The Roman Space Telescope Science Operations Center: News and updates

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) launch readiness is planned for October 2026. With expected data rates 500-times larger than HST’s, and 23-times larger than JWST’s, Roman ushers in new challenges in data handling, processing, and archiving. These data rates are a result of Roman’s Wide Field Imager (WFI) providing HST-like spatial resolution in wavelengths ranging from 0.48 to 2.3 microns, over a field of view 200-times larger than HST’s at 0.271 sq. deg. The Science Operations Center (SOC), which is housed at the Space Telescope Science Institute, is responsible for building the planning, scheduling, and data processing system for WFI. The SOC is responsible for providing additional data products for the WFI Imaging mode as well. Moreover, all data products will be made available for the community, including science-ready image-level and catalog-level data products. Here we provide an overview of the SOC and the latest SOC news and updates, including data management, RDox, SOC Help Desk, the SOC newsletter, the Roman 2023 Community science conference, and several technical reports documenting the SOC’s contributions to the overall progress of the mission.