxy.
What We Do
Our primary purpose is to develop the infrastructure required to plan, execute, and extract cold exoplanet
demographics from the RGES. Specifically, we are working to (1) confirm the five level-1 RGES
science requirements, (2) improve the microlensing event rate and yield calculations by improving input
Galactic models, (3) develop and test the prototype photometry and astrometry pipeline, event detection pipeline,
lightcurve modeling pipeline, and detection efficiency (or completeness) pipeline, with the goal of making these
publicly-available and user-friendly, and (4) develop the occurrence rate formalism and methodology. In order to test
and refine the photometry and astrometry pipeline, we are also developing detailed image simulations that reproduce, as
faithfully as possible, the real images obtained by the Roman Wide Field Instrument (WFI).
Survey Design | Science Cases | Data Products
Our infrastructure work aims to support and enhance the full ecosystem of the Roman mission. We actively work with the Community Science Collaboration(s) relevant to the GBTDS, as well as the Roman Science Centers and project office in general. We plan to make our exoplanet yield simulation tools publicly available and user-friendly, so that those interested in doing science with GBTDS data can assess how the survey parameters affect their science yield, as well as that of the RGES.
Codes, Tools, & Resources
The RGES PIT has developed many software tools and other codes related to Roman and microlensing in general. Some of these codes are hosted on the RGES PIT public Github repository.
You can learn about all of the available tools and more on the Tools page. There is also a Resources page with detailed information on the observatory, mission requirements & goals, and background material on gravitational microlensing.
Funding Acknowldgement
The work of the RGES PIT is generously supported by NASA.
