Goals

The APT project aims to improve the proposal preparation process, in order to provide users with a more intuitive, visual, and interactive experience by means of state of the art technology. The APT should be a complete and integrated system for proposal preparation.

• An intuitive system is one is that allows users to accomplish their work with little training. Users should be able to easily navigate through the system and understand what operations can be carried out.
• Visual tools provide a major advantage for some tasks, such as orienting apertures on targets or developing schedules. On the other hand, it would not make sense to use visual tools to develop an abstract or to specify a generic target.
• Interactive tools operate sufficiently fast that they allow users to conveniently develop and test ideas. As many steps as possible should be made interactive, including orbit planning through Qwik-Trans. An important element of interactivity is that tools can operate on a small level of granularity. For example, with Qwik-Trans, changes to a single exposure can be propagated without reprocessing the entire visit. On the other hand, some steps, such as global checks of the proposal, will still need to be run in a slower, batch mode.
• The state of the art in user interface technology is advancing rapidly with the introduction of Java on which APT will be based. Our strategy is to get proposal preparation tools to users as soon as possible to provide them with the latest technology. We want to obtain their advice on problems and desired features.
• A complete tool provides all the basic capabilities needed for proposal development.
• An integrated APT means that its component tools will share data as much as possible and will abide by certain user interface conventions. The APT tools' conventions will be consistent with each other and to as great an extent possible with those of STScI (e.g., Starview), NASA, and industry.

Most Phase 2 proposals are fairly small (see Figures 1, 2, and 3, which are based on Cycle 8). The median number of targets per proposal is less than 3. The median number of visits per proposal is less than 6, and the median number of exposures per visit is less than 3. On the other hand, the distributions do have a long tail. Based on these results, we will target the APT to meet the needs of users with small to medium size proposals. We will also permit means of satisfying the needs of users with large proposals. For example, interactive tools are a major focus of the APT. However, such tools cannot sensibly be used for all exposures in large proposals. The APT will provide alternative means of input that bypass interactive tools.