program, and you’d like to try out the
technique before putting the proposal
before the TAC? Or maybe you’d just
really like to finish your thesis, and getting that last bit of data right now is
what you need.
Director’s Discretionary Time can fulfill
some of these needs, as exemplified
in Figure 1, but other opportunities
for good science cannot be easily met
under the present system. That’s why,
beginning in January 2015, Gemini will
be running a pilot scheme, called the
Fast Turnaround program, to allow our
user community to submit proposals
on a monthly basis, with observations
following close behind.
The Fast Turnaround Concept
Rather than relying on a standing TAC reviewing proposals every month, astronomers submitting to the Fast Turnaround
program will have two weeks to review
roughly 10 proposals submitted by other
Principal Investigators (PIs) during the same
round (“distributed peer review”; more
on this follows). This scheme generates a
ranked list of proposals, and a small team of
Gemini staff astronomers then checks the
top-ranked proposals for technical feasibility and identifies those that can be accepted
in the time available.
PIs are notified of the outcome within three
weeks of submitting their proposals, and
successful PIs will work directly with the
Gemini support team to prepare their observations by the end of the month. The
Fast Turnaround observations will go into
a “mini-queue,” which is executed on three
dedicated nights each month. The programs
remain valid for three months.
Following a committee review of the program’s design, the Board of Directors has
October 2014
Figure 1.
granted approval for an open-ended trial of
this scheme.
The first Call for Proposals will be announced
in early January 2015 (initially for Gemini
North only) and account for ~ 10 percent of
the telescope time.
These GMOS-N
observations used
Director’s Discretionary
Time to investigate a
high-proper-motion
object detected by
by NASA’s Wide- field
Infrared Survey Explorer
satellite. The images
unexpectedly revealed
the closest star system
to the Sun discovered in
almost a century. This
kind of observation,
using a fairly small
amount of time to
follow up results from
another facility, could
be a good candidate
for the Fast Turnaround
program. The results
were published by
K. Luhman in The
Astrophysical Journal
Letters (2014).
The scheme will operate alongside the standard ways of applying for Gemini time: the
regular semester-based Call for Proposals, the
new Large and Long proposals mode, etc. PIs
from all but two Gemini partners will be able
to submit Fast Turnaround proposals; Australia prefers to use their last year in the partnership to complete regular proposals, and Chile
doesn’t have access to Gemini North so will
not participate.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
time in astronomy that monthly proposal
submission opportunities have been combined with PIs reviewing each other’s proposals. Those two system components have,
however, been used separately by other institutions. For example, the popular United
Kingdom Infrared Telescope Service Observing Program encouraged submissions of
short proposals (< 4 hrs), which a group of
referees reviewed at the start of every month
(see Howat and Davies, 1996; also this link).
GeminiFocus
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