NICER / ISS Science Nugget for December 27, 2018

NICER receives observing proposals from scientists around the world

Beginning in March 2019, NICER will commit a large fraction of its observing time to targets proposed by scientists from around the world. The NICER team will execute these observations as well as Targets of Opportunity (TOOs), Director's Discretionary Time (DT), pulsar legacy science, and calibration observations.

Each year, an Announcement of Opportunity (AO) for new proposals is issued by NASA to ensure NICER's science output is robust. This year, 84 proposals from 268 unique proposers and 26 countries were submitted asking for twice the amount of time we allocated. These proposals cover a wide variety of science topics, including neutron stars, black holes, non-compact stellar objects, white dwarfs, quasars, active galactic nuclei, and other objects. Approximately 1/3 of the proposals requested coordination with other observatories – made possible by the flexible scheduling of NICER on the ISS.

The GO proposals will be filtered a through a competitive, peer review process to generate a science program that will be executed for one year beginning March 1st, 2019.