Announcement of Opportunity.

The Announcement of Opportunity (AO) includes a set documents and tools conceived to prepare and submit observations with the Herschel Space Observatory. All the available documents concerning the AOs will be updated for every call.

Announcement of Opportunity for Open Time (OT1).

The first in-flight AO for the Open Time (OT1) was opened on 20 May 2010, with deadline on 22 July 2010. For the OT1, 241 observing programmes were accepted and the total allocated observing time amounts to 6576.9 hours.
For futher information about the accepted programmes and the classification of these programmes in areas of scientific interests, see the webpage of the Herschel Science Center

Last Announcement of Opportunity for Open Time (OT2).

The AO OT2 will open on 9 June 2011. The submission deadline for proposals is on 15 September 2011. After this time proposals can no longer be submitted or update.

AO Documentation.

The listing of linked documents will be updated for the coming AOs. Where the following links are actives, you can read and download the documentation, otherwise you find a "no active link".

• Herschel Announcement of Opportunity, Documentation: this letter is the formal Announcement of Opportunity from the ESA Director of Scientific Programme, which invites the scientific community to apply for the Herschel Programme observing time.
• Executive Summary, Documentation: this summarizes the AO and associates documents, tools and services with it, providing to the reader a concise overview and a valuable aid in finding information.
• Policies and procedures, Documentation: this is the "administrative" document of the Announcement of Opportunity, which provides the necessary information about the adopted policies and about the procedures to be followed.
• Herschel Observers' Manual, Documentation; it provides information on how to use the Herschel Observatory from the perspective of an observer.
• Instrumet (PACS, SPIRE, HIFI) Observers' Manuals:
  • Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI) Observers' Manual, Documentation.
  • Photodetector Array Camera & Spectrometer (PACS) Observers' Manual, Documentation.
  • Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) Observers' Manual, Documentation.
  • SPIRE PACS Parallel Mode Observers' Manual, Documentation.
  The Instrument Observers Manuals describe the instrument characteristics and their scientific capabilities, the observing modes available, how to perform observations and a overview of the data processing.
• Herschel-Spot (HSpot) Users' Manual, Documentation; it provides a detail description for planning and submitting proposals.

AO Tools.

The listing of linked documents will be updated for the coming AOs. Where the following link are active you can read and download the documentation, otherwise you find a "no active link".

• The AO HerschelFORM PDFLaTeX package. For the AO-2 there is no separate Large Proposal template and all proposals should use the Normal Proposal template. Herschel proposals have to be written using the HerschelFORM PDFLaTeX package. A templatenormal.tex file directs the user towards the proposal writing, suggesting the applicable style and page rules.
• Herschel Reserved Observation Tool (HROST), is available here; checks for potential duplications between your planned observations and approved AORs.
• The observation planning tool HSpot, Download, for designing observation requests and calculating the required observing times.