Peer Review for the Australia Telescope National Facility

The radio-telescopes operated by CSIRO -- Australia's national science agency -- are collectively known as the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF).  These include the 64 metre diameter Parkes radio telescope "Murriyang", the 6 x 22 m Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), and the 36 x 12 m Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP).  In addition to operating independently, the ATNF radio telescopes can be used in conjunction with other antennas, both within Australia and overseas, as a Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) array. The ATNF telescopes are open to astronomers from around the world, with two Calls for Proposals issued each year.  In recent years, proposals have been received from teams made up of about 700 astronomers from around 30 countries.  Proposals are assessed by a Time Assignment Committee (TAC) drawn from the Australian astronomical community which, supplemented by an international panel of readers, grades all proposals. These grades are used by the telescope schedulers to allocate observing time to the proposal teams.

This presentation will describe the evolution of the TAC process over the last 30 years, including its recent progression from semi-anonymisation of proposal teams to complete anonymisation.