The allocation of ESO telescope time for Period 95 is expected to be emailed on 22 December 2014. With the release of the telescope schedule, preparation of Service Mode (SM) observations (Phase 2) starts. The deadline for the submission of the Phase 2 material for Period 95 observations is 5 February 2015 for all instruments except VISIR.
Phase 2 for Period 95
Published: 18 Dec 2014
Owing to re-commissioning of the VISIR instrument continuing into January 2015, the release of the instrument package and the material necessary for the preparation of VISIR observations will not occur until the first week of Feburary 2015. The VISIR Phase 2 deadline has been tentatively set for Monday, 2 March 2015. More information will follow in due time.
Detailed information on Phase 2 observation preparation can be found here. There is a new release of the Phase 2 Proposal Preparation (P2PP) tool (version 3.4.1) and it is recommended that users download this new P2PP3 for the preparation of SM observations for Paranal instruments. This new version is a bugfix release and, in addition to Java 1.7, will also run with the latest Java 1.8. More details on P2PP3 are available.
After 15 years of Service Mode at Paranal, a recent Messenger article (PDF) examines the impact of SM on the scientific return and efficiency of operations, made possible by the DOME (Dashboard for Operational Metrics) project.