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After completion of the sky survey on 1 February 1991 all of the ROSAT observing time will be available to guest investigators. Pointed observation data are subject to proprietary data rights for a period of one year after the data has been made available to the Principal Investigator (PI) in a form suitable for scientific analysis.
There are no restrictions regarding the amount of observing time or the
number of targets requested in guest observer proposals (see however
§ 3.5 
). In particular,
proposals requesting large amounts of observing time will not be
considered separately from proposals requesting only relatively
modest amounts of time. Also, the percentage of observing time spent on
long versus short investigations or the amount of observing time spent
on various topical issues is not specified.
However, in order to avoid unnecessary duplications of scientific results and waste of observing time, no pointed observations will be approved and scheduled whose scientific output is not likely to exceed the all-sky survey results. Therefore, as a general rule, exposure times requested for pointed observations should considerably exceed the sky survey exposures. From figure the ROSAT all sky survey exposure times can be determined for any position on the sky. Pointings with durations not exceeding the all sky survey exposure by at least a factor of two will not be considered for scheduling unless a guest investigator explicitly demonstrates in her/his proposal that the proposed science cannot be extracted from the survey data.
Individuals interested in pursuing specific research projects using data from the all-sky surveys may contact Prof. J. Trümper with regard to the XRT data and Prof. K. Pounds with regard to the WFC data.
Time-critical observations, i.e., observations with scheduling constraints
in addition to those described in Chapter 7 ,
impose a particular burden on ROSAT mission
planning (for more discussion of such observations cf.
§ 9.5 ).
In particular, for ``short-lived'' phenomena, i.e., phenomena where
timing within a spacecraft orbit matters, the observability of
an event may only
be assessed a few weeks prior to scheduling. Too large a percentage
of such time-critical observations would reduce the overall ROSAT
observing efficiency since the observing schedule would then not
be dominated by the visibility slots available for each target but
rather by other requirements. Because all time-critical observations must
receive highest priority in the scheduling process, their total share
will not exceed five
percent of the total available observing time. Guest investigators should
carefully check whether the requested observations really need to be
carried out in a time-critical fashion.