BigBOSS Proposal Received and Reviewed

A year ago, NOAO announced an opportunity for groups in the community to partner with NOAO and the National Science Foundation in developing a major new capability for the Mayall 4-m telescope that the proposing team would use in carrying out a large science program of very high scientific impact. As described in the November 2009 issue of Currents, the dual goals of the large science program are to enable frontier science and to improve the US system of ground-based O/IR facilities. NOAO received one official letter of intent to propose, and NOAO responded to the letter with a request for a full proposal.

The full proposal (“A Proposal to NOAO for the BigBOSS Experiment at Kitt Peak National Observatory” by Schlegel et al.) was submitted on 1 October 2010 by a large international team that is led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and includes 16 US institutions (universities and national laboratories) as well as international partners.

The team proposes to equip the Mayall with a 5000-fiber, 7 sq. degree field-of-view multi-object spectrograph and to undertake a spectroscopic survey of 20 million galaxies over 14,000 sq. degrees with the goal of measuring the expansion history of the universe and constraining several cosmological parameters. As with the Dark Energy Camera that will be delivered to the Blanco, the proposed instrument would be a facility instrument. The instrument would be available for use by the NOAO community through the NOAO open-access process, both while the proposed large science program is being carried out and for a significant amount of time (years) after the proposed large science program is completed. The community would also have access to the archive of data produced by the large science program.

In November, the proposal was reviewed by a 13-member non-advocate panel. A report will be submitted to the NOAO Director shortly. Comments on the proposal were also solicited from members of the NOAO Users Committee and the Observatory Council. Further details on the status of the proposal will be discussed at the NOAO Town Hall at the January AAS meeting.