Joint Survey Processing of Euclid, Rubin and Roman: Final Report (2008.10663v1)

Abstract: The Euclid, Rubin/LSST and Roman (WFIRST) projects will undertake flagship optical/near-infrared surveys in the next decade. By mapping thousands of square degrees of sky and covering the electromagnetic spectrum between 0.3 and 2 microns with sub-arcsec resolution, these projects will detect several tens of billions of sources, enable a wide range of astrophysical investigations by the astronomical community and provide unprecedented constraints on the nature of dark energy and dark matter. The ultimate cosmological, astrophysical and time-domain science yield from these missions will require joint survey processing (JSP) functionality at the pixel level that is outside the scope of the individual survey projects. The JSP effort scoped here serves two high-level objectives: 1) provide precise concordance multi-wavelength images and catalogs over the entire sky area where these surveys overlap, which accounts for source confusion and mismatched isophotes, and 2) provide a science platform to analyze concordance images and catalogs to enable a wide range of astrophysical science goals to be formulated and addressed by the research community. For the cost of about 200WY, JSP will allow the U.S. (and international) astronomical community to manipulate the flagship data sets and undertake innovative science investigations ranging from solar system object characterization, exoplanet detections, nearby galaxy rotation rates and dark matter properties, to epoch of reionization studies. It will also allow for the ultimate constraints on cosmological parameters and the nature of dark energy, with far smaller uncertainties and a better handle on systematics than by any one survey alone.