_                    
                                                         |_|                   
      V   V   SSSS   OOO   PPPP                 \__      |_|      __/          
      V   V  S      O   O  P   P                   --____/ \____--             
      V   V   SSS   O   O  PPPP                    _ _ _ --- _ _ _             
       V V       S  O   O  P                      |_|_|_|  @|_|_|_|            
        V    SSSS    OOO   P                             o-o                   
                                                          /                    
      ***  N    E    W    S  ***                        <)                     
 

NOTIFICATION ABOUT PROPOSALS

Each Principal Investigator (or contact person) of a General Observing Time proposal submitted in response to the first VSOP Announcement of Opportunity should now have received an e-mail containing the results of the Scientific Review Committee (SRC) ranking of the experiments in his or her proposal. Each e-mail also included the likelihood of each experiment being scheduled and SRC comments on the proposal. Any questions or clarifications relating to these e-mails should be sent to submit@vsop.isas.ac.jp .

In a few cases the SRC merged experiments in different proposals. In these cases the merged teams have been asked to contact each other and nominate a contact person for the merged experiment. For three proposals which are observing a relatively large number of sources, the SRC recommended the sharing of data when there is overlap with other GOT proposals. Details of the data sharing will be communicated to affected proposers in the near future.

This marks the end of the proposal review cycle for the first VSOP AO (separate notification e-mails have been sent to participants in the Key Science Programs and the Polarization Study Team, as described in the last newsletter). The SRC felt that all proposers should be commended as the overall quality of the proposals submitted was extremely high -- which made the SRC's job very difficult. The VSOP mission is grateful for the long hours and care with which the SRC carried out their responsibilities.

(The item above also appears in the JPL Space VLBI Project newsletter to ensure that this information reaches as wide an audience as possible.)

VSOP SURVEY PROGRAM

Many aspects of the VSOP Survey Program have progressed over the last few months. A proposal was submitted by Hirabayashi-san and the entire Survey Working Group to the VLBA to determine the fine-scale structure of sources in the VSOP survey source list for which there have been little or no previous VLBI observations. The proposal was accepted and is scheduled for 24 hours on June 5/6. To find strong water maser sources for the survey, candidate maser sources are also planned to be observed for 2 of the 24 hours at 22 GHz.

The acquisition of the necessary ground resources (telescopes, tapes, correlator) for the VSOP survey are progressing. The Canadian Space Agency is supporting the use of the S2 recording system at a number of telescopes around the globe. Much of the Survey Program data will be able to be correlated at the Canadian S2 correlator. Telescope time procurement has nearly met the needs of the survey. Further contributions of telescope time should be negotiated with the Survey Working Group Resources Coordinator, Peter McCulloch (peter.mcculloch@phys.utas.edu.au).

 
 
  Editors: Phil Edwards, Hirax Hirabayashi & Ed Fomalont