The Scientist's Expert Assistant (SEA) project began in 1997 at the Advanced Architectures and Automation Branch of Goddard Space Flight Center. The purpose of this project is to investigate and develop the next generation of proposal tools. A collaboration developed with STScI (Anuradha Koratkar) to produce a prototype for HST proposal preparation. A major aim of the SEA project is to develop tools that can be used for many observatories. More information about the SEA is available on the web at http://aaaprod.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEA/.
In the summer of 1999 the "Tool of the Future" working group undertook a Phase A study to determine what the next generation proposal preparation tool for HST should be like. Their recommendations led to the formation of the Astronomer's Proposal Tools (APT) project. For more information see: www.stsci.edu/ops/tof/tof.html.
In early 2000, STScI began in earnest the APT project. The project is taking the SEA prototype and developing a working system for HST proposal preparation. An APT user group and development group were formed. The user group, consisting mostly of scientists and program coordinators, works closely with the development group. Teams for developing individual tools have been formed with involvement from both groups. In addition, a joint user and development team has been investigating the global or system wide issues involved with the linking the tools together to form a coherent system. The document "User Group Support for APT", available on http://ra.stsci.edu/apst/apt/, describes the organization plan in more detail.
Currently, HST users provide proposal information in two phases. The Phase 1 proposal system consists of a latex template which is edited by users. There are two types of Phase 1 proposals GO and Archival. The Phase 2 system is currently based on a system called RPS2 (Remote Proposal Submission 2). Phase 2 proposals are developed by editing a text file (RPS2 file), which has a customized keyword-value syntax. An initial RPS2 file is created for each user, based on the Phase 1 file that was submitted. The RPS2 file can be edited directly by the user through a text editor or other tools, such as awk or sed. A forms based system called ped also exists for proposal editing. A feature of the ped tool is that it often provides selections of possible values for quantities, based on the contents of the proposal. After editing a proposal, a user runs it through the RPS2 processing system. This is a batch processing system which checks the proposal, determines the scheduling information, and provides the user with a graphical report through the description generator. Modifications to the proposal may take place by re-editing the proposal and rerunning the RPS2 processing.
The current system for proposal preparation can use improvement in several areas, because of the following limitations.
The main purpose of this document is to provide a high level description of the APT system issues status.