PATT ITAC Report for Semester 96B

The individual partner TAGs hold meetings in their respective countries prior to the PATT session to assess applications from their own country. At these meetings informal numbers of shifts are nominated for each application in a priority order. The Chairpersons of each TAG bring their respective lists to the PATT where the ITAC combine the awards, include discussion of the engineering and commissioning requirements and assess the international applications. The final allocations of shifts are made by the ITAC.

Applications to be considered

UK status			39

Canadian status			32

Netherlands status		9

International status		10

University of Hawaii		15

TOTAL:				95

Time Available (in 16-hour nights)

No. of nights in semester 96B	     	183.0

Engineering and Commissioning 		64.0

Set aside for SCUBA 2nd Round           50.0

University of Hawaii (10%)       	7.0

Director's discretionary use       	4.0

Available for PATT science:		58.0

Awards (in 16-hour nights)

UK status		26.75

Canadian status		12.5

Netherlands status	10.0

International status	8.75

University of Hawaii	7.0

TOTAL allocation:	65.0

Allocations for this semester are:

CDN	=	0 shifts allocated;

NL	=       0 shifts allocated;

UK	=	2 shifts allocated

The Lethbridge Group have again requested to bring their own Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) system which will be located on the right-hand Nasmyth platform (the other side from SCUBA).

Applications with Long-Term Status

L/M/96A/U14 completes its award with 2 shifts in 96B. L/M/96A/C08 was given a further 1 night shift and 3 day periods in 96B. L/M/Y/C05 and L/M/96A/C23 are Canadian student thesis projects. These continue to get time wherever possible until they have been completed.

Use of Daytime Periods

The ITAC can only allocate observations during the night periods from 17:30 through 09:30. They can recommend to the Director JCMT that certain applications should be considered for daytime observing. Any allocation of time thus given, at the Director's discretion, does not come from the national quotas.

Engineering & Commissioning

In view of the large amount of E&C time set aside for the commissioning of new instrumentation, other E&C tasks have been kept to a minimum for the semester.

Commissioning of the antenna and instrumentation continues with periods required to characterise and improve the surface via metrology and beam map measures, monitor the antenna performance and tracking through pointing and inclinometry runs, measure receiver performances and efficiencies, and increase the catalogue of standard spectra available at the telescope.

One week of 'heavy engineering' has been set aside for re-grouting and welding up to 8 further joints on the antenna azimuth track.

Time has been allocated for commissioning of RxB3, RxW and for SCUBA according to the commissioning plans made available by the instrument builders. There is a non-standard instrument configuration schedule for the new FTS system which requires set-up and calibration time on the right-hand Nasmyth platform.

A short-baseline interferometry session (SBI) has been arranged with the CSO to be run in November 1996.

SCUBA 2nd Round

A total of 156 shifts (the month of February 1997 has been included in this) have been set aside from the latter half of semester 96B to be allocated for continuum observations pending the successful commissioning of SCUBA. It is anticipated that the distribution of these shifts will be according to the partner percentages.

Once the sensitivities of SCUBA are determined, an announcement of opportunity will be widely circulated requesting applications for time to fill this slot. Applications should be sent to the national TAGs (2 copies) and to Hawaii (2 copies) where they will be peer-reviewed and assessed as normal prior to formal allocation by the ITAC. International applicants should send 4 copies to Hawaii.

These applications must be for single point photometry and 'jiggle' imaging only within the restrictions given in the announcement. Proposals for this round will be restricted to no more than 24 hours integration, including overheads. All observations will be done in serviced mode with no facilities for remote eavesdropping being provided at this stage.

Provisional dates will have the announcement circulated at about the end of July with a closing date for applications of 6th September (applications must bear a postmark no later than this date). The ITAC meeting will be held at ROE on 29th October.

Fallback Programmes

A number of applications have been approved by the ITAC to be included in the schedule should RxB3 and/or RxW fail to meet their delivery schedules. The commissioning time set aside for these instruments will be apportioned according to the partner funding ratio after 10% has been given to the University of Hawaii. Applicants on these fallback programmes will be informed by the JCMT Scheduler when/if their time is to be scheduled.

In addition, there are numerous heterodyne applications set aside to be included as fallback for the SCUBA 2nd round. It is most likely that all these fallbacks will be done in serviced mode by JCMT staff. All applicants awarded fallback will be informed in advance by the JCMT Scheduler.

Modification of the Semester Boundary

In order to accommodate a significant period of time for the SCUBA 2nd round, the ITAC have decided to include the month of February 1997 effectively into semester 96B. Therefore the month of February will be scheduled as part of the SCUBA 2nd round.

Semester 97A will be a 5-month semester, beginning on 1st March 1997 and ending on 31st July 1997. The closing date for applications for this semester is 30th November 1996 (for ALL applications). The national TAGS will meet in early January with an ITAC meeting towards the end of the month.

The Allocations Table

Listings in the following table reflect the allocations made by the ITAC. Subsequent re-scheduling may already have modified some of these awards and added others.

Graeme Watt, JAC

(ITAC Technical Secretary & JCMT Scheduler)