As part of the Agreement for transferring ownership the AEM ALMA prototype antenna to the University of Arizona to install it on Kitt Peak as a telescope of the Arizona Radio Observatory (ARO), ESO will distribute to its user community a total of 3600h of observing time on the ARO telescopes over the next five years. Following advice from the ALMA Science Advisory Committee (ESAC) and Scientific Technical Committee (STC), ESO has decided to dedicate this time to large scale Public Surveys with a strong scientific case and which will offer an important legacy value. In this first call, ESO will allocate up to 2000 hrs for surveys requiring the ARO telescopes.The timing of a second call to allocate the remaining time will be decided based on the progress of the surveys selected as a result of this first call.

The ESO time can be requested for the 10m SMT telescope on Mount Graham and/ or the 12m AEM antenna on Kitt Peak. The details of the telescopes, instruments and backends are available on the ARO webpages. Public Survey proposals with visiting instruments  will also be considered, but will require a supporting letter from the ARO director confirming the possibility of installing the proposed visitor instrument on the telescope.

A Public Survey is understood to be an observing programme in which the investigators commit to produce and make publicly available, within a defined time, a fully reduced and scientifically usable data set that is likely to answer a major scientific question, be of general use and of broad interest to the astronomical community. Each survey is envisaged to be a request no less than 500 observing hours to be allocated over several years (up to 3 years for this call). Observations will normally be carried out in remote observing mode following the ARO procedures.

The deadline for submitting proposals to carry out the large Public Surveys with the ESO time on the ARO telescopes is:

17 April 2015 12:00 CEST

The proposals will be reviewed by a sub-panel of the Public Surveys Panel, which will include submm experts appointed by the ESO Director General.The panel will provide recommendations to the ESO Observing Program Committee (OPC) on which surveys should be implemented as part of the ESO ARO time. Observations will be scheduled for the period starting in September 2015.

The ESO Director General will select the Public Surveys based on the recommendations of the Panel and the OPC, which will evaluate the scientific excellence and legacy value, and on the technical feasibility. The selected teams will be invited to prepare a survey management plan, which will include a detailed description of the data products and their proposed means of dissemination in the community.The approval by ESO of the survey management plan is mandatory before final acceptance of a Public Survey.

Please consider the following conditions:

• The proposing teams will be responsible for carrying on the observations following the ARO procedures and the approved public surveys execution plans.
• ESO will not provide support to the external teams for visitor observing runs.
• No proprietary time will be granted. The ESO-ARO raw data will be made available to any group who will request access through a dedicated webpage, as soon as the data will be delivered to ESO by ARO.
• Survey data products are to be prepared, archived and disseminated by the Survey Teams according to the survey management plans agreed with ESO.
• The teams will be responsible for processing and validating the data products.
• Regular survey data product releases are expected every year.
• Progress of the approved surveys will be reviewed regularly by ESO. Corrective steps will need to be identified in cases where the survey execution is delayed, or the data product delivery schedule cannot be maintained.

The proposals should include the following items:

1. Title, Abstract, Principal Investigator (PI) and list of coòÀÐinvestigators (1 page)
2. Scientific rationale (up to 2 pages, plus up to 2 additional pages for figures and references )
3. Observing strategy, including instruments (ARO receivers and backends or visitor instrument) to be used (up to 1 page)
4. Estimated observing time, including the distribution of observing time over the years (a maximum of three years is envisaged for this Call) (up to 1/2 page)
5. Required observing conditions (precipitable water vapour) and survey strategy that takes into account realistic weather constraints (up to 1/2 page)
6. Description of the relevant expertise and responsibilities within the proposing team (up to 1 page)
7. Description of the data products and justification of their legacy value (up to 1 page). Please note that the legacy value is an important aspect of public surveys, which is carefully considered by the review panel.
8. Up to two additional pages for figures, diagrams or references if required for points 3 to 7 in the above list.
   

Proposals can be prepared using the LaTeX template available on this page. This needs to be submitted as a single pdf file via email to the address eso-aro@eso.org by the deadline. Proposers will need to make sure that the size of the pdf file will not exceed the email limit. Questions regarding this call should be addressed to the same address.

LaTeX Template

Email contact: eso-aro@eso.org