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Policies for ESO Public Surveys

 

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Submission and Evaluation Process

  1. ESO will issue periodical Calls for Public Surveys. The periodicity of these calls will not be fixed, but will depend on the status of on-going surveys according to the following criteria:
    • At no time there will be more than 2 active public surveys covering the same RA range.
    • Two active surveys will be possible only if they do not require similar observing conditions (dark time, excellent seeing, etc.).
    • ESO will issue new calls for surveys 6 months before the estimated date for completion of the current surveys.
  2. The Public Survey Panel (PSP), composed of experts from the community, reviews the proposals. The PSP charter says that

The PSP prime mandate will be to review the Public Survey Proposals and, taking into account the GTO programmes, elaborate a scientifically and observationally well coordinated set of Public Surveys. This process may well imply merging different proposals, or expanding their aims beyond the original ones e.g., in the filter set, depth, area, coordinates, etc. In order to achieve these goals the PSP will involve representatives from both the GTO teams and selected teams having submitted Survey Proposals. On the basis of the achieved coordination the selected survey teams will modify the survey proposals describing the scientific rationale, observational strategy, and data product specifications (e.g. photometric and astrometric accuracy, images, catalogs, delivery time, etc.) as agreed in the course of these activities.

  1. ESO will inform all the PI's about the PSP recommendations for their projects, inviting the successful ones to submit their proposals for the consideration of the OPC. This will be done using the appropriate ESOFORM templates, including a revised version of the proposal originally submitted to the PSP. The PSP documentation will be available to the OPC. The Chairperson of the PSP will present the recommendations of the Panel to the OPC, and members of the ESO Survey Team (EST) will be available to answer questions from the OPC, or give short presentations as required. The PI's of surveys not endorsed by the PSP will still be able to submit them to the OPC as large projects, if appropriate, and the relevant PSP documentation will also be available to assist the OPC process.
  2. The OPC will evaluate the scientific goals of full surveys and therefore an OPC endorsement will commit the telescope(s) for the full amount of time estimated by the PI's (and confirmed by the PSP) required to complete the survey. Nevertheless, in order to harmonize Public Surveys with GTO and other programmes, PI's will be asked to submit (and review) their observing plans every 4 semesters (or to completion if the remaining/total execution time is less than 4 semesters). PI's will be expected to submit OB's every semester in order fine-tune the survey according to the progress achieved.
  3. Progress Reviews will be conducted every 6 months. These reviews will include progress reports of the delivery of data from the Observatory to the Teams, delivery of data products from the teams to ESO, validation of the data products by the ESO survey team, inclusion in the VO, and delivery of the validated survey products by the ESO archive to the community. A panel chaired by the VLT Programme Scientist, and including the Head of DMD, the Head of the Office for Science, and the Head of VISAS will conduct these internal reviews. The chair of the PSP will approve the review reports.

Implementation

  1. After the OPC recommends the Public Surveys and the Director General awards the time, the (single) contact point for the PI's shifts from VISAS to the leader of the EST who will remain the single point of contact until the completion of the survey.
  2. As part of the process, the PI's will submit a management plan to ESO, which will be an integral part of ESO's appraisal of the proposal. ESO will issue a detailed document with Guidelines for the preparation of Survey Management Plans (SMPs).
  3. The management plan will be reviewed by ESO as follows:
    • The SMPs are reviewed by ESO in consultation with the chair of  the PSP. The RIXes thus generated are sent to the PIs for comments  and revisions.
    • The revised SMPs are reviewed by a panel composed of the heads of  the Data Management Division, the VLT programme scientist, and the  corresponding Paranal instrument scientist. In the case of VISTA the  panel will also include the VISTA project manager. The head of the EST will be part of the panel as rapporteur.
    • The review panel recommendations are sent to the Director General, for approval or further actions required.
  4. The EST will be composed of the following staff:
    • Magda Arnaboldi (Team Leader - User Support Department) responsible for Phase II preparation and tools, and team coordination.
    • Piero Rosati (Advanced Data Products Group within the Virtual Observatory Systems Department) responsible for preparing the documentation on data product format guidelines, ingestion of the data products into ESO Science Archive Facility, publishing them in the VO, and advising the PI's on all issues related to this part of the process.
    • Mark Neeser (Quality Control Group within the Data Flow Operations Department; OmegaCam QC scientist) responsible for validation of the data-products. Mark will be assisted by one fellow from the office for science in this task.
    • Marco Lombardi (VISAS) responsible for proposal handling and scheduling.
  5. The ESO Survey Team (EST) will be responsible for:
    • Reviewing the management plan in all its dimensions.
    • Working with the PI's to optimize the scheduling of the observations (Phase II). The preparation of the OB's will be the responsibility of the PI. Since for a survey the number of OB's will be large, the PI may either develop special tools to do this, or may use tools developed by ESO, which, however, will be generic and not tailored specifically for surveys. The functionalities of P2PP will be upgraded in order to incorporate features required for large surveys such as time series, groupings, and easy ingestion of large numbers of pointings. A survey area definition tool, provided by the VISTA consortium, will also be made available for these purposes.
    • Issuing and updating guidelines and ESO standards for ingestion and digestion (curation) of data products by the ESO archive.
    • Validating the Survey Data. The ultimate responsibility for the data quality and the accuracy of the data products delivered by a survey rests with the Principal Investigator. The EST will use standard tools and consolidated criteria to check meaningful sub-sets of the data products delivered to ESO. The validation process should verify that the Data Products comply with the requirements in terms of
      1. Photometric accuracy,
      2. Astrometric quality,
      3. Image quality.

Send comments to <visas@eso.org>
Last update: 09 May 2006

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