Proposal Preparation Tools for Hubble Space Telescope's Second Decade:
Challenges and Paradigm Changes


Anuradha Koratkar, Nicolas Bernstein, Rob Douglas, Andrew Gerb, Jeremy Jones, 
Karla Peterson, and Roeland Van der Marel


Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is expending considerable
effort in developing proposal preparation tools that take
advantage of the technological advances of the last five years. In this
paper we present the key challenges and issues in developing the proposal 
preparation tools.  We also describe the paradigm changes that are being 
considered to handle these challenges at STScI. 

From the user's perspective these new tools are moving from scripts to 
interactive visual tools that can be used at any stage of the proposal 
preparation, development, and specification process. From the developers' 
perspective, we see the changes to proposal preparation tools as requiring
more research and development time to try new ways of processing data, 
handling information, and presenting that visually. The new tools are 
envisioned as an interactive collaboration between user and machine, and 
thus require developers to think in a different way about the underlying 
architecture (speed, information). The tools need to be developed in a 
manner that allows for rapid turn-around of changes. From a software
management perspective to preserve a dynamic research and development 
sub group of developers in an era of declining budgets requires creative
management strategies. 

Widespread use of the Internet, development of Java, CORBA and the 
increased power of desktop hardware have allowed us to prototype such an 
environment (Scientists' Expert Assistant). This prototype is now being 
fully developed into a production line integrated environment for sharing 
data/objects/code.