Date: Monday 23 April, 2012, 13:24 PDT

Subject: SPITZER: Spitzer Mission Extended, Coming Soon: Cycle-9 Call for Proposals

Spitzer Mission Extended: Cycle-9 Call for Proposals 
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The news from the NASA Operating Missions Senior Review was outstanding
for Spitzer. NASA has provided us budget guidelines that give us
everything we proposed for operations through September of 2014. We will
return to the Senior Review in 2014 to make a science case for operations
through 2016. So now is the time to start preparing your Cycle-9 Spitzer
proposals!

The call for proposals (CP) will be issued on May 1. We plan to solicit
Exploration Science (ES), Large and Small GO and Snapshot programs for
a total of up to 9,000 hours for Cycle-9. We will be selecting the
ES, Large and Snapshot programs first and hope to begin executing
Cycle-9 observations by November 15 of this year. All of the details
will be provided in the CP.

An overview of key dates is provided here:

* May 1 - issue CP
* June 1 - ES letters of intent due
* August 3 - ES (>500 hrs), Large (100-500 hrs) Snapshot (>100 hrs) 
  proposals due
* September 28 - announce selection for ES, Large and Snapshot programs
* October 26 - Small (< 100 hours) proposals due
* December 14 - announce selection for Small programs


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