Background
The NRAO Telescope Time Allocation Committee (TAC) makes recommendations to the Director about scheduling priorities, approved time, proprietary period, and disposition constraints. These are all included in the Observation Specification Disposition after approval from the Director. The TAC does not re-evaluate the scientific or technical merit of the proposal and therefore they do not change the consensus comments or linear-rank. They can, however, point out errors in the consensus comments that lead to changes in the text if approved by the corresponding SRP chair.
In practice there are two TAC meetings for each Solicitation. The first meeting discusses only Large proposals, whereas the second meeting discusses all remaining proposals. These are called the Large proposal meeting and TAC meeting, respectively. The Large proposal meeting is held remotely, whereas the TAC meeting is a hybrid meeting located at one of the sites (Green Bank, Socorro, or Charlottesville).
Procedures
Here we list the procedures for the Large proposal and TAC meetings. The procedures for these two meetings are similar but there are some differences noted below. The TAC chair runs the meeting with close coordination of a TTA Group member.
- Introductions/Guidelines. We start with brief introductions and then a TTA Group member will give a short presentation with some guidelines. The TAC chair will then add anything they want to emphasize. A TTA Group member may also give other presentations (e.g., Gender Equity update).
- Discussion by Facility. Since time is allocated by Facility we organize the discussion around each Facility. We usually combine HSA and GMVA since there are fewer proposals for these Facilities. We usually start with the Triggered proposals first.
- GBT. The GBT scheduler will give a short presentation and then the TAC will begin their deliberations.
- VLA. The VLA scheduler will give a short presentation and then the TAC will begin their deliberations.
- VLBA. The VLBA scheduler will give a short presentation and then the TAC will begin their deliberations.
- HSA/GMVA (TAC Meeting Only). The VLBA scheduler will give a short presentation and then the TAC will begin their deliberations.
- Active Large Projects (Large Proposal Meeting Only). During the Large proposal meeting the TAC will discuss and make recommendations about active Large projects.
- Joint External Proposals (TAC Meeting Only). We will review the recommendations for allocating time for these external Facilities (e.g., HST). For example, check that we are not going over the allotted time available and any issues.
- Postmortem (TAC Meeting Only). The TTA Group member who coordinates the TAC meeting together with the relevant ADs will meet with the TAC to discuss any issues.
Documents
Here we list the relevant documents that are needed for the TAC meeting. Currently, most documents are located on a secure wiki page with permissions given for the relevant people. In principle since TTAT understands the permissions it would be useful to have them accessible within the tool.
- Proposal PDFs. All TAC members need access to the proposal PDFs for all proposals submitted within the current semester, even proposals for which they are conflicted. Currently, these are gzip files organized either by telescope or proposal type: Large, GBT, VLA, VLBA, and GMVA. We need to think about how best to present the proposals to the TAC with TTAT.
- Facility Documents. Since we discuss each Facility separately during the TAC meeting the documents are organized by Facility. There are two main PDFs. Currently the GBT has all of this information in one document but there is not reason it could not be put in two documents.
- Narrative. This is a short report written by the scheduler that summarizes the proposals and discusses any issues with resources/scheduling. They always contain a pressure plot which is a LST/GST histogram of the hours requested broken down by scheduling priority, frequency, and weather conditions. Currently each Facility does this differently with some justification, but it would be useful to make these plots similar. We should discuss whether the tools should generate the plots or data (e.g, csv file), or both.
- Summary. This lists the proposals in descending order of linear-rank and includes information that has been deemed useful in past meetings. Currently these are different between the GBT and VLA/VLBA. We should discuss if these should be the same and if so how we combine the best of both approaches (e.g., here is a proposal). Currently we generate different versions of these documents (e.g., only Large proposals, only Triggered proposals, etc.).
- Active Large Proposal Reports. Currently a web-based form is used to capture the relevant information and a PDF of all reports is generated.
- Presentations. There are several presentations given during the TAC meeting that are produced by TTA Group members.
TTA Page: https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/Software/TelescopeTimeAllocation