Fast Turnaround News

At Saturday's deadline we ended up with 12 valid proposals for the second Fast Turnaround cycle (plus another submitted from a non-participating institution). All but one of them arrived within about 36 hours of the deadline. The mix of proposals is a little different from the first cycle, with the NIR instruments being much more heavily represented than last time (5 proposals requesting GMOS, 4 NIRI, 3 NIFS, and 1 GNIRS). Three proposals were received from Canada, eight from the US, and one from the University of Hawai'i.

In marked contrast to last month, when 17 valid proposals were submitted, we have so far received only one proposal for cycle 2 (deadline: February 28, 23:59 HST). Will there be a last-minute deluge? Have people been put off by January's oversubscription? Will the first month prove to be anomalous?

Following technical feasibility checks and consideration of target RAs, requested instrument configurations, etc., PIs have been notified of the outcome of the proposal selection process. The top 7/17 proposals have been accepted (see here for the list of programs). PIs received their overall grade and all the (anonymous) individual reviews, which we hope will be useful to them in writing future proposals.

Astronomers taking part in the first Fast Turnaround (FT) cycle had until February 14th to submit their grades and reviews. The Gemini FT support team met this morning to go over the results. We reviewed the instrument configurations, observing conditions, target RAs, and total time requests of the top-rated proposals, as well as any special considerations such as timing constraints. We then used this information to construct a list of proposals which will fit in the available time and stand a reasonable chance of being observed.

The first Fast Turnaround (FT) proposal deadline passed on Saturday (January 31), and elicited an enthusiastic response. We received 19 unique proposals, requesting a total of 66 hours. This represents an oversubscription factor of about 3.3, given the ~20 hours that we expect to allocate to FT programs (3 nights/month minus typical weather losses). Two proposals had to be excluded from the review process from the outset.