From: Saul Perlmutter (saul@lbl.gov)
Date: Thu Feb 08 2007 - 15:46:37 PST
Hi HSTclusterSN team,
Here's a quick update on the current conclusion about the decision
on whether or not to re-submit a scaled-down proposal tomorrow: The
bottom line is that we will not put in a proposal tomorrow, but we will
continue to do some studies to see if we might propose something if
there is a later mid-cycle round of call for proposals.
This paragraph is for those who want to hear more detail: We have
just managed to perform a subtraction of old WFPC2 data in a manner that
might mimic a cluster SN search at around z = 1 (this was the work of
David Rubin and Kyle Barbary working round the clock this past week).
We can find SNe in this data, but with the current implementation we
would lose the SNe found near core (where galaxies do not subtract
cleanly yet), and there are questions still about the precise
signal-to-noise ratio of the detections. Perhaps more worrying is the
fact that there is no recent WFPC2 data in the archive to use for these
tests, and we expect the search job to be even harder as the CTE will
have significantly degraded since the data we looked at. When you put
this current status together with the rates that we might get per orbit
searched, and the number of orbits needed per SN for followup (because
of the poor CTE and throughput), we just don't think that the proposal
looks quite attractive enough yet without further work. However, we
do expect to have a look at the WFPC2 data that will be collected in the
next month or so, and we will update you if things look more promising
for any mid-cycle round of proposals.
I guess the consolation is that we can now really focus on analyzing
and publishing the Cycle 14 results that got us all excited as we
prepared for the ACS proposal two weeks ago. Let's talk soon on those
topics.
Regards, --Saul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Thu Feb 08 2007 - 15:47:26 PST