January 30, 2009
Posted by Max Bernstein at 2009/01/30
Dear Colleagues,
This is the letter from SARA, a short update for NASA scientists.
Our giant annual call for proposals, Research Opportunities in Earth and Space Science (ROSES) 2009, is done. We have sent it to the contractor for final typo corrections, formatting, and printing. Its over 440 pages long, contains over 80 program elements, currently offers ~ $150 million, and will probably exceed $200 million when all the amendments are done. ROSES 2009 will be available on the NSPIRES and SARA solicitations web pages on Friday Feb 13th.
We are done selecting proposals submitted in response to ROSES 2007, and the plots of the time that elapsed between submission and selection, both by program and by proposal, show that selections were made much faster than in prior years, though we handled more proposals than ever before.
Due to the ice storms and concomitant power outages throughout many states, the proposal due date for our graduate student fellowships, NASA's Earth and Space Science Fellowship (NESSF) Program, has been extended to February 9, 2009 to permit those who lost power enough time to get back online and submit their proposals. For further information about NESSF you can view the NESSF solicitation on NSPIRES or contact the administrators. For Earth Science: Anne Crouch at hq-nessf-Earth@nasa.gov or (202) 358-0855 and for Heliophysics, Planetary Science, or Astrophysics: Dolores Holland at hq-nessf-Space@nasa.gov or (202) 358-0734. This is one of many fellowships that can be found on our student programs page.
Paul Hertz presented a 150 slide, three-hour presentation to the NRC committee on the Role and Scope of Mission-Enabling Activities in NASA's Space and Earth Science Missions and excerpts of that will be made available on the SARA web page just as soon as we can fix some small errors and make it 508 compliant.
As always, number of updates have been made to the information on the SARA web page, including the list of program officer contact information, the latest grant statistics, and the latest information on how ROSES 2009 will differ from prior years. For more information on what has changed on the SARA site see the what’s new page.
Finally, we have posted, with permission, a summary of Greg Davidson’s latest Science News metric on the science matters page. This annual measure of NASA contributions to worldwide scientific discovery reports that “NASA’s 9.2% contribution to worldwide scientific discoveries in 2008 is the fourth-highest in the 36 years covered by the Science News metric” and that “NASA’s non-mission science produced 1.3% of world-wide science.”
Max (a.k.a. SARA)
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