The Observing Time Allocation Committee will review the open time proposals and make recommendations on the observing programme to be carried out by ISO via assigning scientific priorities either to entire proposals or to individual observations. The OTAC review will take place during October and November 1996; it is expected that proposers will be informed of the outcome by late November 1996.
The following items will be taken into account during the review process:
The output of the OTAC review will be a list of proposals/observations that should go forward to the Phase 2 process. For each such proposal, the OTAC will make recommendations concerning the scientific priority and the amount of observing time. Note that in the pre-launch Call OTAC used three priority categories (see entry in glossary). There will also be proposals and observations which will not be carried forward into Phase 2 for further processing. The Principal Investigators of these proposals will also be informed of this.
For efficient timelining of observations, the scientific scheduling software needs to work from a pool of observations which significantly overfills the time available. All these observations have to be fully specified in the data base from which the mission planning system works. Thus, the recommendations mentioned above will take into account the provision of the necessary oversubscription in the data base of planned observations.