GeminiFocus October 2014 | Page 21

program, and you’d like to try out the technique before putting the proposal before the TAC? Or maybe you’d just really like to finish your thesis, and getting that last bit of data right now is what you need. Director’s Discretionary Time can fulfill some of these needs, as exemplified in Figure 1, but other opportunities for good science cannot be easily met under the present system. That’s why, beginning in January 2015, Gemini will be running a pilot scheme, called the Fast Turnaround program, to allow our user community to submit proposals on a monthly basis, with observations following close behind. The Fast Turnaround Concept Rather than relying on a standing TAC reviewing proposals every month, astronomers submitting to the Fast Turnaround program will have two weeks to review roughly 10 proposals submitted by other Principal Investigators (PIs) during the same round (“distributed peer review”; more on this follows). This scheme generates a ranked list of proposals, and a small team of Gemini staff astronomers then checks the top-ranked proposals for technical feasibility and identifies those that can be accepted in the time available. PIs are notified of the outcome within three weeks of submitting their proposals, and successful PIs will work directly with the Gemini support team to prepare their observations by the end of the month. The Fast Turnaround observations will go into a “mini-queue,” which is executed on three dedicated nights each month. The programs remain valid for three months. Following a committee review of the program’s design, the Board of Directors has October 2014 Figure 1. granted approval for an open-ended trial of this scheme. The first Call for Proposals will be announced in early January 2015 (initially for Gemini North only) and account for ~ 10 percent of the telescope time. These GMOS-N observations used Director’s Discretionary Time to investigate a high-proper-motion object detected by by NASA’s Wide- field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite. The images unexpectedly revealed the closest star system to the Sun discovered in almost a century. This kind of observation, using a fairly small amount of time to follow up results from another facility, could be a good candidate for the Fast Turnaround program. The results were published by K. Luhman in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2014). The scheme will operate alongside the standard ways of applying for Gemini time: the regular semester-based Call for Proposals, the new Large and Long proposals mode, etc. PIs from all but two Gemini partners will be able to submit Fast Turnaround proposals; Australia prefers to use their last year in the partnership to complete regular proposals, and Chile doesn’t have access to Gemini North so will not participate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time in astronomy that monthly proposal submission opportunities have been combined with PIs reviewing each other’s proposals. Those two system components have, however, been used separately by other institutions. For example, the popular United Kingdom Infrared Telescope Service Observing Program encouraged submissions of short proposals (< 4 hrs), which a group of referees reviewed at the start of every month (see Howat and Davies, 1996; also this link). GeminiFocus 19