Over the past few years we have seen forefront science driven more and more by survey programs. Such programs allow the identification of complete, well defined samples of objects that can both yield conclusions based on statistical analysis of the survey data itself and also provide important subsets for more detailed observations with larger telescopes. For example, the recent discovery (Kirkpatrick et al., 1998) of a new spectral class of stars, L dwarfs, is a result of follow-up studies of objects found in the 2MASS and DENIS surveys. Although the most obvious examples are very large efforts such as 2MASS and SDSS, there are many smaller surveys as well, covering areas of a few or a few tens of square degrees. A workshop held in Tucson in 1997 identified such surveys as a critical enabling tool for effective use of very large telescopes (http://www.noao.edu/scope/supcap_workshop/).
Survey programs that require more than a few nights of telescope time do not fit well into the existing structures for time allocation. TACs always tend to cut everything back a little to let a few more proposers have access to some telescope time, and a survey program that displaces several smaller programs rarely gets support. While the downside of this balance, the decrease in the number of people who are getting data, is easily seen, the upside often is not. The upside is that the survey has scientific returns in addition to those that are advertised in a standard proposal. The survey data may be made available to scientists outside the proposing team who are searching for other kinds of objects. The survey may produce catalogs of objects that will support follow up observations by many more people.
NOAO is initiating a program that will permit survey proposals to be considered in a partially separate process. Both the concept of this program and an implementation plan have been reviewed by the NOAO nighttime users' committee. A substantial amount of telescope time is potentially available, but successful proposers will have to justify their survey both in terms of overall scientific return and in terms of how they will conduct the project to make that return available to the community. The details of how this program will be carried out can be found at the survey program Web address (http://www.noao.edu/noaoprop). The following is a summary of the ground rules for this new program:
The proposals will be submitted on an expanded version of the standard NOAO proposal form with slightly different instructions. In particular, survey proposals will include a discussion of the management of the survey in the section on experimental design.
Todd Boroson, Richard Green,
Malcolm Smith, Sidney Wolff