The P110 Call for Proposal is open and ESO is offering a short session on the latest information users need to write proposals for La Silla, Paranal, and APEX. This session will happen on Friday, March 11th at 12 CET on Teams.

As announced in the P110 call for proposals, ESO will no longer offer APEX observing time beyond Period 110. The last opportunity to submit ESO observing proposals for APEX is thus the P110 deadline on 25 March 2022, for observations in the second half of 2022. This corresponds to the end of the current APEX agreement. From 2023 to 2025, ESO will operate APEX as a hosted telescope on a cost neutral basis, but without observing time to the ESO community. Data from the remaining APEX partners taken after 2022 will also no longer be stored in the ESO archive.

Last year proved to be a record-breaking year for research based on observations conducted at ESO observatories. A recent report by the ESO Library and Information Centre shows that, in 2021 alone, over 1100 papers including ESO data were released, the highest annual number of publications from ESO telescope data to date.

The European ALMA Regional Centre invites European ALMA users to a virtual community assembly on March 25 at 11:00 CET, in connection with the Cycle 9 call for proposals. At this meeting, updates will be provided on the current and upcoming observing cycles and on the support from the European ARC network. In the dedicated Q&A session you will have the opportunity to ask your questions. The meeting can be accessed at this link.

Also in 2022, as in previous years, ALMA is in shut-down mode during the month of February. This period is used for maintenance purposes and operations are expected to restart in March 2022. More information about the configuration schedule can be found on the ALMA Science Portal.

GRAVITY dual-feed wide mode allows fringe tracking from a target that is up to 30” away from the science target by using the VLTI Star Separators to separate the beams. This mode augments GRAVITY sky coverage by enabling observations of objects which were too faint for fringe tracking, and without a close (<2") fringe tracker source. Two nights will be offered: one on VLTI-UTs and one on VLTI-ATs, both in mid-June 2022. The proposal submission deadline is 25 March 2022 (same as the Period 110 Call for Proposals) using the Phase 1 tool.

On January 10^th 2022, ESO signed an agreement for the design and construction of GRAVITY+, a significant upgrade of the the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) infrastructure and its GRAVITY instrument. The agreement was signed with the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, representing a consortium including MPE, INSU/CNRS, University of Cologne, MPIA, CENTRA, and University of Southampton, in close collaboration with ESO.  

The ESO Offices for Science in Garching and in Chile are happy to announce the new Early-Career Scientist Visitor Programme. The programme is meant to allow early-career scientists (PhD students and postdoc up to three years from the PhD) to spend from one to four months working on their science projects at ESO. 

The next call for ESO ALMA development studies is expected to be announced in November 2022, with a provisional deadline in January 2023. In this call, ESO will solicit proposals for external development studies to upgrade a broad range of ALMA systems. Studies that follow the scientific priorities outlined in the ALMA 2030 roadmap are particularly encouraged, such as upgrades of the IF bandwidth by a factor up to 4 compared to the current system.

The 4MOST instrument will conduct surveys in a five-year programme. The selection of the surveys for the full five year period followed the procedures set out in the VLT/I Science Operations Policies and involved calls for Letters of Intent and invitations to submit a proposal following recommendations by the Public Survey Panel (PSP). The PSP recommended 15 community surveys to be selected for 4MOST observations. The selection was endorsed by the Observing Programmes Committee at its 108^th meeting in November 2021. The selected surveys will become part of the 4MOST project in preparation for the observing planned to start in late 2023.