Mike's Mathom Collection - Guaranteed Time Observing (GTO)

Because of my work on MIRI, I was awarded a bit of guaranteed observing time (GTO) with which I could observe whatever I wanted—within reason. Meetings with other scientists to start to decide who wanted to observe what started as early as 2009, but really got going with the first formal GTO stakeholder meeting in 2014. Over the next few years we all developed our plans and the first drafts were released to the public in 2017. Because there were plenty of launch delays, we continued to tinker with our plans and revisions were released in 2020, and then once more in 2021 a couple of months before launch.

The full (and final) list of GTO programs can be accessed at the GTO link. The bulk of the ideas can be seen if you expand the “Cycle 1 GTO Programs” box. The Cycle 2 and 3 programs are a mixture of “left-overs” from the first year, usually because people wanted to do some exploratory programs first, then follow up with more detailed observations based on what they found in those first observations to better understand the object. In other cases, it was to continue to monitor objects observed in the first year: the planets are common targets, as are moving stars in the center of our galaxy and expanding protostar jets.

I divided my time into 6 projects; look for program IDs 1236 through 1241 in the Cycle 1 table. Except for one little hiccup in 1239 where we missed one of the targets, the observations were spectacularly successful. If you care to explore, here is the list of projects and all the published papers and press releases that I know about that have come from them. Note that there is so much information buried in the data that I had no hope to explore it all myself. Thankfully, I have a fantastic group of colleagues and co-investigators who ran with the data and discovered things in it that I never dreamt of. Well done!

Status as of March, 2026: