Comments on: HST Proposals: How High Will it Go?

By: Roelof

Roelof — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:18:05 +0000

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…

By: Julianne

Julianne — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:26:22 +0000

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.

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:50:14 +0000

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.

By: mollishka

mollishka — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:40:25 +0000

Just heard of a proposal ID #940 with 2 minutes remaining.

By: Julianne

Julianne — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:28:03 +0000

Oooooh! Tasty data! Thanks Caryl!

By: Caryl

Caryl — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:37:39 +0000

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.

By: NGC3314

NGC3314 — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:55:00 +0000

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.)

By: Julianne

Julianne — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:48:54 +0000

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.

By: Sangeeta

Sangeeta — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:39:55 +0000

Ours was 942….Oh come on, you cannot stop counting 10 minutes before the deadline!

By: The AstroDyke

The AstroDyke — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:32:47 +0000

Don’t forget the NOAO deadline, 31 March.

Never ends, does it?