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Main Concepts

Overview

A Principal Investigator is interested in one or more Targets and they decide that they want to create an Observing Proposal to study them. They write a Science Justification to try to persuade the Time Allocation Committee for a particular Observatory to allocate some Observations on one or more Telescopes which they operate. These telescopes might in turn act in unison to form a TelescopeArray.

Detail

Observation

An Observation is a particular pointing of the telescope for a particular time period - the area of the sky that will observed is defined by a Field, the observation may also be specifically looking at some known Targets although the field definition allows for "search" style observations. The observation will also have a TechnicalGoal which itself consists of some desired PerformanceParameters and the frequency setup consisting of some ScienceSpectalWindows which might also define some ExpectedSpectralLines. In addition the observation might have some ObservingConstraints which might relate to time or pointing.

Proposal Cycle

Each Observatory can time box they observing sessions into ProposalCycles in which they can offer a particular set of ObservingModes. Each observing mode ties together paticular sets of ObservingPlatforms, Instruments, Backends and Filters.

The Submission process

A proposal may be submitted concurrently to several proposal cycles that are current for any of the Observatories that are offering observing time. The proposal then becomes a SubmittedProposal in each of the ProposalCycles. The submitted proposal ties together the actual ObservingModes for each Observation via an ObservationConfiguration.

The Review process

Each Reviewer adds a ProposalReview to the SubmittedProposal. Once all of the reviews have been collated the Time Allocation Committee can decide whether to approve a proposal at which point it becomes an AllocatedProposal with an AllocationGrade and some AllocatedBlock of some Resource.

Detailed Documentation

Autogenerated documentation for the models described in overview above is available.