Subject: Writing proposals...
Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 23:20:58 +1000
From: Bryan Gaensler <bmg@space.mit.edu>
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Newsgroups: subjects.hetxxx.00s1astronomynews

Hello everybody,

People always ask me what astronomers actually spend a lot of their time doing. I guess
most people expect that we spend most of our times actually at the telescope observing,
but most of you realise that this is usually not the case.

One thing that we do spend a lot of our time doing is writing proposals - this is
something I'm in the thick of at the moment. Unless a telescope is privately
owned by a university or other institution, the way time is allocated to astronomers
is on a competitive basis. Sometimes as often as once per month, sometimes as rarely
as once every 1-2 years, an institution will issue a "call for proposals" for their
telescopes. A typical proposal might include a standard form in which you fill
in your name, address, the coordinates of the sources you want to look at,
the number of hours you want to look at it, and so on and so on - I've stuck
an example of such a form below, corresponding to a proposal which I wrote
recently (and which I just found out was successful!) for the Australia Telescope
Compact Array (http://www.narrabri.atnf.csiro.au), in Narrabri, Australia.

Filling out this cover sheet is the easy part - the hard bit is the section you have to
attach to it, which explains in detail why the study you're proposing is interesting,
why this is the best telescope to look at it with, the technical details of the observation
you propose, and what you'll do with the data once you get it all. This
can be an awful lot of work - you have to step back from the coalface and
explain, in clear language, and to somebody who isn't necessarily going to know
anything about your field (and who is probably going to have to read hundreds of such
proposals, all claiming their work to be as important as yours!), why the questions
you're working on  are interesting and important, and how the observations
you're proposing are going to help answer these questions. There is normally a
tight word limit (e.g. 1000 words or 4 pages), so you have to be pretty concise
and clear in explaining all of this.

The last part of the proposal is the technical details of how many hours you need,
what sort of camera or filter or receiver you need, any special observing modes
you might need to operate in, etc etc. You have to make it clear to those grading
your proposal that you understand how the telescope works, and that the telescope
will actually be able to answer the question you're interested in. For some telescopes
and experiments, this is quite straightforward - for example, if you just want to
make a simple and quick picture of something using the Very Large Array
(http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/vla/html/VLAhome.shtml), you essentially just "point and shoot" -
just aim the telescope at whatever you're interested in for about 20 minutes, and you'll get a
decent picture out of it. But for most other proposals and telescopes, you need to think very
carefully about what it is that you want to do - one of the telescopes I use, the Rossi X-ray
Timing Explorer (http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xte/xte_1st.html), has hundreds of
different observing modes, and it's up to you to go through them all and work out
which one is best for your particular proposal!

Right now, I'm writing proposals for the Chandra X-ray Observatory
(http://chandra.harvard.edu/pub.html), NASA's newest space telescope, which is
capable of making incredibly sharp pictures in X-rays (something which has
never been possible before). The first deadline for proposals was in Jan 1998,
about 18 months before the telescope was even launched into space! I was involved
in about 10 proposals for that deadline, but competition was so intense (there were
seven times as many proposals as could be accomodated in the time available)
that only three of them were successful - I'm just starting to get the data from
those proposals now.

And so now the next deadline has been announced, and proposals are due on 1 June. So
like many other astronomersaround the world, I'm working hard at putting together more
proposals - probablyabout another 10 or so once more. Some of these will be proposals which
got rejected last time, but of course hopefully sufficiently improved this time that they
will get through! Others are brand new proposals, based on ideas I've come
up with since last time. But all of them are a lot of work - Chandra is such
a complicated telescope that the proposal process requires nothing short of
a full simulation of the observation in order to have any chance of success.
Some of the simulations we did for the last deadline were so detailed that
we almost convinced ourselves that we didn't need any real data - the simulations
themselves were interesting enough! A lot has to go into the simulation: How
big is the object you want to make a picture of, and what's its exact shape? How
bright is it? Is it steady in its brightness, or does it get brighter and fainter with time?
What does its spectrum look like (equivalent to asking what colour is it)? And
you even have to worry about whether there's going to be any other sources which
accidentally lie in your field of view, and make sure you simulate them too! So as you
can imagine, it's a lot of work, and things get pretty frantic in the days and weeks
leading up to the deadline.

Once your proposal is submitted (normally about 30 seconds before the deadline!),
you can then relax (assuming there isn't some other telescope with another
deadline to worry about) - it will be quite a while before you hear anything
more. After a few months, a panel of astronomers will be organised, and this
group of people have to read through every single proposal, giving them all
a rank, e.g. A+ or B-, or perhaps a rank out of 10. These ranks will
be passed on to the people who run the telescope, who will then assign out
the time. The best proposals will get all the time they ask for, the medium-ranked
ones will probably get some of the time they ask for, and everybody else will
miss out. And then, finally, perhaps  6 months to 3 years after you put your
proposal in, you'll finally get the observing time you asked for! Just hope it
doesn't rain that night....

cheers
Bryan