Hubble Space Telescope Call for Proposals for Cycle 11

From the Director

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In this eleventh Call for Proposals for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we are pleased to offer opportunities with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). The ACS will be installed on Servicing Mission 3B prior to the start of Cycle 11, and we anticipate a successful repair of NICMOS following the installation of a cryocooler to restore its detectors to full sensitivity. WFPC2, STIS and the FGS will continue to be available during Cycle 11, too. Cycle 11 will, therefore, provide the broadest and most sensitive capabilities for Hubble Space Telescope since it was launched.

This Cycle also includes a new opportunity for very large projects, the HST Treasury Program (see Section 3.2.4). The Treasury Program is structured to provide cross-cutting public science data analogous to the Hubble Deep Fields. It is patterned after the SIRTF Legacy program and has similar goals: to stimulate science of lasting importance to the scientific community that might not naturally be encouraged by the existing process. Treasury programs should obtain a coherent dataset that has the potential to address multiple scientific questions and should return enhanced data products to the community. Like the Hubble Deep Fields, the observations are expected to carry no proprietary rights. Treasury programs are expected to require large numbers of orbits - perhaps of order 1000 - and can extend over multiple cycles with commensurate support for data analysis.

We are also initiating a Theory Program for proposals that address topics that are of direct relevance to HST (see Section 3.5). These programs will emphasize theoretical research over data analysis. The results of the investigations should enable new types of observational programs with HST or with the HST Data Archive. Recent trends in HST funding suggest that of order 5% of the total HST GO Funding might be used to support Theory Proposals.

Finally, we are creating the new category `Legacy AR' proposals as part of the Archival Research (AR) program (see Section 3.4.2) to further stimulate the use of the HST Data Archive. A Legacy AR proposal should perform a homogeneous analysis of a well-defined dataset in the HST Archive and should provide data products to the scientific community that allow a variety of new investigations. It is anticipated that Legacy AR proposals will be larger in scope and requested funds than Regular AR proposals; they are allowed to extend over multiple cycles. In all AR proposal categories, STScI encourages projects that combine HST data with data from other space-missions or ground-based observatories, also in view of ongoing efforts to create a National Virtual Observatory (NVO; see Section 3.4.3).

In addition to the new opportunities listed above, we made some changes to improve existing proposal categories (as summarized in Section 1.2) and continue to offer the possibility of requesting Chandra or NOAO time in conjunction with HST observations (see Section 3.8 and Section 3.9). We invite you to make optimum use of all these opportunities, and are looking forward to the many new exciting scientific results that will inevitably follow.

Steven Beckwith
Director, Space Telescope Science Institute