TAC Meeting Process
The TAC meeting will meet after the panels in a 2 day session. During these sessions, following a brief orientation, the TAC should discuss all its proposals. The outcome should be a ranked list of Medium and Large GO, Treasury, AR Legacy, and any other proposals before the TAC, and a final recommendation for allocating up to 1000 orbits to the top-ranked Large and Treasury proposals. If necessary, the TAC will also decide cross-panel issues that have arisen during the Panel Reviews, typically TOOs; duplications; SNAP proposal allocations; Chandra, NOAO, Spitzer, or XMM time.All recommendations of the TAC are advisory to the STScI Director, who has final responsibility for the HST observing program and who will review the recommendations prior to notification of the proposers. Revisions of the TAC recommendations may also be required following the Phase II submissions for duplication reasons, or for operational reasons as the actual schedule is constructed and the observing cycle is implemented. If substantial revisions are required, the Director may consult with members of the TAC or Panels after the meetings.
The TAC meetings will proceed along similar lines to the Panel meetings. After the discussion of each proposal, the secondary reviewer should include their their pre-meeting comments in the Web-Reviewer tool. The primary reviewer is then responsible for synthesizing all pre-meeting comments, together with any additional issues that came up during the discussion, into a set of final comments. We encourage the members of the TAC to bring laptops! All comments should be approved by the responsible primary reviewer, as well as the TAC Chair, before the end of the meeting.
The final comments should explain the panel decision, and ideally should help the proposers improve the proposal next time. The comments should be free of unnecessarily offensive remarks. Any comments that are cursory, unclear, or otherwise unhelpful to the proposers will be edited or omitted entirely in order to prevent counterproductive consequences.