The XMM-Newton third Announcement of Opportunity (AO-3) was closed on 30-April-2003.
The performance of the new Proposal Submission System was excellent. Reports about a non nominal behaviour, like missing confirmation e-mails or difficulties with the up-load of the justification file, were extremely rare.
In total 694 valid proposals were successfully submitted requesting in total 98833 ksec of science time. SOC received proposals from 468 different Principal Investigators from 24 countries, mostly ESA member states, the United States and Japan. The number of countries increases to 36 if Co-Investigators are taken into account as well. Considering Principal Investigators and Co-Investigators, about 1500 individual scientists responded to the third Announcement of Opportunity.
The mean time requested for the individual observations is 33 ksec, which is an increase of about 10% in comparison to the previous call. This trend was already visible comparing AO-1 with AO-2. The most probable reason is that the scientific community optimizes the scientific usage of XMM-Newton taking advantage of its specific strengths, i.e. simultaneous non-dispersive spectroscopic imaging, medium resolution dispersive spectroscopy and optical/UV imaging with the unprecedented effective area of the X-ray instruments.
As a result of the wish to have the date of release for future AO's in autumn, the third Announcement of Opportunity covers a period of about 1.5 years and therefore about 60% more observing time is available for distribution. Consequently, the nominal oversubscription factor of 5.1 can not directly be compared with the one reached for the previous calls. Normalizing to a standard one year AO the oversubscription factor is 7.6.
XMM-Newton CD-ROM automatic delivery discontinued
The automatic delivery of CD-ROMs to the principal investigator (PI) of an XMM-Newton observation will be discontinued as of June 15, 2003.
Observation Data Files, as well as Pipeline Products (PPS), as derived from the ODF by the Survey Science Centre (SSC), should be selected instead from the XMM-Newton Science Archive (XSA) and extracted via ftp. Users are informed that the XSA also allows the generation of CD-ROMs if requested.
The PI will continue to receive via e-mail a "Delivery Note" as soon as ODF and PPS of one of their observations are available in the XSA.