Proposals must be submitted to the HSC electronically through HSpot, and shall be consistent with the page and format guidelines given in Section 6.2, “Proposal contents”. Note that this is enforced by the usage of the HerschelFORM PDFLaTeX package, which is mandatory.

When your proposal is ready to be submitted to the HSC you need to open a HSpot session and ensure that:

It is recommended to compute all time estimates before proceeding with proposal submission. In case there is any AOR for which time estimation has not been run or shows an out of date value, the system will force you to run time estimation and bring it up-to-date at the time of proposal submission. This will serve as an additional validation to ensure that the time requested on the cover sheet is consistent with the latest time estimation made by HSpot. If everything is OK, click on 'Submit proposal to the HSC' under the 'Submit' menu of the 'Proposal Submission Tool' window's toolbar. A new window will appear in your screen where you will be prompted to enter the username/password combination which is your identification as a Herschel services user (you have to be a registered user to be able to submit proposals!). Once this information is filled in, click 'OK' on this window and the submission process will start.

If the submission is successful an acknowledge window will appear with the message 'Your proposal was successfully submitted'. The proposal information (username and id assigned by the HSC to your proposal) will appear on the bottom of the Proposal Submission Tool window. However, this is not the final step in the process. Some time later, an e-mail message sent by the HSC to the submitter's e-mail address will confirm the successful reception and processing of the proposal at the HSC. Please check your e-mails to make sure that the submission process finalised without any problems. In case a problem is encountered during the processing of your proposal, the notification e-mail message will ask you to get in contact with the HSC Helpdesk.

Proposals must be submitted prior to the deadline. Please plan your submission early in advance to avoid any unexpected problem in the last minute.

If you have submitted an observing proposal, but have noticed that there are errors or parts of it which need to be revised or updated, there is no need to submit a 'new' proposal, and you should not. You (or your co-users) can update the proposal by using the options 'Retrieve proposal from HSC' and 'Update proposal at HSC' under the 'Submit' menu of the 'Proposal Submission Tool' window's toolbar. After entering your username and password you can retrieve, update and re-submit your proposals (or those from your co-users) as many times as needed before the deadline.