Wide-Field Science – Large
Pamela Marcum / NASA – Ames Research Center, PI
Deep imaging is the next frontier for many studies in galaxy evolution and cosmology, providing unprecedented views of ultra-low surface brightness realms of the universe that are thousands of times dimmer than the sky background, including stellar galactic halo structure, intracluster light, and the traces of galaxy assembly (tidal tails, stellar streams, shells, faint satellites). Detector sensitivity is a double-edged sword: while enhancements facilitate detection, they also result in a dramatic rise of systematic biases such as flat-fielding residuals, scattered light of bright objects in the field of view, and loss of extended sources due to sky over-subtraction. The objective of this proposal is to develop, test, and implement a complete suite of low surface brightness processing tools for the analysis of space imaging observations that will minimize the undesirable gradients in images caused by these sources. The proposed application of these tools is the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. These methods will improve the photometric calibration and maximize the quality of the data product, enabling a new range of science objectives beyond the original mission. The proposed pipeline will be developed and tested with a set of end-to-end simulations of Roman/WFI mosaics based on cosmological simulations that include the complexity of high-z objects and local universe objects. We will implement these tools as additional modules to support observations of the astronomical community with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.