Execute a balanced science program based on discipline-specific guidance from the national academies of sciences engineering and medicine administration priorities and direction from congress

NASA Shared Services Center awarded California Institute of Technology $379,029 on November 1, 2025, under the Science program (CFDA 43.001) to execute a balanced science program based on discipline-specific guidance from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and administration priorities and direction from Congress.

The award supports work performed in Pasadena, California, with a period of performance through October 31, 2027. The funding is structured as a project grant, the assistance type commonly used for time-limited research initiatives within NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), a division of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., receives a sub-award of $379,029 (obligated August 6, 2026) to lead a comprehensive science and engineering program searching for and characterizing high-redshift transients in Roman Wide Field Imager data. The work encompasses development of an end-to-end pipeline including data stacking, discovery, alerts, characterization, and prioritization for follow-up campaigns. In the first year, STScI will explore feasibility of individual modules supporting post-alert classification and prioritization, including host photometric redshift refinement, host property derivation from spectral energy distribution fits, light curve fitting, high-redshift and low-metallicity model spectral template adaptation, and color-magnitude analyses. Postdoctoral researcher David Coulter will lead module testing efforts. In the second year, Coulter will integrate these modules into an anomaly detection algorithm using advanced computing techniques to identify outliers indicative of high-redshift transients, and develop a flowchart determining optimal follow-up observations based on transient properties and telescope resource availability.

Participate as a key partner and enabler in the age