Proposal Category

Proposals should be submitted through PMS for one of the four categories:

STANDARD:

Proposals that ask for a total of less than 100h of observing time and for the standard capabilities of NOEMA's current status (see the following sections).

TIME FILLER:

Proposals that can be considered as backup projects to fill in periods where the atmospheric conditions do not allow mapping, to fill scheduling gaps, or even to fill in periods when only a subset of the standard antenna configurations are available. These proposals will be carried out on a ``best effort'' basis.

SPECIAL:

Exploratory proposals, whose scientific interest justifies the attempt to use the array beyond its guaranteed capabilities. This category includes for example non-standard frequencies for which the tuning cannot be guaranteed, non-standard configurations, special needs with respect to calibration and more generally all non-standard observations. These proposals will be carried out on a ``best effort'' basis. PIs interested in special programs should contact the science operation group (sog@iram.fr) well before the deadline to discuss feasibility and observing strategies.

LARGE PROGRAM:

A Large Program should require more than 100 hours of observing time, spread over a maximum of three years, i.e. 6 contiguous semesters, or longer for programs requesting more than 1000 hours and address strategic scientific issues (for more details see the Large Program Policy on the IRAM web site). The observing time request should currently be based on the availability and performance of the ten-element array. We might adjust it and/or review the observing strategy in response to PI needs and enhanced array's capabilities. In addition, less than the standard 50% of the total scheduled observing time will be reserved for Large Programs using NOEMA at this point. This restriction is necessary to account for the significant investment of technical time still needed to bring the NOEMA project to its full completion in the upcoming years.

The proposal category will have to be specified on the PMS web form and should be carefully considered by the proposers.

Within each of these categories, observations in Band 1, 2, and 3 can be requested which are described in more detail in Section  and in Table .