**************************************************************** EVN Programme Committee Chairman's Report - 29 November 2005 P. Charlot **************************************************************** 1. Membership ============= Observatory Members ------------------- Simon Garrington Jodrell Bank Feb 1997 Huib van Langevelde JIVE Jun 2001 Michael Lindqvist Onsala Feb 2005 Andrei Lobanov (Secretary) MPIfR Bonn Jun 2002 Dongrong Jiang Shanghai Jun 2000 Tiziana Venturi CNR, Bologna Jun 2005 Rene Vermeulen NFRA Feb 2005 At Large Members ---------------- Javier Alcolea OAN, Madrid Jun 2002 Patrick Charlot (Chair) Bordeaux Jun 1999 Claudio Codella Florence Feb 2004 Denise Gabuzda Cork, Ireland Feb 2004 Josep Marti Jaen, Spain Feb 2004 Representatives --------------- Huib van Langevelde EVN Correlator at JIVE Richard Porcas EVN Scheduler A new permanent secretary (Andrei Lobanov) was appointed, starting with the June 2005 meeting. The newly-appointed IRA member (Tiziana Venturi) attended the June and November 2005 EVN PC meetings and provided comments and grades on the proposals reviewed during these meetings. The term for the Jodrell Bank member (Simon Garrington) expired after the last meeting. Some action from the Jodrell Bank Director is needed to renew or replace him in the EVN PC for the next meeting. 2. EVN PC meetings - 27 June 2005 and 14 November 2005 ====================================================== The June 2005 meeting was held at the MPIfR in Bonn and was arranged by Andrei Lobanov and Richard Porcas. 19 proposals were received by the 2005 June 1 deadline. Of these, 9 were global and 10 EVN only. MERLIN was requested for 1 project, Arecibo for 7 and DSN for 3. There were 5 projects requesting a recording rate of 1 Gb/s (1 with EVN, 1 with EVN+Ar+Ro and 3 with Eb+Jb+Wb+Ar+GBT). There was also 1 global project requesting a recording rate of 512 Mb/s. The November 2005 meeting was held at Arcetri Observatory in Florence and was arranged by Claudio Codella. 10 proposals were reviewed during this meeting. Of these, 3 were global and 7 EVN only. MERLIN was requested for 4 projects, Arecibo for 1 and DSN for 1. There were no proposals requesting a recording rate of 1 Gb/s for this deadline. The distribution by wavelength (cumulated for the June and November meetings) was as follows: 90cm 18/21cm 6cm 5cm 3.6cm 1.3cm 2 12 10 4 4 1 (the total being greater than 29 because several projects requested more than one wavelength) As usual, about 2/3 of the proposals requested the prime wavelengths of 6cm and 18/21 cm. 3. Proposal statistics ====================== At the request of the JIVE Director, yearly proposal statistics on EVN use were compiled for inclusion in a self-evaluation document preparing the review of JIVE over the next few months. These are given below. 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 Nb of EVN proposals 34 31 42 29 32 32 Nb of GBL proposals 25 17 21 22 24 20 ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Total: 59 48 63 51 56 52 Nb of scheduled proposals: 32 34 37 28 34 - Hours requested 1627 1400 1476 1357 1200 1356 Hours scheduled 561 713 648 526 592 - Oversubscription 2.90 1.96 2.28 2.58 2.03 - These statistics show that the number of submitted proposals has been stable to about 10% since 2000 with an average of 55 proposals per year. Of these 60% are EVN-only and 40% are global. The mean oversubscription rate (hours requested/hours scheduled) over the period 2000-2004 is 2.32. 4. Other business ================= At the November meeting, the EVN PC examined a request for re-observing an old experiment (thick tape, 40 ips, observed in November 2000) that cannot be correlated easily. This prompted a discussion about project lifetime whether after submission or after observing. The current rule states that a project is eligible for scheduling during two successive sessions at the requested frequency or one year, whichever is longer. However, the maximum elapsed time between the EVN PC review and observing is not specified and there is also no limit on the elapsed time between observing and correlation. After discussion, the general feeling was that such a rule should be formulated by the CBD to avoid projects hanging around either in the scheduling queue (for low-demanded wavelengths) or at the correlator. On the scheduling side, it was thought that a maximum of 2 years between the EVN PC review and observing would be reasonable. This would also be stimulating in trying to have at least one session in every frequency once every 2 years. The equivalence for the correlator (maximum elapsed time between observing and correlation) should be agreed with JIVE. The EVN PC also discussed matters related to scheduling e-vlbi projects. Overall, it was felt that the monthly e-vlbi test sessions could include a scientific part to explore feasibility of things in an initial stage. At the end of the November meeting, there was a demonstration by Rene Vermeulen of the new WSRT web-based proposal tool, developped in the framework of the RadioNet Synergy group. The EVN PC expressed interest in this new tool. Questions that were raised include how to deal with global VLBI proposals if such a tool is implemented for EVN.