Discretionary Programme - CHEOPS Guest Observers Programme

CHEOPS Discretionary programme

Last update 1 July 2021

The requirement for the target of a discretionary programme to be either newly discovered or newly determined to be of high scientific interest since the close of the last AO (ie. 1 December 2020) is waived for proposals led by PhD students (as part of their PhD work) and/or early career researchers. 

The webpage and documentation for the discretionary component of the CHEOPS Guest Observers Programme are in the process of being updated to reflect this and other recent changes. It is therefore important that prospective applicants check the updates detailed AT THIS LINK before submitting a proposal.

This webpage provides prospective users of CHEOPS with all information (policies and procedures for the programme, documentation, tools and links)  required to prepare and submit proposals to the CHEOPS Discretionary Pragmme, through which 5% of the nominal science observing observing time on CHEOPS will be allocated.

To be eligible for the Discretionary Programme a proposal must meet the following criteria:

• Contain a single target of high scientific interest
• Demonstrate that the target was either (a) discovered, or (b) declared to be of high scientific interest since the close of the previous call (1 December 2020)
• Contain a target/event that is observable by the date foreseen for the end of AO cycle 3 (March 25 2023), and that is not on the CHEOPS Reserverd Target List

Details regarding what needs to be included in a proposal, together with the tools and documentation to support proposal preparation and submission, can be found in the Policies and Procedures document for the Discretionary Programme. Prospective observers are STRONGLY RECOMMENDED to read very carefully through this document.

Important Notes:

• The sole way to submit proposals for the CHEOPS Discretionary Programme is through the Phase I Proposal Handling Tool. To submit a proposal you will need to have user credentials for the Cosmos Website AND to be a member of the CHEOPS Guest Observers Programme Group. You will also need to be a member of the GO Programme group to be able to download the software for the Scheduling Feasibility Checker, which is one of the tools that you will need to prepare your proposal (see notes below). Requests for both IDs and group membership are made by following the instructions at the following link:  https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/cheops-guest-observers-programme/register
• It is important to appreciate that the majority of CHEOPS observations will be time-critical. These can be difficult to schedule, and in some cases may not be possible even if a target is awarded observing time and is high priority.
• CHEOPS is a small mission, with a correspondingly small team supporting the Community in their use of CHEOPS. Response times to questions may therefore take a little longer than may be the case for a larger mission/observatory.
• Notifications of updates/changes to application procedures wlll be published on the page at this link - people thinking about applying for discretionary time are advised to check this page regularly and certainly before submitting their proposals.
• A short summary of proposals awarded time in the discretionary programme will be made available at this link.
• Please check the Frequently Asked Questions page for answers to commonly asked questions

In case of questions, please send an email to cheops-support@cosmos.esa.int,  or kate dot isaak at esa.int, replacing the " dot " by "." and " at " by "@".

Documentation:

• Policies and Procedures document for the Discretionary Programme.   ** See this link for an important update **

Tools and supporting manuals:

• Phase I Proposal Handling Tool (PHT1).
• Overview of CHEOPS performances as of Nov 2020.
• ​​​​Exposure Time Calculator  and help page
• CHEOPS scheduling feasibility checker - installation notes and user instructions.
• CHEOPS Reserved Target List Checker.
• CHEOPS Observers Manual.

Useful presentations, reference data and links    

• Link to the CHEOPS Data page which contains the details of selected CHEOPS data taken during In-orbit Commissioning that is already public, simulated data and reference data (including the CHEOPS QE curve and optical throughput)
• Link to the CHEOPS Mission Archive
• In-orbit measurement of the CHEOPS point spread function (also available directly from the CHEOPS archive: REF_APP_WhitePSF)
• CHEOPS Data Products Defintion Document (DPDD) which includes the defintion/description of all CHEOPS data products.
• CHEOPS visibility maps (annual accumulated +1 day (per month) + ascii in a tarball) with README file (note the update relative to that provided in the tarball

User-contributed tools/aids:

Below is a list of tools that have been developed by members of the CHEOPS Science Team for their own use. These have been made available "as-is" via the links below, with caveats and warnings that are detailed in the individual pages

• Tool to generate XML files for input to the CHEOPS scheduling feasibility checker, based on a table of data for multiple observing requests provided by the user.
• pycheops -- a python package developed for the analysis of CHEOPS light curves