15th Announcement of Opportunity (AO-15)

 

This Announcement solicits proposals for observations to be carried out in the period from January to December 2018.

We bring to your attention the following:

  • ESA provides the opportunity to propose for coordinated observations with XMM-Newton, NASA's NuSTAR telescope and/or NASA's Swift satellite with a total of 300 ks, 100 ks and 150 ks, respectively, of their available time. Note that through an agreement with ESA, the Fermi project of NASA offers the possibility to obtain observing time with INTEGRAL through a single proposal to NASA via the Fermi AO.
  • Data or science rights to the targets or science in the field of view (FOV) of the instruments will be allocated to PIs of accepted proposals with the usual 1-year proprietary period. If the PI is from a country other than the Russian Federation, the rest of the field will be made public immediately. Proposals where the PI is from the Russian Federation follow a similar kind of policy, except that the rest of the field will be made public only through the consolidated data programme. The Russian Federation scientists currently working at Russian Federation scientific institutes still have exceptional access to the near-real time data of the rest of the field.
  • The INTEGRAL Project has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the LIGO/Virgo consortium to participate to the electro-magnetic follow-up campaign of GW signals until 1 June 2017; a renewal will be discussed in due time.
  • Observations with non-standard, custom patterns, such as the GPS and Galactic scans, generally reduce scheduling efficiency, and increase workload for both the ISOC and the Mission Operations Centre. The use of non-standard patterns is now strongly discouraged. Hence custom patterns will be considered only for the highest, A-grade, proposals, and their scheduling will be done on a best effort basis.
  • Following a recommendation by the IUG it is possible to submit Key Programme proposals with observations spanning two AO cycles of observation.
  • Finally, we would like to remind you that there is no second call for proposals requesting data rights anymore (so-called data rights proposals). Therefore, we strongly encourage you to submit any data rights proposals as observing time proposals in the coming and future announcements of opportunity; amalgamation has been made more flexible.

To aid proposers writing (new) proposals, we have compiled a checklist from the documentation.

 

AO-15 Milestones

 
Release of AO-15: Call for observing time proposals   20 Feb 2017
Deadline for submission of observing time proposals   31 March 2017 (14:00 CEST)
Meeting of the Time Allocation Committee (TAC)   15-17 May 2017
Start AO-15 cycle of observation (duration 12 months)   01 January 2018
 

AO-15 Documentation

AO-15 Tools

Need help?

Staying informed