Guest Investigator Program

The Swift Guest Investigator Program is an annual announcement of opportunity soliciting proposals from the community for research relevant to the Swift mission. The GI programs begin at the start of each April and last for approximately 12 months. Observing time is available for scientists at both US and non-US institutions, although only those Principal Investigators at US institutions will be eligible for funding from NASA.

GI Cycle 8: DEADLINE PASSED

A new cycle of Swift's Guest Investigator program has been announced with proposals due on September 28th 2011. Cycle 8 observations will begin in April 2012 and last till March 2013.

Swift provides an opportunity for simultaneous optical to hard X-ray observations of targets, allowing broad-band analysis. The X-ray Telescope is specifically designed to choose the best operating mode for the X-ray flux of the object in question.

New for this cycle is the opportunity to propose Large Programs, with more than 100 targets or more than 100 ks exposure time per proposal.

In this cycle, there will be up to 2 Ms available for non-ToO targets, 1 Ms for Large Programs and 1 Ms for ToOs. Monitoring campaigns (programmes requiring two or more "visits" to the same target) are permitted, with up to a total of 2000 visits accepted (total across all proposal categories).

Requests for fill-in observations cannot be time-constrained (e.g. coordinated with ground- or space-based facilities), although both ToOs and non-ToOs may be, provided the window for the observation exceeds 3 hours. Up to 500 time-constrained observations will be accepted during this cycle (an increase from Cycle 6).

The duration of an observation is limited to between 1 and 40 ks, although several observations may be requested.

See the NASA page for more details, or contact the Leicester Swift help-desk.

List of Cycle 8 accepted targets

Swift support

Helpdesk

Guest Investigator Program

GI Cycle 8: DEADLINE PASSED