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Technical Justification

In order for the proposal review committees to judge that the proposed observations are technically feasible and will achieve the scientific objectives, it is necessary for the user to justify the various choices that were made when creating the Science Goal. For example, for a spectral line observation it must be shown that the requested sensitivity and correlator setup will enable the line to be detected with sufficient signal to noise and that the spectral resolution of the correlator mode, perhaps including spectral averaging, is appropriate.

From Cycle 2 onwards, the technical justification is no longer submitted as part of the PDF that contains the scientific case, but is instead created using a node in the Science Goal. This has been designed to help non-expert users in particular in the writing of technical justifications by presenting various calculations based on the SG contents e.g. the signal to noise ratio on the spectral line and the spectral dynamic range. For most projects, the technical justification node is split into four separate sections, each of which has a free-format text box in which the relevant item must be justified. The four sections are:

The exceptions are VLBI and solar projects where instead only a single free-format text box needs to be completed. As a sensitivity is not entered by the user, the OT cannot display SNR calculations. In all cases, the justification texts must contain a minimum of 50 characters and no more than 4000 are allowed.

Note that it is possible to copy and paste whole technical justifications from one Science Goal to another. This can either be done via the Edit menu, or one can simply drag and drop the node into the destination SG. Alternatively, the contents of individual text boxes can be copied and pasted.


next up previous contents
Next: Summary Information Up: Adding Phase-1 Science Goals Previous: Time-constrained observing   Contents
The ALMA OT Team, 2018 Sep 25