The Roman Space Telescope Science Operation Center: Simulation Tools

NASA’s next flagship mission, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), is on track to launch in late 2026. The Science Operation Center (SOC) at the Space Telescope Science Institute is supporting the astronomical community in exploring the capabilities of Roman through the development of a suite of simulation tools. Here we present news and updates on currently available tools: (1) Pandeia is a powerful exposure-time calculator that allows calculations of a host of observational settings and configurations; (2) WebbPSF’s Roman module produces instrumental Roman point-spread functions with a large suite of tunable parameters; (3) STIPS, the Space Telescope Imaging Product Simulator, can generate complex astronomical scenes based on up-to-date models of the instruments and detector characteristics.