Over at Steinn’s place, we’re all a twitter anticipating the number of Hubble Space Telescope proposals submitted this Cycle. Fancy new instruments and shiny bad-ass spectrographs coming to the telescope, so interest should be high. Based on comments, here’s proposal number versus time until deadline. I’ll add any late breaking data to the plot — post submission times (PST, preferrably, because math iz hard) in comments here or at Steinn’s, and I’ll add them as I can.
Apparently this is a nice exponential, so my prediction is that we’ll have an infinite number of proposals this round.
Update: No! Flattening off! We may not even break 1000, which is a shock! Highest number so far is 928 at 10 minutes until the deadline. Extrapolated fit uses the most recent decade in time. Any procrastinators out there have something higher?
Post-Mortem: While cracking some beers with my group at 5:05 PST, we talked with a student who had submitted a STIS proposal. Apparently the spectroscopic ETC (exposure time calculator) was all kinds of crazy, so I’m betting that cut down on the number of proposals one could just whip out for COS or STIS. The imaging ETC worked just great (or at least, it lied convincingly). I also agree with Steinn that a lot of people decided to sit this one out, since there were of course going to be 2000 proposals (the same way that the number of proposals went up after the ACS failure, since of course no one was going to be asking for time on WFPC2 and NICMOS). Apparently you’d make a killing placing short sales on HST proposal betting.
March 7th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
My ex-advisor once started modifying an HST proposal (which I wrote for the most part, spending a sleepless night before) like 15 minutes before the deadline. Needless to say it was well past the deadline when she finished adding final touch to it and submitted. I think it was about 15-30 min past deadline. The proposal was still accepted (thank goodness), though it was, of course, rejected.
The moral of the story: Never write a proposal for your advisor, especially if you don’t even get a credit for it as a PI. Just a bitter memory as a grad student.
March 7th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
But I’m sure you built all sorts of character!
March 7th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
That is a shock! I wonder what the oversubscription rate will be…maybe everyone just asked for 40-50 orbits each? That will be the next thing…a tally of number of orbits requested as a function of time before deadline.
March 7th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
It’s a good idea to submit a draft proposal early just in case the intertubenets go down. That’s probably reflected here. I expect there to be a significant number of large proposals. There will also be a chunk of the cycle that goes to COS guaranteed time.
This might be informative for the non-astronomers reading this blog – I’m not sure how many people outside professional circles, who read articles about this or that HST discovery, realize the angst that goes into every HST proposal cycle. The oversubscription for HST time is of order 10. Astronomers don’t only spend their time staring perceptively into space. Every year, we sweat blood for weeks writing telescope time proposals, of which only 10% can succeed, even though at least half of them are in fact really good. And that’s just HST. HST has the worst oversubscription, but for other telescopes and funding sources, the competition is still fierce.
March 7th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Keck proposals next week!
March 8th, 2008 at 3:18 am
And after Keck, is Chandra
At least Spitzer was in December. When is GALEX again?
March 8th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Also, according to a physicsworld editorial in 1988, Supernova 1987a was followed by Papernova 1988
March 10th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Don’t forget the NOAO deadline, 31 March.
Never ends, does it?
March 11th, 2008 at 1:39 am
Ours was 942….Oh come on, you cannot stop counting 10 minutes before the deadline!
March 11th, 2008 at 9:48 am
If you give me a timestamp, I’ll add it on!
I’m trying to find the historical data, but didn’t turn it up in 3 minutes of googling.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:55 am
How about that? I was guessing 1200, mostly from my guess that oversubscription in time will be 11-12. Certainly trying to do my part.
The STIS ETC was crazy? Well, that explains why one observation went from easy in an orbit to requiring a megasecond when I went back to double-check. That piece of a proposal was certainly one that didn’t get submitted. (And, Julianne – sorry about that, no UV imaging proposal for the ANGST overlapping pair. Barely got the Galaxy Zoo overlap proposals done. Of course, our IT folks picked last week to “rationalize” all the network’s IP addresses, which had the side effect of removing my workstation from email contact for two days and making all my machines incommunicado for several hours. I threatened to return with mediaeval cutlery if the local Unix support guy didn’t get it all back and soon.)
March 12th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Because I obviously don’t have enough work to do over spring break, I went digging through the STScI newsletters and found most of the historical numbers.
Cycle 1 — ??
Cycle 2 — 483
Cycle 3 — ??
Cycle 4 –501
Cycle 5 — ??
Cycle 6 — 1025
Cycle 7 — 1298
Cycle 8 — 1053
Cycle 9 — 914
Cycle 10 — ??
Cycle 11 — 1078
Cycle 12 — 1046
Cycle 13 — 949
Cycle 14 — 727
Cycle 15 — 733
Cycle 16 — 821
Cycle 17 — ~942
Of course the next thing to go look at would be # of orbits requested.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Oooooh! Tasty data! Thanks Caryl!
March 13th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Just heard of a proposal ID #940 with 2 minutes remaining.
March 15th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
STIS went into safe mode (inoperative) in August 2004 and the Cycle 14 deadline was May 2005, so maybe that accounts for why cycles 14,15,16 were lower.
March 16th, 2008 at 10:26 am
And with the return of spectroscopy in this Cycle, the numbers went right back to the 900-1000 level. My thought was that there would be pent up demand for all the projects that didn’t get done in those cycles, and that the “missing” 200 proposals a year would show up on top of the baseline level. But, I think Steinn is right that around 1000 is the full capacity for proposal-writing that the astronomy community has.
For non-insiders, the initial cycles were <600 because of the spherical aberation problems that were fixed with later cameras.
March 31st, 2008 at 9:18 am
So, the semi-official proposal count for cycle 17 is 961 proposals. That is somewhat funny, because I am co-I on proposal 961. Not my idea to submit in the very last minute…