Changes since the Cycle 21 Call for Proposals has been Frozen

February 27, 2013

Frontier Fields Archival Proposals

A number of questions have been received concerning the scope of proposals that can be submitted in response to the Cycle 21 call, given that the Frontier Fields program will span more than one cycle. The relevant section of the Call for Proposals is section 3.4.2:

"Commensurate with the expected scope, Legacy AR Proposals are allowed to be multi-year projects, although this is not a requirement. Multi-year projects will be funded on a yearly basis, with continued funding beyond the first year subject to a performance review."

If proposers aim to apply the same analysis techniques to 4 or 6 clusters covered by the program, they should propose accordingly with the appropriate discussion of the work plan in the management plan section of the proposal. The yearly review sets a mechanism in place to deal with any contingencies that might arise during the execution of the program.

February 20, 2013

Update to the dark rates of the COS FUV segments and impact on ETC calculations for Phase I proposals

The dark rate on both detectors has been evolving with time, particularly in the last few months, and it is now a factor of two lower than the value currently used in the ETC for both segments. Please read the latest COS/STIS STAN for complete details.

February 15, 2013

URGENT - APT 21.0 Phase I Submission Server Issue

STScI has discovered a server problem with APT 21.0 that has already caused submission delays and could cause serious delays for everyone in the days leading up to the March 1, 2013 HST Cycle 21 Phase I proposal deadline. An updated version of APT has been created to correct this problem. Proposers who have not yet submitted proposals and intend to do so will need to install APT 21.0.1, which is now available from apt.stsci.edu. Note that APT 21.0 will no longer be able to communicate with STScI.

If you have already submitted a Cycle 21 proposal and do not intend to resubmit prior to the deadline, no action is necessary.

January 16, 2013

APT 21.0 has been released for HST Phase I Submissions for Cycle 21

The Space Telescope Science Institute is pleased to announce the release of APT 21.0 and its associated documentation. This is the version of APT that needs to be used to support HST Cycle 21 Phase I submissions.

APT can be downloaded from our APT website at: http://www.stsci.edu/hst/proposing/apt.

January 16, 2013

First Four Fields have been made public for the New Frontiers Initiative

The first four Frontier fields have been made public and are discussed on the New Frontiers Initiative web page.

December 10, 2012

Joint XMM-HST Programs from XMM OTAC for Duplication Checking

For XMM-Newton's Cycle 12 and HST's Cycle 21, the XMM-Newton Observing Time Allocation Committee (OTAC) met in the fall of 2012 and reviewed their proposals. The five joint XMM-Newton proposals on listed on the results page have been approved for execution in HST Cycle 21. These observations will be processed during the normal HST cycle ingest after the HST Telescope Allocation Committee (TAC) meets in May of 2013 with those results released to the community by the end of May.

Since these programs haven't been loaded into our Duplication checking system you will need to review the results page to check for duplications against any proposed HST Cycle 21 Phase I Observations that you might be considering.

December 05, 2012

Exposure Time and S/N calculated by the ETC for the G130M/1055 and G130M/1096 Settings are not correct

The focus of the G130M/1055 and G130M/1096 settings were recently adjusted to increase their resolution. As a consequence, the spectral height and size of the resolution element (resel) have changed. Because of these two changes, exposure times may be underestimated by as much as a factor of 4, and S/N may be overestimated by as much as a factor of 2. The ETC assumes a resel of 30 pixels and an extraction height of 47 pixels, but the true resels are smaller and depend on wavelength; the true extraction heights are larger. The ETC will be updated for phase II of Cycle 21, in the meantime the correction factors given in the Known Issues page of the ETC should be used. For more detailed information on how to determine precise corrections, users can refer to ETC Corrections for resel size and extraction height

DD Time

Up to 10% of the available HST observing time may be reserved for Director's Discretionary (DD) allocation.

• DD Submission
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Shortcuts

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