Proposal time

Las Campanas, Chile (Jan 6, 2006)

The photo shows the dorms of the Las Campanas Observatory. Another shot from my last trip in Chile... I didn’t have much time lately to shot new photos. In the last few weeks, in fact, free time has been a foreign concept: it was proposal season.

The access to the large observatories, on the ground or in space, is regulated by a peer-reviewed system. The available telescope time, which is very limited, is awarded on the base of the merit of research proposals submitted by astronomers around the world. These proposals should describe in detailed the use of the requested time and how the research goals will be reached. For a proposal to be successful it is very important to convey the general significance of the proposed analysis, to convince the scientists in the review panel that the project is worth doing.

Telescope time is a very scarse resource, and only a small fraction of the submitted proposals will be awarded any time at all. This is especially true for space observatories, like the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-rays Telescope and the infrared Spitzer Telescope. Time at these observatories is very coveted not only because of the excellence of the telescopes, but also because the time comes together with grant money to perform the research (to pay for salaries, students, computers, publication and travel costs).

Since I mostly work with data from the Spitzer Space Telescope (my group built one of the onboard cameras), I spent the last three weeks writing proposals for this telescope, to observe old dying stars shedding their external layers with dusty winds, regions where massive stars are forming, planets around nearby stars. My research for the next couple of years will depend on the success of these proposals, so I am keeping my finger crossed.