How To Guide
This page should lower your blood pressure if we do it right. Tell us what would be most useful. Contact SARA.
How to Avoid Grant Delays
The NASA Shared Services Center (NSSC) is the NASA organization that issues grants to non-civil servant PI's. They report the number one cause of grant delays is a failure on the part of the proposer to submit accurate budget rates from their institution including approved indirect rates and appropriate justification for expenditures (see the Guidebook for Proposers for instructions.This is one YOU can fix. Also, the more detail in your budget justification (or narrative) the less likely your grant will be delayed. Try to explain procurements in a manner that would be understood by a non-scientist, but with enough detail that they know what will be purchased.
How to Become a Reviewer
NASA seeks to have each review panel staffed with members of
the scientific community that represent the right expertise for the topic at hand. NASA Program
Officers work very hard to ensure that is the case, but the combination of so many proposals, often
with multiple co-investigators per proposal and an overworked community make it increasingly
difficult to put panels together in short order. You can help. If you are not one of those
frequently called upon to serve and feel you could contribute, please let us know. We will follow up
with a request for more information. Volunteering does not guarantee you will be called, but it
serves to increase the pool of reviewers which can only help. Also, please say yes when you are
called. We realize the impact on your time, but this is really the best way to keep our programs
strong. To sign up as a volunteer reviewer just send an email to sara at NASA.gov with the following: Your full name and contact information, a copy of your cv, a short description of your area(s) of knowledge. In addition, if you have particular panels in mind, please don't hesitate to tell us.
A note on Submitting proposals via Grants.gov
Proposals to NASA may be submitted through NSPIRES or through Grants.gov for ROSES and other NASA Research Announcements (NRAs) (but not for Announcements of Opportunity (AOs) of Cooperative Agreement Notices (CANs)). NSPIRES automatically checks that a submission complies with the submission rules in the NRA, for instance it limits the length of the abstract and other parts of the proposal, in keeping with SMD instructions; since Grants.gov serves 26 Federal agencies, it does not automatically check for compliance with NASA page and word count limits. Starting in July 2007 proposals submitted via Grants.gov were automatically ingested into NSPIRES and, in the process, any proposals with sections over the length limits prescribed in the solicitation are truncated.If you submit through NSPIRES and have a problem, we might be able to fix it. We have no control over grants.gov since it is government wide.
How to submit future progress reports
Annual standardized electronic progress reports are now required before the Program Officers can release second and third year funding. Electronic progress reports should be submitted as PDF files. The PI (and the AOR) will get a reminder email from NSSC. The PI will be asked to send in the progress report as PDF file. A standard format is being established for use by all 26 Federal agencies that issue grants - you may see this referred to as 'RPPR' which is an abbreviation of Research Performance Progress Report.
The Grant and Cooperative Agreement Handbook notes that "Reports shall be in the English language, informal in nature, and ordinarily not exceed three pages (not counting bibliographies, abstracts, and lists of other media)." and that "Progress Reports, Summaries of Research, and Educational Activity Reports shall include the following on the first page:
- Title of the grant.
- Type of report.
- Name of the principal investigator.
- Period covered by the report.
- Name and address of the recipient's institution.
- Grant number."
Annual progress reports should contain a summary of the accomplishments and a list of publications that have appeared as a result of the award. Of course all publications should acknowledge NASA support, including the name of the program, and the grant number(s). For examples of this see any of the papers that appear on the Highlights page.
How to handle PI sponsoring institution transfers smoothly
The process of transferring your grants from one institution to another when you move currently takes a very long time because funds must be returned from the old institution before they can be sent to the new one (technically, NASA issues grants to institutions, not individuals, so it is not "yours" to take). We realize that science research suffers when the funds are not transferred in a timely fashion, and that a PI spends a lot of time getting the institutions to exchange information, so we are seeking improvements in this system. For now, please tell us (both your program officer and SARA) as soon as you know you are moving to a new institution. We will help as much as possible now, and work to repair the system for the long run.
Even if you are submitting your proposal via grants.gov the PI still must be a registered user of NSPIRES so we have a way to track it after submission. Please register for NSPIRES as soon as possible if you will be submitting a proposal.
How to get a no-cost extension
Its easy! In most cases (of a grant or a cooperative agreement with a nonprofit entity) you can get your first no-cost extension of the award's expiration date for up to 12 months automatically by just asking for it before the end of the period of performance. All you have to do is send your request in an email with the words "no cost extension" and your grant number in the subject line.
If your grant was awarded prior to FY 2007 or for some other reason was done by HGAO (you will be able to verify this at Click here to verify) then send that email to Ellen Harden.
If your grant was awarded in 2007 or afterwards then its more likely that it went via NSSC (you can verify this at the NSSC grant status page) then please send an email to nssc-contactcenter@nasa.gov.
And as a courtesy please inform the Program Officer as well. If you do not know who that is you can find them on the Program Officers page.
Facilities for Research and Analysis
Distributed throughout the various program element descriptions within the ROSES 2008 call appear short descriptions of various facilities (laboratories, data archives, supercomputing centers, etc.) that are available to proposers. We have collected these here in one place for your convenience.