Approved Science Program: Trimester 2010-A

Dale Frail and Tim Bastian

The October 2009 call for proposals, covering the first trimester of 2010, included a number of new capabilities. Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) Early Science is expected to begin in March 2010 following the shutdown of the old VLA correlator and the transfer of hardware to the new EVLA WIDAR correlator. Similarly, the new DiFX software correlator, with increased science capabilities, will go into routine operation for Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) programs. At the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the pulsar Spigot and spectrometer system was being retired in favor of the new Green Bank Ultimate Pulsar Processing Instrument (GUPPI) pulsar back end. The first trimester of 2010 also marks an operational milestone with all three of NRAO’s current telescopes using dynamic scheduling as the default scheduling mode.

The GBT and the EVLA/VLBA Proposal Selection Committees (PSC) met in the second week of December 2009 to review the referee rankings and technical reports for all proposals, with the goal of providing a recommended science program to the NRAO Director’s Office.

A list of the approved EVLA, GBT, and VLBA/High Sensitivity Array (HSA) observing programs for Trimester 2010-A is on-line.