PFS Science Meeting was held at Columbia University in New York, USA from October 4 to 7, 2019.
PFS Science Team conducts a meeting in which we intensively discuss what kind of observations should be made in the large survey observation using PFS about once a year (see our post for the last year’s meeting). In this meeting, technical topics such as the current status of the instrument development and tests with the telescope, as well as the current survey planning and many discussions made within each science working group, were broadly shared in the entire Science Team.
To observe using the Subaru Telescope, an observation proposal must be submitted to the observatory, and the program is accepted after it is reviewed carefully. Since we are going to propose a very large observation program using observing nights of 300 and more, the reviewing process must be more strictly. We have to clarify and emphasize what can be uncovered by the observation, what the scientific importance is, and the technical feasibility of the observation as well. These should be described in limited pages of the proposal document.
The team has started to write the proposal, and discussed the content in previous science meeting. In this meeting, discussions on the scientific importance and justification, which corresponds to the first half of the proposal, have mostly converged. We also discussed crispy figures which describe the science objectives and their importance. Based on the discussion, we will update these figures in each working group as a next step.
In the last half of the proposal, the actual observing plan and its technical feasibility are described. To be superior to other similar programs all over the world, a strategic plan such as a front-loading observation of some specific target fields is required. On the other hand, we need to optimize the survey so that the entire scientific yield is maximized. Simulations are currently on-going under various situations taken into account. In future, we have to choose one survey plan by agreement in the entire team.
