Simulating and optimizing the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope exoplanet survey

Roman is the next NASA flagship mission after JWST, at a cost of $4.3 billion. It will launch in late 2026 and will spend around 25% of its 5-year nominal mission on the Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey (GBTDS). Transits in the Roman Exoplanet Survey (TRExS) is a NASA selected survey to search for transiting exoplanets within the GBTDS dataset. TRExS is expected to find 60000 to 200000 transiting exoplanets, increasing the number currently known by more than an order of magnitude. Kerins leads Working Group 2 (survey optimization and exoplanet demographics) for TRExS and this project will form a major contribution to the preparatory work of the group. The project will involve building a Galactic simulation of exoplanetary systems in order to assess the sensitivity of Roman exoplanet yield to demographic parameters including host separation, planet-host mass/size ratio, eccentricity and mutual inclination.