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THE MESSENGER No. 52 - June 1988 KEY PROGRAMMES ON LA SILLA: First Round H. VAN DER LAAN, Director General, ESO RESPONSE TO THE PRELIMINARY ENQUIRY My request in the Messenger No. 51 for the deadline appropriate for them. programmes?" The answer is no. All for reactions has met an am pie re­ (As will become clear below, that could ESO will do is inform investigators of sponse. Numerous letters, phone calls be one or two years later than the next mutual interests and overlapping pro­ and visiting astronomers dropping by in deadline.) Moreover, we can now iden­ posals, evident from the response to the my office supplemented some sixty pre­ tify affinity and/or overlap between preliminary enquiry. Whether they wish liminary proposals on the forms de­ many separate initiatives; by informing to collaborate is entirely the proposers' signed for that purpose. In this article I PI's of such common elements, new decision. Obviously, telescope time will wish to report briefly about the compo­ combinations may result. be granted in a manner that is effective sition and extent of this response. That brings me to another worry ex­ and economical, serving the stated pur­ pressed by some: "Will we be forced to poses of the Key Programmes concept. work in large consortia with merged In cases of clear overlap, the best pro- Apprehensions and Possible Misunderstandings As announced earlier, the deadline for the first round of ESO's Key Pro­ grammes is 15 October 1988. Because the timespan between the moment ESO's users first saw my March article and 30 April 1988 was rather short, some people could not respond to the preliminary enquiry at all or not as weil as they would have preferred. Let me emphasize that this in no way prejudices their opportunity for participation. The chief goal of the preliminary enquiry was to establish whether there is a deep and broad interest in the concept I have proposed, and if so, what the main themes and trends of that interest are. The sixty or so principal investigators and some two hundred and fifty co­ investigators who did respond and sub­ mitted a preliminary proposal achieved more than helping me reach the goal just stated. Their work goes a long way In mid-May 1988, the unusual shape of the NIT building stands out against the observatory towards preparing the actual proposal skyline. (Good news about the NIT on page 10 and 51.) gramme will get all, the others nothing. It TAßlE 1: Distribution of number of proposals (figures given within brackets) and of required is that risk which forms, among others, nights - distinguished by 3.6 m plus NTT on the one hand, and the smaller instruments on the an incentive for collaborations. other - over the nine categories distinguished by the OPC. An overview of the distribution of Finally the fear, heard here and there, the nights over the six telescopes is also provided. Not included in this table are the 130 nights that Key Programmes will lead to mono­ requested at the 1-m telescope which was not involved in the inquiry. polies on some subjects or areas. This is elescope an understandable concern wh ich I 3.6 m 3.5 m ND 2.2 m 1.5 m 1.5 mD 1.4 m GAT share. ESO's archiving policy, de­ Gategory scribed elsewhere in this issue, will go S some way to reduce this risk. The OPC (10) (4) ---> will undoubtedly help to minimize detri­ K 1 mental effects on this score. 590 110 (5) (8)-> (2) Key Programme Initiatives K2 465 460 Approximately sixty tentative propo­ sais reached us in response to the pre­ (1) (4)---> liminary enquiry. In Table 1 an overview K3 is provided of the distribution of the 170 110 3,400 nights required over the six tele­ (4) (1)---> scopes involved. Also shown is the vari­ K4 ation in team sizes and the international­ 200 40 ity of these plans (Fig. 1). I find the response very satisfactory. (2) Evidently, there exists a good deal of K5 120 collaboration al ready among astronom­ ers in member states. Within each (1) ~ (1)---> category there may be overlap and K6 strong affinity among proposals. In the 120 50 next month or so these will be analysed and PI's will be informed of such cir­ (3) ~(3)-> (3) cumstances. The involvement of ESO K7 180 staff at Headquarters and on La Silla is 475 widespread, a desideratum I expressed ~(1)-> in the March article. K8 A few words about the different pro­ 15 240 posal groups, without, at this stage, specifying their contents (see OPC (1 ) Classification; "K" signifies Key Pro­ K9 45 gramme): - K 1 has 14 proposals, seven of which TOTAL 1075 785 480 660 315 75 involve deep redshift surveys of galaxies, all using the 3.6-m and the Note: Only the 54 proposals in wh ich both the lelescopes and the number of nigllts required were ND. Some reconfiguration of teams indicated have been laken into consideration fer constructing this lable. seems logical and discussions among Pl's will be suggested from ESO. - K2 concerns both quasar surveys - K9 concerns HST follow-up and a the ND in Period 43 and the continued and gravitationallense studies as ma­ major speckle programme. commissioning of instrumentation in jor activities, sketched in 15 pro­ Period 44, the time available for Key posals. Programmes in the first round is corre­ Call for Proposals - K3 is concerned with the Magellanic spondingly limited. The allocation space Clouds, including SN 1987A, and the The harvest of sixty initiatives, numer­ that has been set for these two semes­ half dozen proposals aim at a signifi­ ous individual reactions as weil as the ters is given in Table 2. cant use of the smaller telescopes as endorsement by the Users Committee This total of 125 nights on the two big weil. and the Scientific Technical Committee telescopes is a rather modest start, - K4, interstellar matter, is heteroge­ of ESO together form a very encourag­ leaving room for new proposals next neous, but the six proposals thus far ing base for a good start. However, year. For the second round, deadline request primarily big telescope time. given the rather modest availability of October 15, 1989, Periods 45 and 46 - K5, on star clusters and galactic structure, has two proposals and - K6 for X-ray sources has two initia­ TAßlE 2: Number of nights to be allocated to Key Programmes tives for satellite programme follow­ up: ROSAT and SIGMA. Telescope 3.6m 3.5 m 2.2 m 1.5 m 1.5 m 1.4 m GAT - K7 is for stars and contains twelve ND ESO Dan. GES proposals for this major area, with small telescopes heavily contributing. Period 43 40 15 20 25 15 30 - K8 is a sole comet programme in­ 44 40 30 20 25 15 30 volving five telescopes. 2 (April 1, 1990-March 31,1991), we ex­ With the great reservoir of plans and pect the number of nights devoted to the modest beginning just outlined, OPC Classification Key Programmes on the 3.6 m and the many potential proposers may wish to 1 - GALAXIES ND to increase to a level of about 200 postpone their initiative by one or two 2 - QUASARS, SEYFERTS, RADIO nights. The amount of time on the smal­ years: Key Programmes are long GALAXIES ler telescopes will be more elastic, de­ term. .. Proposals not successful in 3 - MAGELLANIC CLOUDS pending on proposal pressure. With any round may be resubmitted in identi­ 4 -INTERSTELLAR MATIER EFOSC 11 on the 2.2-m a shift of some calor modified form for later rounds. 5 - CLUSTERS AND GALACTIC STRUC- 3.6-m work to this intermediate size Proposals for the first round will be sent TURE 6 - X-RAY SOURCES telescope may be expected. to referees outside ESO's OPC. Their 7 - STARS ESO community astronomers, reports, gradings plus explicit commen­ 8 - SOLAR SYSTEM whether they responded to the pre­ taries supporting the grade, will be sub­ 9 - MISCELLANEOUS liminary enquiry or not, are invited to mitted to the OPC for preparing its re­ submit proposals to the Visiting As­ commendations to me. tronomers Section at ESO Headquar­ After the first round the whole process ters before October 15, 1988. Copies will be evaluated and, if necessary, of a form designed for this purpose adapted. Through the Messenger the will soon be available from this Sec­ community will be informed of progress. be summarized by the Pl's in future tion on request. Successful programme proposals will issues of the Messenger. 25 r--------------------.../\ ~ VI 20 0"" "-- 0 "--'" (a) (C) u.. 0 15 .... CD'" :>: z=> 159 proposals ) 157 proposals I 10 NUHBER OF INVESTIGA TORS NUHBER OF COUNTRIES INVOLVEO • PER PROPOSAL Figure 1: Histograms showing the distribution of the proposals, (a) as a function of the number of in vestigators involved; (b) as a function of the number of institutional nationalities per proposal when ESO and ESA institutes are included, (c) when ESO and ESA institutes are excluded. The programme related to HST follow-up, which involves 32 investigators from 19 institutes, is not included. ESO Archiving Policy The following statement is a set of jects wh ich otherwise could not be achieved will the archive serve its pur­ premisses and principles for a data-ar­ performed; pose to fully utilize data acquired at chiving policy wh ich ESO will implement (b) to re-use the data for other pro­ ESO. gradually in the next several years.
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