GRAPEVINE, Texas — As NASA prepares to resume vibration testing of the James Webb Space Telescope after an anomaly last month, it’s asking astronomers to start developing proposals for observations to be carried out by the observatory after its launch.
At a town hall meeting during the 229th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society here Jan. 5, JWST officials said they were formally releasing calls for proposals for observations that would be carried out starting in April 2019, about six months after the telescope’s scheduled launch.
“This is really exciting for me,” said Eric Smith, the JWST program director at NASA, noting that, for years, the program has focused more on the development of the telescope than its science. “This year marks the return of the [science] community to the program.”
One call for proposals announced at the meeting is for what are known as “guaranteed time observations,” reserved for astronomers who participated in the development of instruments, software or other capabilities for JWST. The other is for “early release” observations that any astronomer can propose to carry out and are intended to show the telescope’s capabilities to the astronomical community to help them plan later proposals. A more general call for proposals for the telescope’s first year of observations, known as Cycle 1, will be released in late 2017.
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