Phase I Proposal Roadmap Phase I Proposal RoadmapThe Hubble Legacy Archive (HLA; version 1.0 to be released in January 2008) is designed to optimize science from HST by providing online, enhanced Hubble products and advanced browsing capabilities. In particular, the HLA includes a footprint service that shows where HST has observed on the sky. This tool may be useful in helping you define your science program.
The Announcement Page will provide basic information about submitting an HST proposal (such as the deadline), as well as links to important documents.
The Call for Proposals describes the policies and procedures, and explains how to submit a Phase I proposal. The HST Primer provides a basic introduction to the technical aspects of HST and its instruments, and explains how to calculate the appropriate number of orbits for your Phase I observing time requests. Links to the relevant sections of these documents are included in this roadmap, but a general familiarity with these documents is important. In particular, please review the New and Important Features for the Cycle and the Proposal Selection Procedures.
Download and complete the GO/SNAP, AR, or GO/DD template which will be attached to your APT file as part of your submission. This attachment includes:
Helpful hints on making the PDF file, as well as embedding figures are available. Please note the format and page limit restrictions.
ARCHIVAL PROPOSERS CAN SKIP TO HERE.
To determine if your observations are feasible, review the observatory constraints.
There will hopefully be 6 functioning instruments on HST. The Instrument Handbooks for ACS, NICMOS, STIS, COS, WFC3, and the FGS provide all the relevant information on those instruments. There is also an Instrument Comparison page (Cameras, Spectrographs), which can assist you in determining the best instrument for your program.
Primary observations are those observations that determine the telescope pointing and orientation. HST can support Target of Opportunity observations, which are linked to the occurrence of an event that may occur at an unknown time.
Parallel observations are those observations whose pointings are determined by a Primary observation (e.g. with ACS pointing at an object, take an image with NICMOS of whatever region of the sky is in the NICMOS field of view). Parallel observations can be Coordinated (where the primary observation is in the same proposal) or Pure (where the primary observation is in a different proposal). See Parallel Observations with HST for more information on Parallel programs.
Determine which instrument configurations (detector and spectral elements) are needed for each target. To get the exposure times, Exposure Time Calculators are available for ACS,COS, NICMOS, STIS, and WFC3. For the FGS, exposure time calculations for POS Mode and TRANS Mode are described in the Instrument Handbook.
Due to the uncertain status of ACS for Cycle 17, proposals that combine WFC3 and ACS observations must include a description of the consequences for their program should ACS/WFC or ACS/HRC not be available in Cycle 17. The description should be given in the Special Requirements section of the pdf attachment.
Observers have exclusive access to their science data during a proprietary period (normally 12 months). Special policies apply to cases in which a proposed observation would duplicate another observation already obtained with HST, or currently in the pool of accepted HST programs. To check for duplications, use one of the following options:
In addition, there are COS GTO programs and a WFC3 Early Release Science program that proposers need to be aware of. The exposures are included in the 3 options above, but additional descriptions are available.
While the HST target visibility (the amount of time the target is visible in an orbit) is generally a function of the target declination (see the next step), there are some observation constraints that impact this visibility:
The following constraints can have a significant impact on scheduling HST observations (and could make the observations infeasible). You should use the broadest possible ranges (within scientific constraints) to maximize schedulability.
Use the Orbital Visibility Table in the HST Primer to determine the available orbital visibility time for your observation based on the target declination.
Even though the schedulability of observations has increased with the return to 3-gyro operations, it is still useful to verify that the constraints you have chosen for your observations allow a reasonable number of scheduling opportunities for your program. This is useful for all constrained proposals (i.e. any proposal with ORIENT, BETWEEN, or AFTER OBSERVATION BY), but particularly important for Large programs. The Verifying scheduling feasibility section of the HST Orbital Viewing and Schedulability web page provides a Decision Tree and instructions on how to use it and APT to evaluate scheduling feasibility.
ARCHIVAL PROPOSERS CONTINUE HERE.
APT is available for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X. The remaining steps are all performed within APT.
Here are some links to good introductory documentation:
Start up APT (as described on the download page for your platform), and either load in a previous cycle's proposal (under the File Menu, select Open, and give the name of the old file) or open a new proposal (click on the New Proposal button on the toolbar or under the File Menu, select New Proposal).
Complete the Proposal Information 
section. Be sure to attach your
Science Justification via the Proposal PDF Attachment (use the Browse
button on the far right to select the file that contains your PDF
Scientific Justification).
Note that for additional information on the
individual fields, you can use the Context-Sensitive Help in APT.
Click on the 
, then (in
the Form Editor) click on the field of interest to get information
from the appropriate document.
Complete the PI information 
section.
If you have a Co-I, complete the Co-I information
section.
For more Co-I pages, click on the New/CoI button at the
bottom of the form or at the top of the tool bar. If there are no
Co-Is in your program, then click on the Unnamed Co-I in the
tree view on the left and delete it (via the Delete command in the APT
Edit Menu).
Open the targets folder 
and
complete the Targets section.
You can specify your target as a Fixed 
,
Solar System 
,
or a Generic 
Target. Note that Survey
and SNAP
proposers may choose to only give a sample of their target list.
APT also has a target ingest capability to read in an ascii file with
target positions. See the Movie (3 minutes) (ECF mirror copy of movie) or
Text Equivalent.
We have also included a Target Selector Tool that can be used to search for your targets from the NED and SIMBAD databases. Enter the target name, click on the Search button, select the target you want from the list returned, and click on the Select Object as Target button to ingest the information into APT.
Complete the Observation Summary section.
To aid in the review of Archival Research Proposals, additional information is now required for these proposals. Complete the Datasets section.
This tool is used to check the schedulability of your observations, and should be run if you have specified any scheduling constraints or if you are submitting a Large program. This check can only be done for fixed targets. However, if you have a specific (short) time period for your moving target observations, you could determine the coordinates of the object at the time you want to observe it, create a fixed target with those coordinates, and process the observation to check the schedulability. See the Movie (6 minutes), Text Equivalent, (ECF mirror copy of movie) for more details.
Please note that the Visit Planner will only check schedulability for one cycle (with some extention into the following cycle). Therefore, you will not be able to check the schedulability of multi-cycle programs.
from the toolbar with the
observation of interest selected in the Tree Editor. Note
that if you link observations with the AFTER OBSERVATION BY,
then selecting any one of those observations will cause the
Planner to process all linked observations together (since
all observations impact the total schedulability). Also,
selecting the Observations container will select ALL
observations for processing.
When you have a schedulable program with no errors,
review your completed proposal by selecting the PDF Preview
tool. This view will merge the information provided in APT along
with the PDF attachment, and is what the TAC will review.
When your proposal is complete, select the Submit
tool to begin the submission process.
In the Submission Log window you will see a message giving the time of the submission, the assigned proposal ID (if a new proposal), and the submission status.
After you submit your proposal, the PI and all CoIs will receive an email acknowledgment that your complete proposal has been successfully printed at STScI; this completes the proposal submission process. If you do not receive this message by Tuesday following the deadline (or within 2 days of your submission if you submit early), please contact us, as your submission was NOT RECEIVED and the Telescope Allocation Committee WILL NOT see your proposal. Notification of your proposal's status (approved or rejected) generally occurs within 2-3 weeks on the Telescope Allocation Committee meeting. Budgets are not requested in Phase I, but are required in Phase II from successful U.S. proposers.
This roadmap was created in response to feedback from several users. If you found it helpful, or have suggestions for making it better, please let us know. You can also provide feedback on other aspects of APT or its documentation. You can send your comments to help@stsci.edu.