Observational Proposal

OK, so you are coming to Stage-1.

The academic field is competitive in nature. Unless you are super-rich, it will not just be a matter of what you want to do. Why the money or any other kinds of resources have to be invested in you instead of in the other people? What is your potential? Can you justify your competitiveness? It is never too late to think about this. Composing an observational proposal would be your first experience with this.

Depending on where you are, every 10~30 Ph.D. students, only one will get a research job. The competitive observatories (e.g., ALMA, JVLA) typically have oversubscription rates of 4~5, meaning that only 1 over every 4~5 proposals will be approved and be allocated with observing time (although in this case, you are directly competing with professors and postdocs). Persistently winning observing-time is not only important for maintaining your research but is also a convincing way of justifying that you are the one who has the potential to get to the next stage.

Writing observational proposals is one means to benchmark your competitiveness and sharpen your thinking.

If you have successful proposals to very competitive observatories, you can include those records in your CV. (But note that this is subtle. This is a way to justify that you are capable of acquiring resources. But if you cannot convert them into journal publications, such records can hurt your applications in the end.)

Most observatories call for the proposals once or twice every year. This is the duty-cycle for you to acquire data. Mark the relevant deadlines on your calendar and reserve your time. If you are preparing a proposal for the very first time, and if you are not a native English speaker, you will probably need at least 3 full weeks (including weekends). You will spend perhaps a week reading the call-for-proposal and checking the technical details, a week drafting the proposal including making the figures, and a week polishing the writing. If you have senior co-investigators, make sure you circulate them a draft at least a week ahead of the deadline, otherwise, they will be busy on other people’s proposals or on their own proposals.

Most of the proposals are composed of a Title, Abstract, a Scientific+Technical Justification (usually 2 pages of text and 2 pages of figures/tables in PDF format). In some cases, the Technical Justification may need to be filled to the online forms of those specific observatories. In such cases, it is still good to include some basic explanations for your technical setups in your PDF document. You should check exactly what is required in the form(s) early, and make sure you know how to fill them. For example, there can be check boxes asking whether you would like to use OTF mode or raster scans. Then you better know what they are.

Some tips for composing those parts of a proposal are outlined below.

1. Title

Try not to use more than 90 English characters (in many cases, this is the text hard-limit).

Spend time on making a title that precisely and concisely conveys what you are trying to do. What questions you are trying to address? What is the advantage of your experiment?

For an example, the title of one of my recent successful proposal is How to Make an Earth that is Deficient in Water?. The Abstract of this proposal will be shown in the next section.

A bad example would be 13CS 5-4 line observations towards molecular cloud G123.45-6.78. Most of the readers will not have an idea about what is the 13CS 5-4 line and what is special about the molecular cloud G123.45-6.78. For such people, this title conveys absolutely no information.

2. Abstract

Try not to use more than 200 English words (in most cases, this is the text hard-limit).

This might be a bit about style. But if you are composing a proposal for the very first time, the following pattern might be something easy to begin with:

  1. One or two sentences to provide a big picture of your research area, or to convey the importance and generality of your research.
  2. One or two sentences to introduce your hypotheses that will be tested in this experiment.
  3. Two to three sentences to explain how you are going to test your hypotheses (e.g., the target source you select, your spectral setup or angular resolution, and so on).
  4. One or two sentences to introduce how you are going to analyze your data.
  5. One sentence to justify how your results will make an impact on the research field.

The Abstract for my proposal How to Make an Earth that is Deficient in Water? is:

The asteroid belt (~2 au from the Sun) in the Solar System is made of solid material that is deficient in water. So are the Earth and Mars. Since these dry solid bodies are located within the 170 K water snowline, we are motivated to consider that they formed in-situ out of a dry path of dust grain coagulation, which implies that water-ice free dust grains are stickier than what used to be considered. In spite that this possibility has been rarely considered in the previous observational frameworks, it is supported by the latest laboratory experiments. To test our hypothesis, it is necessary to probe dust grain sizes inwards of the water snowlines in protoplanetary disks. This is challenging since these regions are very small in general (<1~2 au). We propose the 2-48 GHz radio spectro-polarimetric observations towards the nearest and the brightest FUor-like object L1551IRS5 in which the luminous accretion outburst has significantly enlarged the water snowline. Based on SED analysis and diagnosing dust linear polarization due to self-scattering, we aim to test whether or not the >1 mm sized dust grains predominately reside inwards of the snowline. This unique experiment will fundamentally advance our understanding of terrestrial planet-formation.

Once you become familiarized with proposal writing, you can follow your own style. Sometimes, I also immediately point out my experimental setup in the first sentence, for example, We request to make the first measurement of the linear polarization of the Galactic supermassive black hole, Sgr A*, at ALMA Band 8 and 9. The main science goals are ......

3. Science Justification

If you are not an experienced proposer, then you may organize your proposal in the following way:

  1. First paragraph can make a broad overview of the research field including some general understanding.
  2. In the second paragraph, you can point out what is not yet understood, why it is not yet understood, and why it is important to understant it. It would be good if we can say that the problem could not be understood due to the limitation of the previous observing capability, and the proposed observing capability will enable our attempt for the first time.
  3. If possible, make an explicit question, or an explicit hypothesis to test. If you have done some research before that has led you to your present hypothesis, you can phrase in a way such that people can see (1) you have novel ideas in this research area, and (2) you are capable of analyzing the data.
  4. With the above justifications, you should be able to smoothly continue to what you want to propose, and then to the detailed experimental setup in the Technical justification.

If you are an experienced proposer, or if you are working on a very well known problem, it is also OK to leave out most of the background introduction and begin straightly with your novel ideas to make a step forward. This is to some extent free-style.

Preparing good figures is very important for making an excellent scientific jusitfication. Never underestimate the importance of making a nice figure. People will only spend 5 minutes reading the scientific justication. In this case, figures are usuallly more efficient than text to convey some key ideas.

4. Technical Justification

The following information is required. The order of them depends on your logic flow. Note that quantities such as angular resolution or on-source observing time need to be quantitatively and explicitly explained.

  1. Target source selection strategy if this is a survey (this part can also be explained in the Science Justification). You may select them from a previous survey based on certain cuts such as distance, luminosity, etc. Be explicit and explanatory if you are carrying out a statistical study in which target source selection can induce serious systematic errors.
  2. The required angular resolution and maximum recoverable angular scales. If you would like to perform high dynamic-range imaging, you might also need to carry out a simulation, to justify that you can achieve good enough uv coverage.
  3. The spectral setup (e.g., frequency tunings, spectral resolutions, etc).
  4. Required sensitivity (e.g., in units of Jy beam-1). Usually, we need the target source to be detected at 3-sigma significance. Be very careful with this. The required observing time to achieve 6-sigma significance is 4 times the required observing time to achieve 3-sigma significance. If it requires only 1 full night for you to achieve 3-sigma significance, but you request to observe 4 nights to achieve 6-sigma significance, then the proposal would need to justify why 6-sigma significance is definitely necessary to meet your science goal (sometimes this is indeed necessary, just it has to be explained convincingly). For example, we may argue that we need to achieve X-sigma detection, such that the error in spectral index can be smaller than Y, which is needed to discern hypothesis Z. If your target source has never been observed before, you may make an estimated either based on the previous observations on similar target sources or on a theoretical model.
  5. Ancillary data (e.g., has the target source been observed by the same observatory before? If so, what is the reason of proposing new observations?)
  6. Target source availability (if relevant). For example, if your observations require fix date observations (e.g., observing comets/asteroids), or target of opportunity observations (e.g., gamma ray bursts, etc). Do check the target source visibility using the STARALT interface (should check the elevation limits of the telescopes).
  7. Analysis plan (this part can also be explained in the Science Justification).
  8. Any other specific technical requirements (e.g., polarization calibration, VLBI, etc).

Ideally, you want to convince the reviewers that the telescope is the best for your science case. Conversely, your science case is good for the observatory (e.g., it can be regarded as a major achievement of the observatory).

5. Figures
  1. Spend time on creating high-quality figures
  2. Use PDF as far as possible
  3. A figure should not be a stack of information. Know what you want to convey and leave out anything irrelevant to what you want to convey with this specific figure. When you want to convey multiple things, create multiple figures.
  4. Make it pretty and eye-catching.
  5. Not every reviewer is familiar with your research area. Everything should be well explained.