Hubble Space Telescope Call for Proposals for Cycle 11

8.15 Scientific Justification

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(This is item 14 in the GO/SNAP template; it is item 10 in the AR/Theory template.)

This section should present a balanced discussion of background information, the program's goals, its significance to astronomy in general, and its importance for the specific subfield of astronomy that it addresses. The members of the review panels will span a broad range of scientific expertise, so you should write this section for a general audience of scientists.

Depending on the type of proposal, the following items should also be included:

• GO Treasury, AR Legacy and Pure Parallel proposals should address the use to the astronomical community of the data products that will be generated by the program.
• SNAP proposals should provide a complete and unique description of the target sample.
• AR proposals should describe how the project improves upon or adds to the previous use of the data.
• Theory proposals should include a description of the scientific investigations that will be enabled by the successful completion of the program, and their relevance to HST.
• Innovative proposals should describe what science will be enabled by the successful completion of the program, and why the proposal is technically innovative in the sense defined in Section 3.6.
• Calibration proposals should describe what science will be enabled by the successful completion of the program, and how the currently supported core capabilities, their calibrations, and the existing pipeline or data reduction software are insufficient to meet the requirements of this type of science.

The default page limit for the `Scientific Justification' section (Section 8.15) is 3 pages. However, Large GO proposals (see Section 3.2.2), Treasury GO proposals (see Section 3.2.4) and AR Legacy proposals (see Section 3.4.2) may use 6 pages. In all cases, an additional two pages are allowed for (optional) figures, tables and references. Those proposers who consider this useful may add a glossary of acronyms and abbreviations. This glossary should not be more than 1 page, and does not count towards the total page limit for the proposal.