ATCA Legacy Projects

CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science implemented a program of ATCA Legacy Projects in the 2016OCT semester. Legacy Projects are large, coherent science investigations, not reproducible by any combination of smaller projects, that generate data of general and lasting importance to the broad astronomy community. ATCA Legacy Projects typically require more than 2000 hours over the lifetime of the project, with the expectation of over 300 hours to be allocated per semester. Up to 25% of the observing time may be allocated to Legacy Projects. The original announcement was made in November 2015 and is reproduced below.

Eleven Legacy Projects were submitted in response to the Call for Proposals for 2016OCT semester, and these were considered by an international Time Assignment Committee in early August, 2016. The panel was tasked with reviewing all Legacy Projects, and with making recommendations for a balanced program of ATCA Legacy Projects. Feedback on each proposal has been provided to the proposal teams. The call for Expressions of Interest proposed that Legacy Projects would be supported at the level of 25% of the available observing time. As there was, at the time, some uncertainty over the funding of the ATCA into the future, the TAC was advised that ATNF would be willing to support Legacy Projects at a higher level. The TAC recommended two projects be given the highest priority:

• C3132, GAMA Legacy ATCA Southern Survey (GLASS): A Legacy 4cm Survey of the GAMA G23 Field,
• C3157, Deep Imaging of the Circum-galactic Medium with ATCA​, (now named IMAGINE)

C3132 (GLASS) was allocated its first observing time in semester 2016OCT, and as of April 2019, ~80% of the GLASS observations have been completed. The original Expression of Interest for GLASS is given here. A full ATCA proposal was also submitted and is accessible via the team wiki.

GLASS is an open collaboration, and if you’re interested in joining, please contact Minh Huynh and describe how you can contribute to the team.