Re: Agenda for Monday meeting.

[Peter Schilke <schilke@MPIfR-Bonn.MPG.de>]

Barry Clark wrote:

> I'm a bit ambivalent about a fancy preparation tool/parsable coversheet.
> I've considered it several times for the VLA, and always decided against.
>
> Every proposal deadline, a secretary spends three or four days typing things
> in, and I spend another three or four days typing things in and proofreading
> what she has done.  With a fancy tool this would not go to zero, though it
> would be substantially reduced.  So the potential time saving is about a
> week per deadline, three weeks a year.  I'm guessing something in excess
> of half a man-year to implement the thing.  The ten year breakeven is a
> rather slower payback than other things I do.

I think one also has to take into account the time the proposers spend in
preparing the best setup and checking the proposal for technical feasibility.
With an instrument as complex as ALMA, this would be a significant amount of
time.  Also, we should be very clear that it is essential that ALMA is easily
available to other communities (such as the optical) as well as for radio
astronomers - at least in Europe we would be dead in the water if we loose the
support of the general astronomical community, and that may happen if ALMA was
considered an experts only instrument.  Easy to use proposal (and observation)
preparation tools will help in this respect.

    Peter


--
Peter Schilke                           mailto:schilke@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Max-Planck-Institut f"ur Radioastronomie
Auf dem H"ugel 69                       Tel.   49-228-525-392
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