FAST’s first international Call for Proposals attracts broad Interest

BY PROF. BO PENG (DIRECTOR, CAS KEY LABORATORY OF FAST, NAOC, CHINA)

The first international Call for observing Proposals with China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), an SKA pathfinder facility, was issued on 31 March 2021.

To coincide with this momentous event, the CGTN’s (China Global TV Network) Dialogue programme arranged a joint interview with myself, the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy Prof. Michael Kramer, and the Science Director of the SKAO Prof. Robert Braun to discuss the implications of FAST’s arrival on the international scene for the global scientific community, our Data Policy, cooperation opportunities as well as differences between FAST, now the world’s largest single dish telescope, and the future SKA telescopes.

Ten percent of FAST’s observing time is allocated to international scientists, and is open to users from any nationality or affiliation.

We received 216 proposals from 49 institutions across 16 countries for this first international call, requesting a total of more than 7200 hours of observing time. Combined with the domestic call, the overall figure demonstrates the strong interest in using FAST. The proposals covered a broad range of scientist interests, including pulsar search and timing, single pulses, fast radio bursts, Galactic and extragalactic spectral lines as well as many other topics such as pulsar scintillation, pulsar polarization, stellar radio flares, comets, dark matter, neutrinos, SETI, and others.

Prof. Keping Qiu from Nanking University was appointed Chair of the FAST Time Allocation Committee (TAC). They have invited tens of international reviewers to assess the call, making use of the SKA expertise in the community, in order to assign 5 or more TAC members and external experts for each scientific category, which roughly corresponds to 10 proposals per reviewer.

The TAC is now reviewing these and accepted proposals will be announced on 20 July, then scheduled for observations from August onwards over the next year.

Further information and updates for the scientific community are available on the FAST website.