SOLARNET is pleased to announce its call for proposals of its Access Programme for the balloon-borne solar telescope mission Sunrise III.
Proposal Submission Deadline: 17 November 2021, 23:59 UT
Send proposals to: east-tac@astro.su.se
Proposals are hereby invited under the SOLARNET Trans-National Access Programme for observing time at the balloon-borne solar telescope Sunrise III, planned to be launched in June 2022.
Proposals will be evaluated by the EAST TAC, a common European time allocation committee installed by the European Association for Solar Telescopes.
The Nationality rules of the Access Programme require that the PI and at least half of the Co-I’s of a proposal have affiliations in the European Union – with the exception of Germany – or in associated countries or in the UK. The exception for Germany means that German PI’s are not allowed. German Co-I’s are allowed but do not count as EU when checking if the proposal is eligible.
Data acquired in the SOLARNET Access Programme follow the same data policy rules as all other Sunrise data. These rules foresee a 12-month period of exclusive usage of the data by the consortium members, including the SOLARNET PIs. After this, all Sunrise data will be publicly available.
The Sunrise III mission has a planned flight time of 4 to 5 days. It will carry three instruments: the tunable-filter spectropolarimeter TuMAG and the grating spectropolarimeters SCIP (NIR) and SUSI (UV). For more information about the instruments and their capabilities, please see https://www.mps.mpg.de/sunrise-obs-plan.
For general information about Sunrise, please see https://www.mps.mpg.de/solar-physics/sunrise
The teams of the selected proposals will be included in the mission organisation under the same conditions as the researchers from the instrument teams.
The data recorded during the Sunrise flight are shared with equal rights between the researchers from the Sunrise team and the PIs of the selected SOLARNET proposals. The scientific topic of the selected SOLARNET proposal is reserved exclusively for the SOLARNET PIs prior to the public availability of the Sunrise data.
SOLARNET PIs have to comply to the same rules for publication and co-authorship as everyone else.
It is expected that SOLARNET projects will be scheduled on 10% of the available time. Since time is required for calibration and various overheads, proposers are advised to express their observing time requirement as the net time required for scientific data. It is expected that the longest such slot will be at most 4 h.
Given the brevity of the Sunrise flight compared with the time-scale of evolution of solar activity as well as the sometimes strong constraints on observations set by technical and environmental factors, the Sunrise team cannot guarantee that the types of objects that the SOLARNET PIs wish to be observed will actually be observed. In such cases, the affected SOLARNET PIs will be given the chance to negotiate alternative science goals with the Sunrise team and will be provided the data (as far as available) to carry out this work.
A proposal consists of a SOLARNET form plus a template specific for the mission.
Please download the forms here: Download file
All proposals should be sent via email to east-tac@astro.su.se and must be received by 23:59 UT on November 17, 2021.
Questions can be sent to east-tac@astro.su.se.
Technical questions about the instrument and the mission can be posed directly to the Sunrise III Project Manager Andreas Lagg: lagg@mps.mpg.de.
Information Webinar:
An information webinar has been held on October 7th, 2021. Recordings of the webinar and presentation slides are available to watch and download at: Sunrise III: Observation Planning | Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (mpg.de)
SOLARNET is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 824135.