Background
The NRAO/GBO Telescope Time Allocation Committee (TAC) makes recommendations to the Directors 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 procedures for these two meetings are similar but there are some differences.
- Location. 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).
- Active Large Projects. During the Large proposal meeting the TAC will discuss and make recommendations about active Large projects.
- External Joint Proposals. During the TAC meeting proposals submitted to NRAO that are joint with external Facilities (not AUI/NA) are discussed and recommendations are made (up or down) to the Director.
Documents
Here we list the relevant documents that are needed for the TAC. (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.)