Call for Proposals for Key Projects to use the LCOGT 1m and 2m telescope networks
Semester dates and deadline
The 2014A semester runs from April 1 to September 30 , 2014 . The 2014B semester runs from October 1, 2014 to March 31, 2015.
LCOGT is planning to dedicate up to 50% of its 1-meter and 2-meter telescope time starting in semester 2014A to key projects. Key projects are large, coherent observing programs designed to take maximum advantage of the unique attributes of the LCOGT network to address important astrophysical problems. Our goal is to highlight for the world the best science that can be done with the LCOGT network. It is anticipated that key projects will have a minimum duration of one year and a maximum of three years. We expect to issue a call for new key project to start each year, and so it is unlikely that the entire pool of key project time will be allocated in this first year. We expect to approve two or three key projects to start this year. Time not allocated for key projects will be available for standard proposals, for which a call will be issued near the end of January 2014. The expected 1-year total of time available for key projects through this call is approximately 6000 hours of 1-meter time and 1200 hours of 2-meter time.
This call is the first announcement of time available for V1.0 of the LCOGT network. This means that a limited complement of capabilities will be available and fully supported. At this time, we believe that this will include the Sinistro cameras on all 1-meter telescopes and the FLOYDS spectrographs on the 2-meter telescopes. More details of the V1.0 capabilities are listed below. At this time, we anticipate that V1.0 observations will begin on April 1, 2014, but the start of the semes ter will be delayed if critical aspects of the system are not ready.
Key projects will be large efforts – involving several thousand hours of observation. We expect that project teams will form to carry these out. The level of effort will be significant but the potential return is great. Because LCOGT is contributing large amounts of telescope time to support this program, we require that collaborators on proposing teams coming from other institutions commit significant resources to the effort. Such resources could be access to other facilities, or additional time on the LCOGT network from their own institution, or computing resources, or scientist time.
We invite all LCOGT collaborators to submit proposals to the LCOGT Key Project Program. This includes the LCOGT site partners (ANU, AURA – on behalf of the Chilean astronomical community, SAAO, IfA, and University of Texas) , including those sites (IAC and XAO) at which telescopes are planned but not yet built. It also includes the institutions with whi ch we have other types of partnerships – IPAC, University of Colorado , University of California at Santa Barbara, and St. Andrews University. Anyone who lists one of these institutions as their affiliation for published research may PI a proposal. We also invite the LCOGT extended scientific family – in addition to current staff, this includes astronomers who were postdocs at LCOGT within the last 5 years, and astronomers who contributed to our advisory and allocation committees within the last 2 years .
In order to manage this process effectively, we require that anyone who intends to submit a key project proposal submit a letter of intent by December 1, 2013. Letters of intent will allow us to identify potential collaborators and to ensure appropriate e xpertise on the TAC.
General Information on Time Allocation
A number of studies have shown that key projects provide the maximum scientific impact of a new facility, especially one that opens up a new area of parameter space. It had been the hope of LCOGT scientific management that the institutions that form the science collaboration would agree that jointly funding a key project program would result in a benefit to all the institutions in a way that transcended the amount of telescope time that they we re guaranteed. Ultimately, trying to work out the details of this arrangement became too difficult and complicated, and we fell back to the current position. Each partner institution can use their guaranteed time as they wish. We will provide IAC and XAO, whom we hope will soon become site partners, with a similar “guaranteed” allocation from our share of 1m time if they desire.
LCOGT has decided to institute a key project program with nominally half of our share of time on both 1-meter and 2-meter telescopes. The time that is not allocated to key projects will revert to the LCOGT standard project pool. From th at standard pool we will remove the time that we can sell to support operation of the entire network and a small amount to serve for Director’s Discretionary time during the semester. The remaining time in the standard pool (along with the DD time during the semester) we will make available through a subsequent proposal process to our extended scientific staff as well as the members of the scientific collaboration who do not have their own guaranteed LCOGT network time.
Definition of Key Projects
Key projects are large projects that will have substantial scientific impact on problems that are widely considered to be of significant astrophysical interest . They require a large number of hours (at least 500), and may require observations over several years (nominally up to 3 years, though scientific arguments for longer periods will be entertained). Key projects often provide observational or derived data sets that are of interest to other researchers, in part because they can gather observations of a particular class of object in a coherent and uniform way.
Key projects are carried out by well organized teams with well thought out management of effort and resources. They are likely to require resources in addition to the telescope time, perhaps computing for analysis or theoretical studies , or time on larger telescopes to further follow a subset of the sample.
Key projects have a final goal; they are n ot just a data gathering exercise. It is expected that the project is designed to accomplish that goal, and that the resources are available or th ere is a plan for acquiring the needed resources .
Review Process and Criteria
Proposals will be reviewed by a panel of external astronomers (TAC) , from institutions that are not part of the LCOGT collaboration. They will be selected not only to ensure that their scientific expertise covers the range over which we expect to receive key project proposals, but al so in that they understand the types of observations that the LCOGT facilities can do uniquely well.
The TAC will meet for two days after having a few weeks to read and think about the proposals. They will rank the proposals based on the following criteria:
- Scientific merit
- The value that the proposed project will have both within the area of specialization and more broadly, within astronomy and science, generally .
- Credibility of effort
- The probability that the study can be carried out as described. Are the resources available consistent with what will be needed?
- Experimental design
- Are the proposed observations and other work consistent with the LCOGT network and other capabilities? Have they been thought out in sufficient detail and depth?
- Suitability for LCOGT’s unique capabilities
- Does the proposed study take advantage of the unique aspects of the LCOGT network? Will this project demonstrate a result that could not be obtained without LCOGT?
- Resources brought by other collaborators
- Whille we want to encourage collaboration within the group of institutions that have worked together to make the LCOGT network a reality, we also want the burden of carrying out large projects like these to be shared fairly. We expect that any institution that participates in a key project will demonstrate a commitment to such a significant effort. We imagine a wide range of different types of resources may be relevant, and we leave it to proposers to be creative.
In addition to their ranking, the TAC will make a recommendation to the LCOGT Director, who will allocate the LCOGT time, based on the TAC recommendation as well as programmatic considerations.
In future years, this TAC will also review progress on continuing proposals and make a recommendation on whether to adjust the network time allocation relative to what has been requested.
Instructions for Letters of Intent and for Submitting Proposals
In order to help us better manage this process, proposers must submit a letter of intent by December 1, 2013. Letters of intent should be submitted by email to key_loi@lcogt.net , and they should include:
- Names and affiliations of PI and Co-Is
- Title of Proposal
- One paragraph description of science
- One paragraph description of observations
- Estimate of time requested – in 2014 and in future years
Item 4, the description of the proposed observations should be a high - level summary, not a detailed list.
We intend to circulate the list of PIs and titles of projects received through letters of intent to all science collaboration representatives, which will allow them to make their staffs aware of projects they might be interested in joining as collaborators. We leave the structuring and management of these collaborations to the proposers .
As part of our release of V1.0, we are revising the interface for creating and submitting proposals. This will be a web - based form that creates a readable version of the proposal, using typed or pasted content. The key project form of this proposal will differ slightly from the standard form. It will allow two pages for scientific justification (plus two more for figures) , as well as fields for the proposer to comment on the additional information described in the criteria listed above. Access to the proposal submission interface will b e through the new lcogt.net web pages for astronomers, which will be available by December 1, 2013.
We expect to issue calls for new key projects annually. The process for review a nd approval of key projects will be separate from that for standard projects. Thus, the hours requested should be for the two semesters 2014A and 2014B. The proposal will also include a request for the desired network time allocation for future semesters through the lifetime of the project.
Proposals approved as new key projects will be required to submit annual status reports, together with requests for modifications to the allocations specified in the original proposal. These reports will be reviewed by the key project TAC in subsequent years, and the requested modifications will be considered on the basis of the TAC review.
Observatory Capabilities
As described in a recent email to the Science Collaboration, we are moving towards what we define as V1.0 of the LCOGT network. This will be a well-defined set of capabilities that are robust and properly supported. A new section of our website will provide information needed by proposers and users of our network. Although development, deployment, and commissioning are still ongoing, we expect that V1.0 will look like this:
- We will have four sites with operating 1-meter telescopes – Australia, Chile, South Africa (a complete southern ring), and Texas. We will have our 2-meter telescopes (Faulkes Telescopes) also, one in Hawaii and one in Australia, and these will be integrated with the 1-meters – same procedures for allocating telescope time, same procedures for requesting observations, same procedures for getting your data.
- The instrumentation will focus on Sinistro and FLOYDS. We will continue to operate the imagers on the 2-meters, but they are not guaranteed to be fully supported yet. Detailed information on the instrument capabilities can be found in the paper that Tim Brown put together (soon to appear in PASP, but now available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.2437 ). Filters available on the Sinistro imagers will include all the standard LCOGT broadbands – Johnson/Bessel UBVRI and SDSS u’,g’,r’,i’,z’, and Y.
- Our scheduler will support two primary modes, cadence - driven and target-of-opportunity (ToO).
- Cadence - driven means “I want an observation every 5 minutes (or every 6 hours, or every week) for the next 6 hours (or 6 months or 6 years).”
- ToO means “When I send you a trigger, I want an observation (or a cadence - driven sequence) to start within 15 minutes.”
- The aspects of observatory operation that are required for good science data quality will be in place. Robustness of the network will be monitored. Commissioning will include and document the procedures for taking and reducing data in order to produce high quality results. Documentation for users will be available. A scientific support mechanism will be established.
- Finally, data management and processing will be robust . Automatic pipeline processing will remove the instrumental signature, and data will be transferred to our archive at IPAC. Users will be able to find and download final reduced data from the archive the day after their observations were made or quick reduced data immediately after an observation.
While this description is admittedly not very technical, our goal is to do as well as we can in these areas within the constraints of our limited resources. We intend to document the performance of our network, telescopes, and instruments on our website to provide proposers and users with adequate information to plan and carry out their observations successfully, and to analyze their data.
Please watch this website, and in particular, our new web pages for astronomers with this information.
