Page History

Hubble Space Telescope is a general purpose observatory that continues to make significant contributions to our understanding across a wide range of scientific topics. From time to time, STScI supports initiatives focused on specific areas, generally involving Working Groups or Advisory Committees drawn from the community. These include the following:

• Hubble Second Decade Committee (1998-2000)
• HST-ACS Ultra Deep Field (2003-4)
• Multi-Cycle Treasury Programs (2010)
• HST Deep Fields Working Group: Frontier Fields Program (2012)
• Solar System Advisory Committee (2014)
• Exoplanet Advisory Committee (2016)
• HST Observations of Europa Advisory Committee (2017)
• Fundamental Physics with Hubble Working Group (2017)
• HST-LIGO Follow-up Working Group (2018)
• HST Ultraviolet Legacy DD program (2019)
• HST-TESS Advisory Committee (2019)
• Dual Anonymous Review Workshop (September 25, 2019)
• Strategic Exoplanet Initiatives with HST and JWST (2023)
• Long-term Variability Monitoring Strategies for HST and JWST (2023)
• JWST and HST: Equitable Data Access and Team Recognition

Further details on each initiative can be found on the pages linked from the page-tree:

The Science Policies Group is home to the scientific and technical staff that manages the allocation of Hubble observing time, conducts the process of selecting the science program, including General Observers and Archival Researchers, and establishes science metrics to evaluate success.

Our Mission

Science Policies manages the allocation of Hubble observing time, conducts the process of selecting the science program, including General Observers and Archival Researchers, and establishes science metrics to evaluate success.

It is the Institute point of contact with the Space Telescope User Committee (STUC).

Our Vision Statement

The key objective of the Group is to optimize and maximize the scientific productivity of HST.

The goal is to foster the submission of the highest quality scientific programs through the identification of key scientific areas that require the investment of HST time to be studied and to foster broad multidisciplinary and multi-observatories collaboration.

How STScI Conducts the Proposal Review

HST programs are selected through competitive peer review. A broad range of scientists from the international astronomical community evaluates and ranks all submitted proposals, using a well-defined set of criteria and paying special attention to any potential conflicts of interest. The review panels and the Telescope Allocation Committee (TAC) offer their recommendations to the STScI Director. Based on these recommendations, the STScI Director makes the final allocation of observing time.

The Review Panels

The review panels will consider Small GO (1-34 orbits), Medium GO (35-74 orbits), Calibration GO, Snapshot, Regular AR, Calibration AR and Theory Proposals. Each review panel has an allocation of a specific number of orbits, and the panel can recommend Small GO Proposals up to its orbit allocation. Medium GO Proposals will be ranked side-by-side with the Small Proposals, but the panels will not be charged for them; instead, each panel will be allocated a fixed number of medium proposals, depending on the overall medium proposal pressure within that panel. The panel recommendations generally do not require further approval of the TAC, and scientific balance will be determined within each panel rather than by the TAC.

Panelists are chosen based on their expertise in one or more of the areas under review by the panel. Each panel spans several scientific categories. For a normal cycle, we anticipate having a panel dealing with Solar System, two panels dealing with Planets (including exoplanets, planet formation, and debris disks); three panels dealing with Stars (of any temperature and evolutionary state, and including nearby star formation and Galactic ISM); two panels dealing with Stellar Populations (resolved); three panels dealing with Galaxies and the IGM (including unresolved stellar populations and ISM in external galaxies); two panels dealing with Massive Black Holes and Hosts (including AGN and Quasars); and two panels dealing with Cosmology (including large-scale structure, gravitational lensing, and galaxy groups and clusters). Within a panel, proposals are assigned to individual expert reviewers based on the keywords given in the proposal.

The Telescope Allocation Committee (TAC)

The TAC will include the TAC chair, the panel chairs, and the four vice-chairs to ensure broad expertise across the full range of scientific categories. The primary responsibility of the TAC is to review Large GO, Treasury GO, and Legacy AR Proposals for scientific balance.