ESO received 244 valid proposals for its first Fast Track Channel (FTC) call 117A (1 September 2026 – 28 February 2027). The deadline for proposal submission was 15 June 2026. The total time request amounted to approximately 1970 hours (of which 80 hours were Target-of-Opportunity requests), for a total available time of 460 hours for this first FTC call. This corresponds to a mean oversubscription factor of 4.3, comparable to that of the previous Yearly Cycle (P117). The telescope with the highest oversubscription is Melipal (UT3), with a total request of 643 hours (excluding ESPRESSO), corresponding to an oversubscription factor of 7.1 (again excluding ESPRESSO). The most demanded instrument was X-Shooter (406 hours), followed by ESPRESSO (307 hours, to be distributed among several UTs; labelled as ICCF1 in the above graph), and MUSE (236 hours). As a reminder, only VLT/I Normal programmes with a maximum time request of 30 hours were offered in this first FTC call.
ESO’s first Fast Track Channel Call 117A Proposal Submission Statistics
Published: 15 Jul 2026
All FTC 117A proposals were evaluated via the distributed peer review (DPR) scheme. All DPR reviewers submitted their grades and comments ahead of the deadline (7 July 2026). Proposing teams can expect to be informed of the outcome of the review process by late July/early August 2026.
A second FTC call 117B covering at least the last two months of P117 (i.e., 1 March 2027 until 30 April 2027) will be released before the end of the year. More information is provided in the Call for Proposals for P118, and further updates will be provided ahead of the call release via Science Newsletters.