Instructions for submitting a request for Director’s Discretionary Time can be found here.
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Input the names, email addresses, affiliations and countries of all the members of the project. This includes the Principal Investigator*, all Co-investigators* and the Technical Lead*. As relevant also indicate whether the proposal is a core component of a PhD thesis.
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Upload your science case as a pdf. Note that the pdf should be less than 10 MB and not exceed 3 pages for Regular proposals. , 4 pages for Large proposals may submit up to 4 pages and XLP are limited to , and 8 pages for XLPs.
Targets/Fields
Attach/input (J2000) coordinates of your proposed targets, if they are known, as well as the requested integration time per target in seconds, excluding calibrators and calibration overheads. In the case of Target of Opportunity observations, subject to triggering criteria, you may tick the box to submit the proposal without specific targets. The triggering criteria must be clearly defined under the ‘Observation’ section. Also if, for instance, your project aims to cover a wide contiguous area of sky, you may choose to note those details in the ‘Additional Information’ box on the last page rather than submitting many individual targets. The total time for targets must be less than or equal to the total time on the Observation Details page, which includes calibrators and calibration overheads.
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Observation details
Observation Page
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The observation details form has been significantly expanded from 2023. Please read the Call document for conditions pertaining to time requests, including multi-year proposals.
Spectral zoom modes are only available for L-band at this point.
Limits for time are as follows:
Regular: 0.1 - 100 hrs overall
Large: 100.1 - 300 hrs overall
XLP: 300.1 - 2200 hrs overall (but you can only request a max of 500 hrs for this year)
S-band limit to : 100 hrs overall
Multiple bands can be requested. The time request for each band must be entered into this form.
Multiple simultaneous sub-array indicator has been added if multiple arrays/bands are observed at the same time.
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Choose between imaging or beamformed observations. Note beamformed observations can also include imaging. Selecting beamformed observations triggers a new dropdown selection box for User Supplied Equipment.
Choose the observing band(s), integration period, correlator channelisation, and centre frequency in the case of narrowband modes.
Indicate the amount of observing time (including overheads) that you are requesting. Note that for standard calibration schemes an overhead of 25% can be assumed. If different overhead fraction/time is expected (different calibration scheme, many short slews, etc), this must be justified in the Science Case and the OPT must be used to simulate the observations. Short observations (< 2 hours) tend to have much higher overheads due to the larger proportion of time spent on the bandpass calibrator. Please refer to our page on average overheads for further details.
In certain cases, night time observations may be necessary, e.g. to avoid solar interference or because simultaneous optical observations are planned. Note that night observations tend to be more oversubscribed and your preference needs to be justified in the Science Case.
For multi-year proposals there will be is an additional field in within each band selection, defining many indicating requested hours in this the immediate 12 months -month cycle and how many in the proposal altogether overall for that band.
For target of opportunity (ToO) observations, the triggering criteria must be clearly specified.
Multiple simultaneous sub-array proposals should be confirmed with the observatory SARAO before submitting.
Data management
MeerKAT datasets, particularly for spectral line modes, can become extremely large. Use the data volume calculator to estimate the size of the measurement set to be downloaded. Remember that you will need several times this in disk space to process the data.
Specify where you are planning to reduce the data. The compute requirements may be considerable.
Many of our users have experienced challenges in downloading data. Please indicate how you plan to transfer the data to the processing facility. Users who may need to download many terabytes of data and who have a slow internet connection may wish to make prior arrangements with SARAO to ship tapes (if they have the this requires appropriate tape drives).
If the proposal type is
XLP, there is anAccess Securedbutton.
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You may wish to consider using the SDP pipeline and images for some purposes, particularly if rapid feedback is necessary.
Upload a one-page pdf detailing the data management plan including relevant experience of the team team experience for Regular and Large proposals (see the Call document for details).
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