RGES PIT stands for the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team. Formed in 2023, our NASA-funded team is building the software and human infrastructure required to successfully execute the exoplanet component of the GBTDS. The 2020 Decadal Survey states that Roman is “the only platform in the coming decades that can produce a statistical census of planetary occurrence as a function of orbital separation and mass, from terrestrials to gas giants, beyond 1 AU”.

The exoplanet survey will make use of Roman’s wide-field instrument (WFI): The RGES PIT has four major scientific and programmatic objectives:

  • Confirm and/or reconfirm the five level-1 RGES science requirements which are:
    • RGES shall be capable of measuring the mass function of exoplanets with masses in the range 1 M_earth < m < 30 M_jupiter and orbital semi-major axes ≥ 1 AU to better than 15% per decade in mass.
    • RGES shall be capable of measuring the frequency of bound exoplanets with masses in the range 0.1 M_earth < m < 0.3 M_earth to better than 25%.
    • RGES shall be capable of determining the masses of, and distances to, host stars of 40% of the detected planets with a precision of 20% or better.
    • RGES shall be capable of measuring the frequency of free floating planetary-mass objects in the Galaxy from Mars to 10 Jupiter masses. If there is 1 M_earth free-floating planet per star, measure this frequency to better than 25%.
    • RGES shall be capable of estimating η_earth (the frequency of planets orbiting FGK stars with mass ratio and estimated projected semimajor axis within 20% of the Earth-Sun system) to a precision of 0.2 dex via extrapolation from larger and longer-period planets.
  • Improve the microlensing event rate and yield calculations by improving the input Galactic models, incorporating new measurements of the near-infrared event rate obtained by the PRIME survey
  • 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
  • Develop the occurrence rate formalism and methodology.

Click through for more details on the Team, RGES Design, or RGES Science.