Approved AO-3 Programmes - CHEOPS Guest Observers Programme

APPROVED AO-3 PROGRAMMES

27 May 2022 The third and final Announcement of Opportunity (AO3) for the CHEOPS Guest Observers Programme in the nominal mission came out on 15 February 2022, and closed  4 weeks later on 15 March 2022. A total of 38 proposals were submitted to the AO, with an oversubscription factor of ~ 2.4 on the time available at the opening of the Call. Given the demand on CHEOPS observing time it was agreed with the mission PI that observing time that was not allocated from Year 2 could be taken forward to Year 3. As a result a total of 25% of the science time in the period 1 July 2022 to 24 September 2023 is available to the GO Programme. 

It was decided to allocate approximately 85% of the GO Programme time to proposals submitted to AO-3, with the remainder to be made available to the Community through the Discretionary Proyramme. Approximately 30% more orbits than can be physically scheduled in the AO-3 component of the GO Programme have been allocated to enable efficient scheduling of the very large number of time-critical observations in CHEOPS programmes. 

The CHEOPS Time Allocation Committee (TAC) met on 11-13 May, 2022. Based on the recommendations made by the TAC, the Director of Science has awarded observing time on CHEOPS to the proposals listed in the table below.  Successful proposals, known as programmes, have been awarded observing time on CHEOPS totalling 1546.8 orbits. Targets that are part of these programmes have been added to the Reserved Target List and cannot be included in observing programmes of others until the AO-3 observations have been completed. 

All programmes have been assigned a priority from 1 (high) to 3 (low), in some cases at the level of individual targets. This priority is taken into account by the automated planning tool used in the weekly planning, and is a strong indicator of the likelihood that observations will be scheduled. Observers are reminded that the award of observing time provides no guarantee that the observations will be executed, and that more observing time has been awarded than can be physically scheduled to minimise the time that the CHEOPS satellite is idle.

Principal Investigators of proposals that have been awarded time will be contacted by email, and are required to complete and submit observation requests at their earliest convenience. Guidelines on how to prepare observation requests can be found in the document at this link. Feedback will be provided to the PIs of proposals that were not awarded observing time. 

Key to table:   EP - exoplanet science; SP - stellar physics

Note: programmes #21 and #35 have a target in common.  Given the similarity of the proposed observation, a single observation will be made and the data shared.