STScI announces the selection of 274 JWST General Observer programs for Cycle 4. This follows the review of 2,377 submitted proposals by the JWST Telescope Allocation Committee, which made recommendations to the STScI Director, who approved the final selection. The selection is balanced across a wide range of science topics with a distribution that matches the submitted proposals, from small bodies and giant planets in the solar system, exoplanets, and planetary systems at the beginning and at the end of their lifetime, to the study of star-forming galaxies throughout cosmic time and the earliest stars. Additional information about the approved programs is now available. 

Cycle 4 includes 241 programs for approximately 8,500 hours of JWST prime time(the largest GO program JWST has had to date), as well as 8 Survey, 15 Regular Archival, 8 Theory Archival, and 2 Legacy Archival programs (two of the Archival programs are Calibration and one is a Data Science Software program). This establishes the science program for JWST’s fourth year of operations, reflecting the aspirations of the worldwide community of observers. The selected proposals were prepared by 2,173 unique investigators from 39 countries, including 41 U.S. states plus D.C., 21 ESA member states plus three cooperating countries, and six Canadian provinces. Forty-one percent of the proposals are led by first time HST or JWST Principal Investigators.

The Cycle 4 GO prime time is distributed as follows:

• 112 Very Small  programs (≤ 20 hours) for 1,338 hours
• 86 Small (> 20 and ≤ 50 hours) for 3,014  hours
• 35 Medium (> 50 and ≤ 130 hours) for 2,654 hours
• 8 Large (>130 hours) for 1,524 hours

Cycle 4 includes Large and Treasury programs that will provide the community with immediate access to more than 2,196  hours of JWST data.

JWST is now poised to build on its first three years of discoveries. Selection of the General Observer programs represents a tremendous effort by the 6,730 investigators who submitted proposals, the 536 members of the Telescope Allocation Committee, the 220 additional community members who served as expert reviewers, and the JWST teams at STScI and NASA.