Today is bittersweet. News continues to come out about cuts at NASA, such as scrapping support for Voyager, other large cuts to space science funding, and failure to budget for Hubble refurbishment. While the overall NASA budget is up slightly for next year, a large part of it is directed toward the Moon/Mars initiative at the expense of existing space science. Still, research goes on, and Hubble isn't dead yet.
My snapshot program, which proposes to use the Hubble Space Telescope to image post-starburst quasars, was approved. Over the next year or so, I should get about 40 sharp images to study the morphology of these galaxy interactions causing massive star formation and black hole accretion. Hubble will likely live on through that period okay, and there will be another round of proposals next year (which I predict will be the last). I'm very pleased to finally get the project through the review process -- I've come close and missed the two previous years -- but I must worry about it being my last Hubble project, and of the general near-term future of astronomy funding.
My proposal was ranked in the second quartille, where it has been ranked in previous cycles, although I believe this version was stronger. Oversubscription was down this cycle, undoubtedly due to the loss of the spectrograph STIS. Second quartille for a snapshot program, as you can see from the numbers below, is just squeaking in.
Cycle 14 will have a duration of approximately 12 months, beginning in July 2005. We expect to issue the Cycle 15 Call for Proposals in October 2005, with a Phase I Deadline in late January 2006. For your information, 485 GO proposals requested over 14,000 orbits in Cycle 14, compared to the 3000 orbits available. A total of 63 snapshot proposals requested over 5100 targets, compared to the 1900 targets approved.