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The Telescope System
Instrumentation Program (TSIP)
PROPOSAL PREPARATION AND SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
A. LETTERS OF INTENT
» The deadline for Letters of Intent is January 18, 2002.
Letters of Intent for both types of TSIP proposals are required. Letters of Intent may be submitted in electronic version, paper copy, or both. Acceptable formats for the electronic versions are plain ASCII text, MS Word, Adobe PDF, or Postscript formats. If submitted electronically, send by email to syspo@noao.edu.
If submitted by mail, Letters of Intent should be sent to:
System Project Office
c/o NOAO Director's Office
National Optical Astronomy Observatory
P.O. Box 26732
Tucson, AZ 85726
1. Required Content
Letters of Intent should include (a) designation of the proposal as either an instrument or improvement proposal, (b) names and institutions of the PI and Co-I's, (c) general description of the instrument or improvement, (d) anticipated period of performance, (e) anticipated total funding or other resources sought through proposal, (f) description of facilities to which community access will be given. The purpose of obtaining Letters of Intent is to assemble a peer review panel without conflicts of interest and with expertise appropriate to the anticipated proposals.
Questions that arise during the period preceding the due date for Letters of Intent may be sent to syspo@noao.edu. Collected questions and answers will be displayed on the system web site: http://www.noao.edu/system/
B. FULL PROPOSALS
» The deadline for full proposals is March 29, 2002.
Proposals must be submitted electronically to syspo@noao.edu. In addition to the required electronic version, hard copies of the proposal may also be submitted. Acceptable file formats for the electronic version are MS Word, Adobe PDF, or Postscript.
1. Required Sections and Page Limits
Each proposal must contain five sections: (1) Science, (2) Technical, (3) Management, (4) Budget, and (5) Community Access. The length of the proposal without the Budget section should not exceed 20 pages. There are no page limitations on the Budget section.
- The Science section must describe the scientific capability that the proposed instrument or improvement provides or enables. It may refer to scientific motivations for particular capabilities derived from community meetings or workshops (e.g., The First Workshop on the Ground-Based O/IR System; see http://www.noao.edu/ gateway/oir_workshop/). If this section does not refer to community-based efforts to identify needed capabilities, it should make the scientific case that the capability to be developed is as desirable as those that have been prioritized through such efforts. Specific scientific goals for the instrument or improvement and/or generally described studies that could be undertaken with community time may be stated.
- The Technical section must describe the technical approach that will be used in order to provide the proposed capability. The intent of this section is to convince the evaluation committee that the technical approach is viable and that the proposing team has the resources and the expertise to carry it out. This section should include an overview of the instrument or improvement, including optics, mechanical design, electronics, and software. It should present a discussion of the technical issues or concerns, and strategies for addressing them. It should also describe the flow down from scientific goals to functional performance requirements, and should provide evidence that the proposed instrument will satisfy these requirements.
- The Management section must describe the management approach to be used on the proposed project, including:
- Overall project structure and organization, including an organization chart
- Project risks and key challenges and strategies for addressing these
- Procedures and process to be used to manage the project, including:
- Procedures to assign tasks and to control project personnel
- Metrics to monitor and assess progress
- Procedures and tools to plan and organize the project work
- Plant and equipment
- Persons or subcontractors
- Dependencies among aspects of development, design, or fabrication
- Documentation that will be generated
- Summary of any effort requested from NOAO personnel resources
- A Work Breakdown Structure showing timeline of major tasks, resource loading, task durations, and task costs built up to the overall project cost.
- Dates of planned meetings and reviews and other critical milestones.
- Quality assessment and control
- The Budget section will give the total cost of the instrument or improvement, and an annual payment schedule or funding profile for the funds requested from TSIP. The payment schedule should be justified on the basis of the work breakdown structure and planned commitments for large capital items. The budget should explicitly identify payroll, benefits, non-payroll, and agency-agreed overhead costs as they would be determined in a proposal to NSF. Summary budgets should be given using formats and categories similar to those used for NSF Fast Lane proposals. For instrument proposals, summary budgets should be given separately for phase AB and phase CD.
- The Community Access section must detail the manner in which telescope time is to be made available, including the total number of nights and their distribution over time, constraints on their use, the facilities to be made available, and so forth.
This section must include an explicit calculation of the value of community observing time used to determine the nights available to the community if the proposal is funded. This value should be calculated using such items as amortized construction cost, together with annual costs for operations and instruments. To provide accountability for the community, the calculation and explanation of the value of nights provided for successful TSIP proposals will be published on the System web site: http://www.noao.edu/system/
In addition, the Community Access section should include a thorough description of instruments available to visitors, services for visitors, data quality, data analysis capabilities, and any other factors that affect the judgment of the value of observing time on a particular telescope. Proposals should state a clear schedule and any contingency planning for providing the allocated community observing time.
Questions that arise during the period following the due date for Letters of Intent may be sent to syspo@noao.edu. Submitted questions and answers will be distributed to all potential proposers from whom letters of intent were received.
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