RAPID

RAPID (Roman Alerts Promptly from Image Differencing) is a NASA-funded Project Infrastructure Team for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, based at Caltech/IPAC. RAPID is built to deliver image differencing of every new calibrated Roman image, a public alert stream of transient and variable candidates carrying alert-driven forced-photometry histories, and public source catalogs.

Roman’s mission requirements include supernova cosmology and microlensing, but not other time-domain astronomy. RAPID fills that gap, extracting broader transient and variability science from surveys built for other purposes. Its mandate is to support time-domain science, not produce official science results. Its outputs are public, for the entire time-domain astronomy community.

RAPID project infrastructure team acknowledges NASA support under award 80NSSC24M0020 (program NNH22ZDA001N-ROMAN).

This site is the public reference for RAPID. Reference pages are updated in place: the System section states the design target the pipeline is built to, and the Products section, when it exists, states what is available. Posts in the log are dated and never revised. The site is being built up section by section.