Suzaku News #075: Senior Review / Proposal Deadline / Reviewers Sought

[Newsletter for users of the Suzaku mission <suzakunews@lists.nasa.gov>]

20-October-2011

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[1] Suzaku in the Senior Review: call for help
[2] Reminder: Proposals due on November 10
[3] Request for volunteers for US peer review

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[1] Suzaku in the Senior Review: call for help

The biennial NASA Senior Review of its operating astrophysics missions
will take place in early 2012, and Suzaku has been invited to participate
along with 8 other missions.  The budget for the US participation in
Suzaku was dramatically reduced in early 2011; Suzaku must rank high
in the 2012 senior review to ensure continuing US participation, and
even to restore some of the lost funding.  We need the help of the
Suzaku user community in the US to make the strongest possible case
in the senior review.

We ask you to complete and submit papers based on Suzaku data that you
have been working on, and to submit new observing proposals (see below)
to demonstrate your continued interest in the success of the mission.
In addition, if you have a high profile result, please contact the
Suzaku GOF using the Feedback mechanism on our home page.  This will
ensure that we present the range of high quality science that is being
done using Suzaku in our senior review proposal.  Some of them may
be suitable as press releases, in which case we can help with that
process.

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[2] Reminder: Proposals due on November 10

This deadline applies both to regular proposals as well as proposals
for Key Projects, which are defined as comprehensive observing programs
sampling a number of objects of a particular class, or surveying a large
region of the sky, in order to take maximal advantage of the unique
attributes of Suzaku to address important astrophysical problems.

We especially encourage proposals for new key projects, requesting time
of ~1 Ms or higher.  All current US key projects will be completed in
the current observing cycle, so substantial key project time will be
available.

Further details can be found at:

http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/suzaku/aehp_prop_tools.html
        (for scientists in the US)
http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?project=Suzaku
        (for scientists in ESA member countries)
http://www.astro.isas.jaxa.jp/suzaku/
        (for scientists in all other countries, not the least in Japan)

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[3] Request for volunteers for US peer review

We will hold the US peer review of Suzaku Cycle 7 proposals in Greenbelt,
MD on January 23 & 24, 2012 (with set-up and reviewer arrival on January 22).
If you are US-based scientist and would like to serve as a reviewer, please
contact Koji.Mukai@nasa.gov.  We may or may not be able to use every
volunteer, as we need to avoid conflicts of interest while ensuring that
the reviewers collectively will have the right expertise to match the
subjects of the submitted proposals.

Please note that we cannot use scientists resident at non-US institutions,
or those yet without a PhD, in our review.