The AWG held its Spring meeting on 1998 April 30 - May 1 at NASA Headquarters. The following is a brief summary of highlights.
Proposed restructuring of the R&A program was discussed. The concern is that the current structure and budget allocations do not accurately reflect NASA current goals as outlined in the Strategic Plan, for example. The process through which the R&A structure should be reviewed also was not clear at the time of the meeting. Wes Huntress has established a number of guidelines for restructuring, including the following:
The National Research Council (NRC) has conducted surveys of astronomy and astrophysics every 10 years since 1960. These reports set priorities for NASA and NSF support for astronomy. Preparations for the Year 2000 report are now under way. Chris McKee (Berkeley) and Joe Taylor (Princeton) have agreed to co-chair the upcoming survey. Special concerns of the AWG that we would like to see addressed in the survey report include:
This year, as a means of simplifying the grants process for OSS programs, virtually all of the NRAs to be issued this year were issued in a single omnibus NRA, Research Opportunities in Space Science (ROSS98), with standard forms and formats, and different deadlines for different programs. It is noted that not every program is open to competition every year - only those programs that are open for competition this year were included in the omnibus NRA.
Several AWG members had already submitted proposals under the ROSS98 NRA, and people were generally very enthusiastic about the concept. Most problems encountered were fairly minor, and the AWG has agreed to provide a list of criticisms and suggestions in preparation for the next omnibus NRA. This will be prepared as a separate report.
NASA has established a Grants Management Process Team (GMPT) to review the problems with grants procurement - as many of us are aware, the time between submission of a grant request and when an award is made has become unacceptably long. At the present time, the interval between program selection and an award can be several months. The grants procurement issue is of obvious importance to the AWG, and David Burrows has attended a number of GMPT meetings as our representative.
The GMPT has examined the problem and has now made recommendations to NASA on how to streamline the awards process. The final report is now available.
The AWG will continue to pay close attention to this issue to check on whether or not the recommendations have been implemented and, if so, whether or not they are working.
An emerging, multi-faceted issue is community participation in PI-class missions. Recently we have seen the issue of public access to data from PI-class missions become a selection factor (although we note with some concern that there are to the best of our knowledge no archiving standards that must be met), and in many cases, the existence of a GO program has been deemed to be a positive factor in mission selection. A GO program and promises of early access to PI-mission data can give a proposal an intangible advantage, but beyond this there is not much incentive for projects to do this. The issue put before the AWG was whether or not there should be tangible incentives (i.e., funding) for these kinds of activities. Participation might take the following forms:
Currently, the first type of activity can be funded through the ADP program.
An AI program is one where additional investigators are added to a science team sometime after mission selection; essentially, AIs become part of the mission science team, bringing along their own scientific programs. Guest observers (GO) are selected after mission definition and indeed often even after launch; they propose science investigations that are carried out more-or-less independently of the mission science team. AI and GO programs differ in how integrated the programs become into the overall mission - there are also important differences in the level and type of support required for each type of investigator: for example, GOs generally require more extensive software support.
The AWG is enthusiastic about greater community involvement in PI-class missions, and is in general agreement that there must be incentives offered to PIs to encourage this. This must mean the availability of extra funding that is otherwise not available, since PIs should not have to compromise the mission or their own science programs for this purpose. An OSS-wide funding line as part of the FY2000 budget has been suggested, and there was general support for this from the AWG.
The Space Operations Management Office (SOMO) was established in 1996 for functional management of NASA space operations. Some areas that specifically overlap with the space science enterprise include higher-level data processing (beyond unpacking of level 0 telemetry) and archiving and distributing data to investigators, which fall under what SOMO refers to as "Science Information Services" (SIS).
There is currently a study about the extent to which SIS-type activities should be absorbed agency-wide into SOMO. The motivation for this was to seek cost-savings through centralization of these activities, and finding other cost efficiencies.
The AWG is strongly opposed to moving any data processing beyond level 0 to a centralized function. The principal reason for this is that every science mission is different -- the types of data obtained and the most desirable data formats vary extremely widely, and we oppose forcing any mission to adopt data handling procedures that the PI and science team may feel are not the best for their particular mission. It is important that data-handling functions are managed by people who have a strong vested interest in the data sets being acquired.
The AWG certainly applauds efforts that will make mission data more readily available to the outside community. However, because every mission is different and can have vastly different goals and data products, we believe that the correct way to impose archive standards is on a mission-by-mission basis; exactly how the data are to be archived and where they are to be physically located should be negotiated as part of the Phase B/C/D contract since we do not believe that it is possible for us or any other group of scientists to foresee all possible circumstances. Data processing and archiving issues should be negotiated between the PI and HQ, using the general principle that the data will be formated, archived, and made available in a fashion THAT MAKES SENSE in the context of the particular mission in question.
A committee was convened by Dr Hashima Hasan to review a component of the Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) program. It was asked to explore the possibility of the Office of Space Science (OSS; Code S) assuming an additional $100K per year in operating expense. This request arose as a result of streamlining of the entire Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) program, that is supported by The Office of Earth Science (Code Y) and funds laser ranging activities at McDonald Observatory. OSS also supplies support for the LLR operational program at the McDonald Observatory, and in addition funds programs which make use of LLR data. All of the OSS funds for LLR are provided through its Relativity and Gravitational Astrophysics (RGA) program; thus OSS is a substantial stake-holder in the LLR activity through funding of peer-reviewed proposals.
The charge to the committee was the following:
The members of this committee were:
Conclusions, quoted from the submitted report:
Data from the LLR program support experimental tests of relativistic gravity, an understanding of which is absolutely fundamental to our ability to quantitatively understand a wide range of astrophysical phenomena. The Committee notes that the NASA-supported LLR enterprise at McDonald Observatory, in addition to its substantial importance to lunar and planetary science, has made and will continue to make important scientific contributions to studies of post-Newtonian theories of gravity. LLR should not be dismissed based on the small sizes of its relativity and lunar scientific constituencies. The Committee recognizes the value of LLR at McDonald Observatory for relativistic gravity, but believes that the current funding for LLR data gathering from the RDA Research and Analysis Program, which is based on peer-review, is appropriate.
The outcome of this exercise was that Code Y committed to continue funding LLR through FY00.