9.1 Scientific Justification

This section should present a balanced discussion of background information, the program’s goals, its significance to astronomy in general, and its importance for the specific sub-field of astronomy it addresses. The members of the review panels will span a range of scientific expertise (see Section 6.1), so you should write this section for a general audience of scientists.

Depending on the type of proposal, the following items should also be included:

•	GO Treasury, AR Legacy and Pure Parallel proposals should address the use to the astronomical community of the data products that will be generated by the program.

•	Proposals using ACS/WFC, WFC3/UVIS, or WFC3/IR for undithered imaging must explain why this strategy is needed for the scientific objectives; dithering is required to eliminate hot pixels and other detector artifacts that may compromise the archival value of the data.

•	ACS/SBC, COS, and STIS/MAMA proposers must address the safety of their targets and fields with respect to the appropriate count rate limits of the photon-counting detectors (see Chapter 5 of the Primer and the COS, STIS, or ACS Instrument Handbook).

•	Snapshot proposals should provide a complete and unique description of the target sample.

•	AR Proposals should describe how the project improves upon or adds to the previous use of the data.

•	Theory Proposals should include a description of the scientific investigations that will be enabled by the successful completion of the program, and their relevance to HST.

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Calibration Proposals should describe what science will be enabled by the successful completion of the program, and how the currently supported core capabilities, their calibrations, and the existing pipeline or data reduction software are insufficient to meet the requirements of this type of science.