The Roman project has adopted a single-phase proposal submission process for Cycle 1, and Dual Anonymous Peer Review (DAPR) for the proposal review process. All submitted proposals are expected to be compliant with DAPR policies and include an anonymized science justification portion as well as a separate team expertise document. All proposals must be submitted through the Roman Telescope Proposal System (RTPS). The general information about the proposal and the proposal team is entered directly into RTPS. The science justification and the team expertise documents must be submitted as PDF file attachments in RTPS. 

There is no limit to the number of proposals that may be submitted by a Principal Investigator or by Co-Investigators. The proposal can be resubmitted or updated an unlimited number of times before the proposal due date. Proposals should not contain classified or controlled unclassified information, nor should they depend on access or use of classified information or facilities for any portion of the proposed activities. The Principal Investigator may withdraw a proposal from consideration at any time prior to the completion of the selection process by notifying the SSC via the Help Desk.

Cycle 1 science justification and team expertise files must be prepared with the provided Cycle 1 templates. The templates are available in LaTeX and Microsoft Word formats and can be found in the Proposal Templates section. Proposals that do not strictly adhere to the Cycle 1 templates will be declined. Proposals found in violation of DAPR rules will be flagged as non-compliant and disqualified without review.

Proposal Submission Deadline

Proposals must be submitted electronically on the RTPS website by the due date indicated on the Cycle 1 Call for Proposals page.

Input into the Roman Telescope Proposal System

General Information 

General information about the proposal and proposal team is entered into RTPS and then submitted to the Roman SSC via the RTPS website. This information can be saved to a local computer as a JavaScript JSON file. When the proposer is ready to submit the proposal, they should upload the JSON file, the science justification and team expertise PDF attachments, and, if requesting new observations, an .apt file (see the APT section below), to RTPS and submit. After the initial submission, all the proposal elements can be updated separately or all at once as many times as necessary prior to the proposal deadline.

Proposals must include one science category. This information is used to distribute the proposals to the panels for the review. Please select the science category that best describes the proposal. Proposal category must also be specified: Small, Medium, or Large. An abstract with a character limit of 2000 should be entered on the proposal cover sheet.

Primary Investigator (PI) and Co-Investigator (Co-I) information such as contact email and institutional affiliation need to be entered into RTPS. There is no limit to the number of Co-Is that may appear on a proposal. The PI may also designate an additional Technical Contact for purposes of communications about technical issues with the science centers, or designate Co-Is as Co-PI for the purpose of grant administration.

Observation Specifications

For proposals requesting new observations, the observation details are specified in the Roman Astronomer's Proposal Tool (APT) and should be saved as an .apt file. On the RTPS proposal submission page, check the box indicating that the proposal contains new observations. This triggers three new entry boxes to be filled in: Hours, Summary of Observations, and APT Observation Parameters. Enter the number of requested hours based on the charged time calculated by APT. A summary of the observations should be provided on the cover sheet. The summary should detail the total observation time requested (charged time computed by APT) for each observing mode requested as well as the anticipated observing strategy. Any generic targets being proposed (e.g. as Targets of Opportunity or ToO) must also be summarized. The .apt file from APT should be attached in the Observation Parameters box on RTPS.

Proposal Page Limits 

Templates in LaTeX and Microsoft Word formats are provided in the Proposal Templates section in the RDox and MUST be used to prepare the Scientific Justification  and Team Expertise PDF attachments. Proposers may not alter the margins or font sizes in the templates. Proposals not using the Cycle 1 templates will be declined.

The page limits for each section in the Scientific Justification PDF attachment depend on the proposal category. Relevant page limits for each proposal category are summarized in the table below. Proposals that exceed the page limits may be flagged for the peer reviewers as non-compliant. The page limits for proposals are:

General Investigator Science Justification

All General Investigator proposals, regardless of type, must include the following sections in the Science Justification document: science case, data analysis plan, and implementation plan. An additional technical justification should be included in proposals requesting new observations. The information must be added as a single PDF file attachment to RTPS. 

Proposals will be provided to each panel and TAC reviewer as PDF files. It is the responsibility of the proposing team to ensure that their science justification PDF file is legible, not password protected, and DAPR compliant.

Science Plan

Proposals must include a clear and complete statement of the investigation’s science goals. The science plan and its underlying rationale should be readily comprehensible to review panels consisting of observational and theoretical astronomers with a broad range of scientific expertise. Proposals should describe the scientific impact of the proposed investigation and explain how it will provide a lasting benefit for current or future observational programs with Roman. 

Analysis Plan 

The analysis plan should describe the path from observations to science. It should discuss the extent to which the data contribute towards achieving the stated scientific goals of the investigation, and the extent to which data analysis would be performed as part of the project. Proposals must reference the relevant Roman surveys to determine their relevance to Roman science, unless they are pure observing proposals of new General Astrophysics Surveys (see below). This section for a theory proposal should discuss Roman data that will be used to develop or inform models or theory, and the types of Roman observations that will benefit from the proposed investigation. 

All proposals must also include a quantitative description of the sky coverage and optical elements ("filters") of the planned Roman observations. Check the observing plan schedule and the data product availability section of RDox for more details. To find out more about how the Roman data will be processed, more information about WFI data calibration can be found on the data pipelines pages. 

Implementation Plan 

The implementation plan needs to describe how the investigations will implement and achieve the proposed science goals as related to Roman data. The plan should include the category bin for Nexus credit, how the results of the proposed investigation will be made available to the astronomical community, and on what time scale publications are expected.

Detailed cost plans are not required for Roman proposals given the use of Research Support Agreements as the funding vehicle. Instead, this section should include a high-level description of the planned work and how the requested funds will be utilized, e.g. post-doc/graduate student support. If multiple institutions are involved, the allocation of work among the investigators should be described in an anonymized fashion. The proposal category (Small, Medium, and Large) should be commensurate with the scope of work outlined in the proposal.

Technical Justification (for proposals requesting new observations only)

Proposals with an observational component must include a clear statement of the observing plan and describe the necessity of the new observations to achieve the stated science goals. Proposers should address why Roman’s capabilities are uniquely important in advancing knowledge in the proposed area(s) of research. 

The technical justification must include a description of the survey footprint and tiling (total area, mosaic layout, and dithering), field selection criteria, and observing modes. A summary of the exposure scheme and temporal sampling (cadence and number of repeats) at the survey level should also be included and it should be highlighted how these choices enable the science goals of the proposal. Special requirements must be explained and justified. For imaging, the required depth per band (1-sigma noise and/or 5-sigma point-source limits), filters, and expected target magnitudes/surface brightness should be detailed.

In the case of spectroscopic observations, images of the same field in at least one filter are required for pipeline processing. However, two or more filters and roll angles are highly recommended for optimal results. The imaging and spectroscopic observations do not have to be contemporaneous. For the High Latitude Time Domain or Galactic Plane Survey, observers can request grism and/or prism observations of areas with imaging observations expected in the first two years, provided the spectroscopic data is not part of the planned survey, and the imaging data meets the technical and scientific needs of the proposal. 

Roman data are expected to be calibrated to highly precise levels. If proposers of new observations required special calibrations above and beyond those provided by the project (see the calibration plan here), they should be fully justified, and included in the requested time using the resources estimators within the Roman APT. For example, projects performing photometric or astrometric measurements must specify the accuracy levels needed for those measurements. The observing time requests must be based on the charged time resource estimates calculated with the Roman Astronomer's Proposal Tool (APT). 

Duplicate Observations

Observations proposed as part of a GI program should not duplicate those specified by previously approved core community or general astrophysics surveys, unless an appropriate scientific motivation and a corresponding explicit justification is included in the proposal. Examples of possible scientifically justified duplications include repeat observations of variable or moving targets. Observations flagged as duplicates will be reviewed and evaluated by the review panel. The Appendix: Additional Observing Guidelines contains information about what constitutes a duplication and the procedures followed to identify duplications. 

Special Requirements

APT allows for observers to input special requirements needed to constrain observations. These requirements can be used for example to specify observations that cannot be interrupted, to specify that an observation must start in a specific date range or start after another observation by a certain amount of time, or to specify than an observation must be executed at a certain orientation, or that an observation is background limited and must be executed in a low background time frame, etc.  

Currently, proposers cannot use the APT special requirements to specify that observations are linked together over a time period shorter than 4 days (i.e. Obs. 2 executes after Obs. 1 by less than 4 days). Proposers for whom this is important should reach out to the Roman Help Desk for help on implementing a workaround. More information can be found in the RDox.

Proposers are advised to minimize constraints as much as possible and request them only if strictly required by the science goals. Constraints reduce telescope scheduling efficiency and are likely to create scheduling conflicts with other programs. For this reason, all special requirements used in the proposal need to be thoroughly justified.

Calibration Observations

The Roman project establishes and maintains the calibration of the WFI instrument to levels specified in the Calibration Plan, which details WFI calibration activities that are planned to be executed during nominal operations. Following commissioning, routine calibration observations will be performed following the calibration plan. All data obtained as part of WFI calibration observations will be publicly accessible in MAST and proposers can request funding to analyze data from, e.g., the Touchstone fields, which will be observed regularly throughout the mission. (While the specific details of the calibration plan may change after commissioning, the pre-defined Touchstone Files are reference fields and are not likely to change.) 

No special calibrations may be requested as part of new General Astrophysics Surveys in Cycle 1.

Other Contents

Figures and Tables

There are no limits on the numbers of figures and tables in the PDF attachment, and they may be interspersed in the text. However, the font size in the figures and figure captions must be respected such that any text or labels inside figures are legible, and the total page limit must be observed.

References

References should be listed at the end of the proposal and do not count against the page limits. Reference callouts in the text must be written in numerical format, e.g. [1], with each number corresponding to the full citation in the reference list. It is recommended that callouts appear in numerical order in the text and that the reference list is presented in numerical order to simplify navigation between the proposal and the reference list for reviewers.

Team Expertise Document

As part of the proposal submission, proposers should attach a "Team Expertise " PDF file in RTPS. This section should provide a description of the expertise, background, and roles of key team members, as they relate to the science proposed. This section should be limited in length to two pages; for most proposals, two or three paragraphs will suffice. For proposals with a large number of Co-Investigators, it is not necessary to report on the qualifications of every team member, nor is it necessary to provide a bio of all the team members – just the top contributors to the project will suffice. 

Templates in LaTeX and Microsoft Word formats are provided on the Proposal Templates section in the RDox for the creation of this document. They should follow the same formatting guidelines as the Science Justification PDF document above, specifically, adopt a font size no smaller than 12pt, and have one inch margins on all sides as printed on a 8.5 × 11-inch paper.

Roman Astronomers’ Proposal Tool (APT)

Proposals requesting new General Astrophysics Surveys must use APT to define their observations. The  Roman APT user guide provides information on how to specify Roman WFI observations. It is the responsibility of the proposer to ascertain the completeness and correctness of the elements in their APT file.

Proposers should save the finalized observations plan as an .apt file to be uploaded to RTPS, in addition to the science justification and team expertise PDF attachments as part of the proposal submission.