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PIs or technical leads of projects are requested to assemble their observing blocks as soon as possible by logging into the Observation Planning Tool (OPT) at https://apps.sarao.ac.za/opt/observations using the same credentials used for proposal submission.
On-source times/cadences/source lists must correspond to those requested in the proposal, or recommended by the Review Panel if different.
PIs are also reminded that projects are approved for the proposed science cases/targets only, and other use cases must first be discussed with SARAO in order to limit clashes among approved projects
Time allocation principles
The total requested time on target is carefully considered during the feasibility and science reviews, and this is the key quantity in the time allocation. Observers are requested to minimise overheads, when setting up their schedule blocks, and to adhere to the allocated integration times on target.
The MeerKAT time allocation may seem a bit ambiguous due to the uncertainty in actual overheads. The following This is intended to clarify the reasoning, and why you may be requested to adjust your submitted schedule blocks.
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The average observation overhead, considered across a full year of observing a varied science programme, works out to about 25%. In order to ease the proposal preparation process, an overhead of 25% can be assumed when requesting time. The total requested time on target is carefully considered during the feasibility and science reviews, and this is the key quantity in the time allocation. Observers are requested to minimise overheads, when setting up their schedule blocks, and to adhere to the allocated integration times on target.
For example, a proposal requested 8 hours on target, and assumed 25% overheads, leading to a maximum time request of 10 hours. However, once the schedule block is set up and the observation is simulated, the total duration of the block is 9 hours. This does not mean that the time on target should be increased to extend the block to 10 hours, since this is not necessary to achieve the science goal as per the approved project.
Conversely, we may have a situation where the observatory has requested the observer to split the observation into shorter blocks in order to expedite scheduling, and the overheads increase to 30% when following the recommended calibration strategy. This would be considered acceptable in the cause of reducing scheduling idle time.
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PIs of accepted projects will be given administrator rights for their project and may enable access for Co-Is by following these instructions. In some cases the PI may not be the corresponding author and might not be registered on the system. In these cases we request that the PI follow the instructions on the getting a SARAO account page, then raise a support ticket once this is done to confirm their account details. Please quote your SCI or DDT project ID.
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