Technical Memo: The impact of Nancy Grace Roman Telescope's default image processing on the detectability of moving Solar system objects
Joseph Masiero
Published: 2025/9/24
Abstract
The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is scheduled to launch in 2026 to conduct a wide-field survey of the sky at near-infrared wavelengths. Although Roman is unable to track objects moving at non-sidereal rates, there is recent interest in the potential capability of the telescope to support planetary defense by tracking and characterizing asteroids and comets (Holler et al, 2025, arXiv:2508.14412). However, the standard pipeline image processing scheme that the mission is planning to implement for the majority of its survey data will preferentially reject flux from all moving objects during the process of cosmic ray rejection. Here we describe the impact of the default Wide Field Imager (WFI) processing on moving object detection, and possible mitigations that could be employed to recover moving object observations.