Community Data Science Software Proposals

Proposers have an opportunity under the JWST AR Program to obtain financial support for the development of  software products that will be made available to the community for the purposes of analyzing JWST data.  Descriptions of the data products created by the JWST calibration pipeline and related software tools are available on JWST Data Calibration ConsiderationsJWST Science Calibration Pipeline, and JWST Post-Pipeline Data Analysis. Examples of additional products include, but are not restricted to,

  • scripts to mitigate artifacts from specific detectors,
  • tools to identify and extract fluxes/magnitudes from multiple sources within a field,
  • utility software for working with JWST data products, 
  • or codes to produce background-subtracted spectra or software to interact with JWST archive services.

Please contact the Data Science Mission Office (dsmo@stsci.edu) for additional guidance. The primary criterion for a Community Data Science Proposal is that the results should broadly enhance the value of JWST observational products for anyone in the astronomical community. The results of the data science software development should be made available to the community in a timely fashion through an appropriate distribution platform. Open source software using a standard license (https://opensource.org/licenses) is encouraged. The software should have thorough internal documentation at a level consistent with software best practices, and, if computationally intensive, should be compatible with a cloud computing service. 

There is no limit to the amount of funding that may be requested, but it is expected that the amounts will be at a similar level to those in the Regular AR category. The effort detailed in the Management Plan section of the proposal should be commensurate with the level of funding requested. 

A Community Data Science Software Proposal may be submitted by a non-U.S. PI if there are one or more U.S. Co-Is who request funding. 

The ‘Scientific Justification’ section of the proposal should describe the proposed software plan and also its impact on observational investigations with JWST. Review panels will consist of observational and theoretical astronomers with a broad range of scientific expertise. They will not necessarily have specialists in all areas of astrophysics, particularly software development, so the proposals must be written for general audiences of scientists. The ‘Analysis Plan’ section of the proposal should discuss the types of JWST data that will benefit from the proposed investigation, and references to specific data sets in MAST should be given where possible. This section should also describe how the results of the investigation will be made available to the astronomical community, and on what time-scale the results are expected.


Next: Director's Discretionary (DD) Time Proposals




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