 I can hear you. All right, this is the room. This is the room. Can everyone see the room? Yeah, right now we see the screen slides, the opening slide. Okay, Andrew, stop sharing for me. Can you guys see the room now? No, now we see the name cards of the panelists and participants. All right, that's what I'm calling up to. I'm going to start over. I've been talking. No one can hear me. Sorry about that. Hopefully you can hear me now. I am Karen Fox with NASA's Office of Communications and you are here for NASA Science Town Hall with Vicky Fox, the associate administrator for science at NASA headquarters in Washington and other members of the leadership team. We will be holding this town hall very similarly to the way we did the last one, which is instead of leading with a set of highlights, we are going to really try to leave as much time as possible for questions. And then we will really use this as a tool for understanding what the community wants to hear and needs to know about. As such, I will sometimes aggregate questions. I'm not necessarily going to read each one verbatim, but we are able to look and say, oh, everybody's asking about blank, and we will pull that together and then answer those questions in that way. I'm about to pass off to Nikki, but before that, let me just quickly tell you who we will have both online and in the room to answer questions and give some of those highlights at the very end. So in addition to Nikki Fox, we have Sandra Cotley, who is the deputy associate administrator for the science mission director. We have Wanda Peters next to her over there, deputy associate administrator for research. Julie Robinson is here, deputy director for earth science division. She'll be joining us virtually, not in the room. Lori Glades, director for the planetary science division. Peg Luce, acting director for the heliophysics division. We have Mark Clampett, director for the astrophysics division. Devon Griffin, acting deputy director for the biological and physical sciences. John Gugosian, the director of the joint agency satellite division. Jeff Grammling, the program manager from our sample return, and Brad Bailey, the assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration. That's a long list, but everybody is ready to answer your questions. With that, I'm going to Nikki Fox for a few opening remarks before we start taking questions. All right, thank you, Karen. So thank you to everybody for joining us today. Our town hall, as Karen said, right before we all lost audio, is gonna be very similar to the one that we held in July. So we're gonna focus on responding to your questions that are submitted instead of just walking through a ton of slides. So our goal is to answer as many questions as we can and save a few minutes at the end for our science division directors to share a few recent and upcoming highlights. The past few months have continued to be very exciting for NASA science, from a new decadal for biological and physical sciences to a jam-packed asteroid autumn to a celestial event that touched millions, we're as busy as ever. But I am not going to steal the division director's thunder. I'm gonna let them tell you all about those highlights at the end. One highlight I would like to personally share is the public release of SMD's idea annual report. This is the second year we formally documented our efforts striving towards NASA's core value of inclusion. And in it, you will find significant work accomplished across every organization within SMD. So we're very proud of this report. And my heartfelt thanks go to all of you for your commitment to creating an inclusive work environment and ensuring our missions, programs and research are conducted in alignment with our values. Fostering diversity is essential to producing excellent science and ensuring inclusion is paramount to our pursuit of exploration and discovery. As we look ahead, SMD remains committed to our idea values. We'll continue to strive to be an environment where all SMD team members are valued for their diversity of thought, unique backgrounds and whole selves. We'll also continue to ensure idea principles and practices are embedded across the whole of our portfolio. And as we know, this kind of change requires time but I'm extremely encouraged by the commitment across our organization and what is to come. The 2022 report is still available online and the 2023 report will soon be available online on NASA science. And I'm going to ask somebody to drop that link into the WebEx chat so everybody can see it rather than me reading it, reading it out. I just wanted to touch on the budget and of course the avoided shutdown as noted in July. We will be as open and transparent about our successes as well as our challenges. And we have navigated and continue to navigate some challenges. As you know, we're only part way through the annual FY24 appropriations process and we anticipate further budget uncertainty with recent events in Congress. This uncertainty makes it difficult to know where we'll land in many areas but nevertheless, our assumption is that SMD funding likely will be highly constrained in the next couple of years. And so we are continuing to carefully prioritize. The decadal surveys are critical to our critical guiding resource but at NASA we also must consider additional input from across the government that guides our priorities and decision-making. Impacts sometimes have included delaying announcements of opportunity to help prioritize missions that are already in development. We always strive to protect our RNA programs. We want to minimize disruptions to our international partnerships. And of course we want to try and continue to support our cross-cutting and enormously important activities in the early career space, our STEM engagement, our idea, and many other things. I do want to thank our headquarters and particularly our SMD team for their efforts to prepare SMD and our projects for the possible shutdown at the end of September. I can tell you we were very well prepared which certainly positions us to be ready for any future potential laps in funding. But despite this uncertainty, NASA science continues to deliver and it is still time to make your voices heard and to share your stories about why support for science is critical. Sciences interdisciplinary and cross-cutting and speaking with one voice about the critical importance of what you do can certainly help us build a compelling narrative. So for today's Q&A, even if we don't yet have all the answers and there are many questions for which it may be too early to provide an answer, we will attempt to share our progress so far and our thinking behind the actions that we're taking. And so with that, I will hand back to Karen so we can jump right into those questions and answers. Thanks, Karen. Great, fantastic. Before I go to the questions, I skipped one of our panelists. I'm so sorry. I want to point out that Michael New, the Deputy Associate Administrator of Research is also with us today to answer questions as needed. All right, going to the first question. What is the plan for standing of the Veritas mission and does activity directed toward a 2029 launch date? And I'll pass that to Lori Glaze. Thank you, Karen. This is a great question. I get it pretty regularly and so I'm always happy to answer it again. We are right now, of course, going through the current budget planning cycle for the fiscal year 2025 and beyond. And as we've been stating for the past year that that is the process that we're going through to try and identify the funding that would be needed to lay in the restart plans for Veritas for 25 and beyond. So we are requesting a budget profile for Veritas that targets a launch no earlier than 2031. That is still consistent with the decision that was made a year ago. And also still consistent again with the current situation that we're in now with the planning, the budget planning. And I'll just add that, as Nikki mentioned, right now, we are still working around some incredible amount of uncertainty around our 2024 budget. And so this answer still stands. Thank you. I think I'm still on there. Great, thank you so much. The next two questions are about Mars sample return and we're gonna lump a bunch of Mars sample return questions into one. The first question is, what actions will SMD take to guarantee that Mars sample return does not, I assume, negatively impact the rest of the portfolio and decadal priorities? And then there are a number of questions about the Independent Review Board. So we're combining that into what is NASA's response to the recent Independent Review Board report on Mars sample return. And there were a lot of specific questions pointing to concerns about, you know, discussing technology readiness, et cetera. So we are going to pass that first question over to Lori Glaze. The first one is the portfolio. Is the portfolio. And then Sandra Connelly is going to step in for us on the IRB. Got it, sounds good. So yeah, let's talk about Mars sample return in the context of actually the whole SMD portfolio but in your planetary in particular. From my perspective as the planetary director, you know, our job here is to make sure that the planetary budget does remain balanced and we all take that job very, very seriously. We want to make sure that our research budget is protected and that the NASA missions that are in development right now that we have costs and schedule commitments for that those have the best opportunity for success just as Nikki mentioned earlier as we look to prioritize budget in constrained times. I wanted to point out that, you know, the planetary decadal did lay out a plan to prioritize Mars sample return to get it completed as soon as possible. But I just want to remind folks that that's not the only reason we're doing Mars sample return. It's not just because the decadal said so. The decadal said so because of the incredible importance and the kind of paradigm shifting impact of bringing the samples back from Mars will have. We've been planning for the last at least 20, 30 years. All of the missions that we've been sending to Mars over that time period have laid the groundwork for preparing us to identify the correct, the best place to go to pick up samples and to identify the samples that can best provide the ground truth for interpretation of all of those data that have been collected over the last 30 years. So I think it's incredibly important priority. That's why the decadal put such a high emphasis on this mission. We've been leading towards this for a very long time and it is highly important. The decadal did provide us with some guidance that said, please don't let the budget in any given year, any given program year let it exceed 35% of the planetary budget. I've been saying for quite a while that I think that's actually very prudent guidance from the decadal survey and I appreciate that. I work very closely with Jeff Gramling who is managing the Mars sample return program to really take that to heart and understand how we can best implement Mars sample return within that kind of guidance. So right now in the wake of the recent Independent Review Board report, we are in the process of evaluating the best design and timeline from our sample return and I'm gonna let Sandra address the IRB responses to get a little bit more, a fuller answer on that part. Thanks. Great and Nicky wanted to weigh in on the IRB as well so I'm gonna toss her first and then we'll go to Sandra. Thanks Karen, yeah. I mean the IRB's findings and recommendations are really critical to us and we really do thank the IRB for the incredible work that they did. You can definitely see they're broader than just the Mars sample return program and so we have charted, SMD has charted a response team that we asked Sandra Connolly who's my deputy to lead because we really did want it to have that level of oversight. So this team and it does have some sub teams as well will develop the responses to the IRB's findings and the recommendations and establish the program that we will then propose to proceed forward. As part of that team, there's a technical team being led by the Mars sample return program offices, Chief Engineer Steve Thibault who would delight it has joined us to help with this and they're looking at the technical and the architectural findings and the recommendations to really look at what architecture should be pursued and this is of course in conjunction really working very, very closely with our ESA partners and I know Sandra is really pushing the team hard and they are hoping to get their work complete in March and we really do feel we wanna take that kind of time, the timeframe that we really need to do a thoughtful and an effective assessment and I am extremely confident that with this level of planning, it will lead to a realistic timeline and budget and of course it will also lay out plans for ways to test and establish confidences in all of the components of the mission. Sandra, please add on. Yes, thank you, Nikki and Lori and totally agree. We are doing this work and we're doing it within the context of a balance portfolio as well moving forward because that's equally important. This is a hugely important mission to us. There's been a tremendous amount of work. We wanna recognize that work that the team has done and so we're gonna build upon that and look at alternatives moving forward. We really appreciate. Listen, are you not hearing me? I had it on. All right, did you hear me? Could you hear me? You're good, Sandra. Okay, thank you. All right, so anyway, I do appreciate all the work that's been done by the team, thus far by the IRB and our SRBs as well. We had a kickoff meeting so I have established a team and we have a number of sub teams. As Nikki mentioned, Steve Tebow is leading the architecture aspect of that, the technical team, but we have a number of teams supporting us. They're staffed with very experienced people. We, most of the teams actually have independence from the existing program. The technical team obviously has a dependence because it's important to understand what's been done to date and how to move forward as is the program office, but there are other sub teams are comprised of members that are independent of the existing program. So we're very much looking forward to having these results in the March timeframe so that we can inform our budget and decision-making moving forward. So thank you. Great, thank you. One more planetary question has been voted up and then we will be able to give Lori Glaze a break. This is about New Horizons and there are a couple of questions that we're sort of lumping together here in general, which is quite simply, what is the future for New Horizons and the decisions being made currently about taking it forward? So passenger Lori Glaze to update us on the mission. Yeah, let's talk about New Horizons for a second and just to remind folks, we did do a senior review for New Horizons and the results of that senior review when that was completed was the SMD decision that Planetary would fund New Horizons for the FY23 and 24. And then because the senior review had indicated such strong science within heliophysics, the mission was invited to submit a proposal through the heliocenure review process. The project did not do that as the question noted, but we still know that the senior review indicated that the spacecraft was still capable providing really unique observations from that unique position in the solar system out in the Kuiper Belt. And so we wanted to make sure that we still had the way to be able to use the spacecraft to make those unique observations, particularly heliophysics and also to position the spacecraft so that if another Kuiper Belt object is identified that could be flown by, that we still had the spacecraft in an operating condition that we could do that. So that was the primary motivation behind trying to keep the mission going. The intent always was to try and keep the mission going in some form. So that is what we're trying to implement at this point. The funding that will go forward is coming from Planetary Science Division. We're gonna do everything we can to keep that as limited to the New Frontiers program as possible, but it's not necessarily true that it will all come out of New Frontiers because there is certainly a lot of budget pressures at the moment. So we will work to find the funding that has not previously been identified in the funding horizon going forward. I think that mostly answers that question. Thanks. Thank you so much, Laurie. Our next question is going to go to Michael New. The question is, could you speak to the inclusion plans required in our proposals? Do you have any reaction to the inclusion plans that you've reviewed thus far? Do you have any guidance or comments for those of us writing inclusion plans? Yes, thanks. It's a great question. As I hope everybody knows, inclusion plans, the use of inclusion plans in proposals rather is a pilot study. This is really only the first year we only have one year of data on it. It's a relatively small number of programs involved. What we've seen is what you might expect from the first or second time you do something. Some inclusion plans are phenomenal and some are not. And that's on us as much as on anybody else because we're new with this. Everybody's new with this. We do have a website up for help on this. I think it's on the Sauer website, S-A-R-A. I'll put the link in the chat in a minute. And we will be updating it, especially soon because we have some information. In terms of guidance or suggestions, the kinds of things we've seen that have not worked very well kind of fall into three big categories. The first is people using very, very flowery and generic abstract language as opposed to actually talking about actionable things they're gonna do. The second and not surprisingly is people reformatting broader impacts sections from NSF, related NSF proposals and the goals of the broader impacts assessment is very different from what we're trying to do. So I wouldn't recommend doing that. The third thing has been not picking really actionable and measurable outcomes. Saying we're gonna do X, Y, or Z is great, but if you can't measure X, Y, or Z, then it's not helpful. So those are the three big guides I can give you right now. Check the website, we will be updating it. There will be some town halls on this. I believe one is scheduled for the AGU meeting and one is scheduled for the AAAS meeting. So yeah, stay tuned. Thanks for the questions. Great, and Michael just keep on because two more questions have come in that are really, really for you. The two next questions. The first is many announcements of opportunity have moved their planned dates. When is an update expected to the planning list for our Science Mission Directorate solicitations? Yeah, I've been getting a lot of email directly to me about that too. Given the tremendous uncertainty in the FY24 and FY25 budgets, I can't really update the planning list right now. Things are very much in flux and I can keep putting out updates that are just guesses really at this point. So I'll update that list once we actually have some sense of where the budget's gonna be 24 to 25, sorry. And one more. Is SMD concerned about proposal calls with success rates dipping below 20%? Yeah, yeah, I saw that question. I'm not sure which program in particular you're talking about. 16% is pretty low by SMD standards. There's lots of reasons though why I could have a low success rate. The best reason is if we've got so many great proposals that no budget we have at all could possibly support them all. On the other hand, there are some situations that are concerning that would require us to look into it. One, for example, would be if there was more than enough money but not enough proposals deemed meritorious. There's lots and lots of reasons why that could be but that would be something we would look into. In the absence of knowing what program you're talking about specifically, I can't really tell you much more than that. Across the directorate, the success rate is about 28%, I believe, well, last year for roses 22, which is good, not phenomenal, not the 30 some odd percent it was when I started 21 years ago, but still pretty good. Thank you so much, Michael. Moving on to a few heliophysics questions we seem to be clumped together the way everyone's voting things up. So the first one, which I'm going to pass to Peg Luce, is are there actions, concerns to increase the heliophysics research budget? Sorry, I'm finding the, I got lost in this. So the premise of the question, I believe, was that the heliophysics research budget has not kept up with inflation. And I wanted to assure everyone that it has doubled in the last decade. So the Decadal Survey that was released in 2013 placed the highest emphasis on the RNA program, the research program for heliophysics. And we responded accordingly, our stakeholders responded accordingly. So it had been a pretty steady 65 million a year and the research elements in our program now are $130 million a year in FY 23. So this reflects the high priority that SMD places on research and our efforts to balance our investments in research with other parts of the portfolio, such as technology investments in new spaceflight missions which bring in new data for our researchers to use as well. All right, thank you very much. The next one has a helio element to it as well. So what is the status of the Lunar Gateway Mission and specifically the Hermes package of science instruments? Will there also be a launch opportunity for backup instruments, such as the Space Weather Pipeline program? So give it to you, Peg and then Brad Bailey if you wish to weigh in, you're welcome to as well. Okay, so from the heliophysics and Hermes perspective, all four science instruments and other payload flight hardware that the electronics box for Hermes will complete final testing and go into storage by the end of 2023. We expect the flight hardware for the robotic interface that will attach the Hermes payload to Gateway 2 be delivered no earlier than late 2024. So that's why we're going into a storage period. When received, Hermes will go through a final integration and test campaign to be ready to ship to the Cape for final preparations for launch. We're currently planning for Gateway launch right in the state of October of 25. So, and if that changes, we will adjust accordingly, but we will be in a storage period starting at the end of this calendar year. I don't know if Brad wants to add anything to that. Sure, just a quick few notes about the status of Gateway itself. Right now, the power propulsion element PPE as well as Halo, the habitation and logistics outpost is expected to launch in a Falcon heavy and that will be no earlier than 2025. I believe that they are going to take approximately one year to transit out to the near recto-lineo Halo orbit around the moon. And so we're really looking forward to having heliophysics instruments and we're working closely with other divisions within SMD, such as BPS and others who are, others across the agency in the human research project in order to make sure that we have science well represented from that platform. Great, thank you both. Next question back over to planetary. When is Uranus Orbiter and probe planned to enter phase A and is any consideration being given to SLS as a launch option? Great, thank you, Karen. Yeah, let's talk Uranus Orbiter and probe for a moment. The UOP Uranus Orbiter and probe mission was identified as the highest priority flagship mission after Mars sample return to be implemented by planetary science in our most recent decadal survey. I just want to make sure folks understand that there's actually many internal and external steps that need to be completed before a phase A can actually begin. Right now there is not a timetable for when those steps will be complete. We are in the interim supporting a sequence of workshops to discuss the science content of the potential Uranus flagship mission in the future and the output of those workshops will feed into the formulation studies for the mission. If folks look at the fiscal year 24 budget request that came from the president, you'll see that there was some funding there starting in FY 25. But our ability to begin the work on this project is contingent on an FY 25 appropriation from Congress and we're working through the project process right now. And as you've heard, we are expecting some pretty tight constraints on the budget over the next two years or so. And to be frank, one of the few knobs we have to adjust to that tightening budget is to delay new missions such as the new flagship like Uranus Orbiter and Probe. So right now in the anticipated type budgets, we are not anticipating initiating Uranus Orbiter Probe over the next couple of years. Regarding the question about launch vehicle, again, that decision is pretty far off into the future at this point. And at the time that we are ready to consider launch vehicle, NASA as always will consider all options that are appropriate for the mission. Once again, Laurie, is Dragonfly being considered for cancellation since it has grown to a three billion lifecycle cost? Thank you for the question. I'll just make a note that in the question that's posted in the IO tool, it mentions it does quote the $850 million cost cap that was in the announcement of opportunity. Everyone needs to remember that the $850 million was only for the development. It did not include phase E costs, none of the operational costs, nor did it include launch vehicle and some of the other additional things that we hold at headquarters, including extra reserves that would be required. In addition to that, I'll point out that because of some type budgets that we've had over the last couple of years, we've already shifted Dragonfly out to the right a couple of times. And so I don't blame the project for that. Every time you shift a mission to the right, there's gonna be cost growth associated with that and we have to take ownership of that cost growth. So just to kind of put the current estimate for costs for Dragonfly into context, yes, they have gone up since the proposal, but there is a lot of reason for that. And we are going through the process right now. The project has gone through their preliminary design review. They successfully passed that. The technical aspects of that preliminary design review are in a really good shape with a design that is feasible and executable. We're now in the process of going through the confirmation process, which is where NASA decides, yes or no, the project will go forward. And if it does go forward, we make a commitment, an official commitment to the cost and schedule for that mission. So right now we're in the middle of that process, so I don't have an answer of where we're gonna end up on the other side. Thank you so much. All right, next question. I'm gonna toss this one to Nicky. Why did the JPL director tell Science Magazine that the European Space Agency had scrapped its plan to build a fetch rover given the reality that JPL could not deliver the fetch rover to Mars? The Mars map became too big and heavy. Didn't want to read every one of those. Yeah, I'm glad you brought them up because I think there's a number of questions that we have in the tool right now that are pretty disrespectful. And we allow anonymous questions because we want people to feel they can ask anything, but you're better than that as a community, you're better than that. And I would like to us to think about keeping up professionalism and just being respectful with those questions. And I was a little disappointed, not gonna lie when I saw some of the questions that were in there. So I hope we'll see much more professional questions at the next town hall. But to this question in particular, I'm afraid you will have to address that question to Laurie Leshen. She is the one who made the quote and I'm sure that she will be happy to explain why she made that quote. So thanks, Karen. All right, the next one, most likely to you as well, Nikki, in the event of a prolonged continuing resolution, will all new solicitations be put on hold even for active programs? For example, with an ESTO. So I don't know if that is you or if Michael New wants to weigh in too, but I'll toss it to you first, Nikki. Yeah, I'm happy for Michael to jump in as well. I mean, obviously, if there's a shutdown, it's gonna have really devastating consequences for NASA, for families all across the country and really for America's kind of global competitiveness. So, you know, we're really concerned about that. We are deciding, of course, what actions are needed in the event of a government shutdown, including which events need to be accepted and activities as such as solicitations are likely not going to be accepted. But of course, we, you know, NASA will maintain the people to protect life and protect property, all of our operational missions, you know, our spacecraft, our landers, our rovers, as well as the International Space Station and its crew. So in the event of a shutdown, yeah, we will be worried about many things moving forward. But Michael, if you'd like to add to that, please go ahead. Yeah, thanks, Nikki. So in the past, when we've had government furloughs, shutdowns, lapses in appropriations, we have generally slid the due dates of any program that was due during that period of time, slid it later by day for day. So if the government was without funding for five business days, then we would shift the due date five business days. If it was out for two weeks, which is 10 business days, we'd shift it 10 business days. We have also tried to not then move due dates into holiday periods. So if due date was going to fall on Thanksgiving, when you slid it, we would have jumped over Thanksgiving and then moved it beyond that. So generally, yeah, that's been our approach. And I don't see why we would be changing that. I can't speak to missions in process, obviously. Solicitations that were already proposed or received, of course, if the civil servants can't oversee the review panels, which they have to, then we'll put a pause there too. It's just how we'd have to roll. Yeah, now I'm gonna jump in because I'm afraid I misread the question. So I apologize, because it actually asks about a CR, not about the shutdown. So I do apologize for that. If in a CR, we will continue to release AOs, we will continue to make research selections, pending the amount of funding that we have available as is true all the time. But if we're in a continuing resolution, we would indeed continue to put out those AOs and make selections. So thanks, sorry about that, Karen. No problem. All right, our next question, they keep moving on us, is can we get any transparency on the decisions behind which research calls get cut because of R&D budget cuts? For example, the H-SR was moved from roses 22 to roses 23, but no more expected selections were listed in 23. So passing that one to Peg Lips. Yes, thank you. So first of all, when we do make adjustments in the roses schedules, we really are attempting to minimize impacts on the heliophysics community. So we do try, very hard to do that. The decision not to solicit proposals for H-SR or heliophysics supporting research in roses 22 was driven by a number of factors. First was actually giving proposers more time to adapt to the introduction of dual anonymous peer review for that program. Secondly, shifting the timeline of the selections from very late in the fiscal year to earlier in the following fiscal year was a consideration. And we were adjusting to a temporary fluctuation in funding. As a result, the H-SR 22 moved to 23, but the actual delay in the opportunity was less than six months. Great, thank you so much. We are gonna keep answering questions for another five or six minutes. I want to make sure we get to biological and physical sciences questions because there are a number of them in here and they're obviously important to people. So I'm gonna jump to that. The questions are basically, how are we responding to the decadal and how are we going to align with other aspects of NASA's work, et cetera. So I'm gonna pass to Devon Griffin and ask you to respond. Okay, thank you. Well, we received the decadal about a month ago back on September 12th and we're reviewing the recommendations. We're actually going to have drafts for our director to review starting tomorrow. And as part of that, we did see the recommendations that we worked closely with other parts of NASA, with other government agencies and internationally. And so we're going to work with those colleagues, particularly across NASA, the international partners and commercial space companies to identify the opportunities for collaboration so that we can increase the pace of our science and we can increase the return on our science as well. What we do plan on doing is we're gonna have a town hall to share an initial response in January 24 and I hope that you'll all be able to tune in then. Thank you so much. I'm also gonna pass back to Peg Lewis who was not finished answering the question that was asked before about the Space Weather Pipeline. That's sort of a two-parter. So on the Space Weather Pipeline, these are instruments that were selected at the same time as we selected the Hermes instruments, but they are instruments that are being developed up to a point in order to be available to fly on readily available opportunities when they come. I'm sure the people who asked the question know that we recently closed an RFI to assess commercial interest in an opportunities for in-space hosting of science instruments for space weather and other NASA disciplines. So we actually broadened that from just space weather to all of SMD. SMD has not yet completed the analysis of the responses to this RFI, but this analysis will inform potential solicitations for hosting opportunities of the current space weather pipeline instruments as well as potentially other SMD instruments. But that still has to play out and right now we don't have specific plans for hosting those yet. But the whole idea is to be ready when the right opportunity comes along. Thank you, Peg. Next question, what is the rationale for moving many science mission directorate science missions to infrastructure missions? The operation mode of scientists on mission instrument or slash instrument teams working on both data pipeline and calibration and related science subjects has been working for the past seven decades. In my opinion, forcibly separating science from instruments slash operation teams would be counterproductive. That's one's for Peg Lusso. This refers to a decision that was actually made in 2020 for heliophysics operating missions to identify an infrastructure category which was for missions that had been in operation for quite a long time, had where we wanted to continue receiving the data, calibrating it, doing all that was needed to archive the data from long-term missions, but we didn't want to require those missions to reinvent themselves every three years for another senior review. So we had a number of missions that fell into that category after this senior review. In other words, they would continue being funded. We did not cut funding associated with this, but the title infrastructure has offended some people and it indicates that we don't value these missions. We received that feedback and are looking for ways to incorporate that feedback and respond. Thank you. Another question. Should we expect more researchers to leave the field as we are graduating more people but not seeing a similar growth in the R&A budget? I'm gonna pass that one to Michael New. Thanks. We're losing people now for lots and lots of reasons, not just because we don't have, not just because our research program dollars have not been growing at the same rate as the community. And just because the community grows doesn't necessarily mean our research dollars have to grow as well. NASA is about doing relevant research to our other missions, our missions at large, not missions like in Solar Pro Plus or something, but our goals, our objectives. NSF's goal different is to support the science in general, the best science in general and build the next generation of scientists. So our objectives are different, which means our responses to proposal pressures also have to be different. We lose people like I said now for not just funding reasons, but for all kinds of things, reasons of bullying and harassment and work-life balance. We're trying to do the best we can on all these, but it is not NASA's only responsibility. Sorry, it's not only NASA's responsibility to deal with this, I'm done. Thank you so much. I am simply trying to figure out if we can fit in one more question before we are going to switch to our highlights. Again, I wanna go back to the BPS Decadal. That's obviously an important milestone that just happened for them and their division. So I will finish up with one question on that, which is that the Decadal survey did recommend 10 times increase to the division's budget and looking to figure out what we would expect to be to SMD if we really saw a giant growth there and how is NASA planning to implement a budget that requires such a large increase to meet the recommendations of the Decadal? So a nice easy one for us to end on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you. And we did note that budget increase recommendation in the Decadal and the reason they recommended it was because they said we really couldn't drive the questions to closure that they asked us to if we didn't have a budget increase. And the reason they said that, if you look historically at what we were funded with adjusting for inflation back before the Vision for Space Exploration, we had a community that was on the order of the size and funding on the order of the size of what the Decadal recommended. And so I don't think we have a problem in envisioning how we could get back to those levels and the science content, given both the history of people within our program and the recommendation of the Decadal. That having been said, we also have to live within budgetary realities and what the Congress appropriates is what we will work with and we will do the very best that we can to get the maximum return on that on the investment of the American people. I will say that one thing that we are keeping in mind is the fact that due to that long period of constrained funding, we made the decision to try and make high use of ISS. And that precluded some growth in the number and the amount of the research awards that we had because we needed to build hardware. We don't envision being in that straight in the future and we really do want to focus on making sure that our grants are competitive and that they really do support the community to the best extent possible. Great, thank you. And I lied, I'm gonna throw out a couple of last little questions here because we really didn't hit on astrophysics or earth science too much today with the way the questions are voted up. So Mark Clampin, throwing one to you. Hopefully a nice easy one. When is the next astrophysics SMECS call? So the next astrophysics SMECS call is scheduled for 2025 and I just advise people to continue to monitor our webpages for any updates. Thank you so much. And an earth question for Julie Robinson. Are there any actions to increase the earth science research budget which is not increased in inflation dollars for the last decade in spite of urgent need for understanding and predicting the impacts of climate change? Julie? Yeah, thanks for that question. You know, we do actually our overall budget does roughly track inflation and that only and we do try to grow our RNA budget consistent with that overall budget growth while maintaining the right split across the different kinds of research we have. Both our classic earth system science and our collaborative and cross cutting elements that are typically multidisciplinary and also our applied science or now we're calling them earth action elements. We also tie new opportunities to new missions. So even though our disciplinary research calls are relatively stable in funding, we have a lot of new opportunities that have come along for things like soil moisture, sickness, Jedi and eco stress. An Emit call will be coming out for the first time for that multispectral data. So that's the approach that we're using to increase the opportunity for research. Thank you so much. Nikki, do you want to tee off the final round of the specific question or should we just go into it? I just, I'm going to throw it to the division directors. So since we didn't hear much from Mark, he can go first with the astro highlight. I will just start as always these days by talking about the great science web is doing and I'll just highlight one result, the new spectrum of an exoplanet named K218B where we see both methane and carbon dioxide. But tantalizingly, we also see a very tentative detection of dimethyl sulfide, which on earth is produced by life. So we're now eagerly awaiting further observations by JWST later this year to either confirm that observation or provide more data on the observation. I'll also just give a highlight very quickly to two of our recent launches. We launched Chrism in September. This is a high resolution X-ray spectrometer with a NASA instrument. It's a partnership with JAXA. And we also launched Euclid in July, which is a wide field survey experiment. And we're just coming to the end of science commissioning there and expect to start doing science early in 2024. That's great. Thank you, Mark. Devon, BPS. He wasn't expecting that. No, you're right. So I think probably the biggest science highlight recently is one of our investigators just published a paper that looked at differences in gene transcription in something that seemingly pretty simple, which is a radish that was grown on earth as opposed to radish grown on the ground. But that's really, if you look at the decadal recommendations that we have coming out. So we did this in advance of the decadal. But if you look at the recommendations, they really want us to look at what genes are getting turned on and off as a function of being able to tweak that gravity variable because that can have implications beyond just what we need to do to enable exploration, just what we need to do to provide food. But really, we may be able to get insights into making life better here on earth. And so that really was pretty interesting. It looks like it was a responsive stress, but they're going to need to understand that a little bit better. But that was a significant recent finding that we had. And so I will thank you for the opportunity. Thanks, thanks, Devon. Laurie, you've had nothing going on in Planetary. Try not to use all the remaining time. So we talked a little bit during the time here about some of the challenges we have, but it's just so important to remember, we have some incredible things going on within SMD and within Planetary this fall. We're in the midst of asteroid autumn. It's just been spectacular success after success. We landed the OSIRIS-REx samples in Utah on September 24th, two days later on the 26th, we celebrated the one year anniversary of DART, our amazing Planetary Defense Mission, demonstrated the first time ever the kinetic impactor technique that gives us the tool to protect ourselves from dangerous asteroids in the future. We then just last week was really action packed where we started to talk a little bit about the first look of those samples that were returned by OSIRIS-REx with incredible, just the first analyses of the sample that we've looked at so far, showing almost 5% by massive carbon in those samples and minerals that took to be altered by hydrothermal processes. So just incredible results already just with the very small part of the sample that we've looked at so far. And then on Friday, of course, we launched Psyche, going to visit the metal asteroid Psyche. That mission already going very well there, of course, in their early checkout, but everything going very well. And then coming up, we're gonna wrap up asteroid autumn on November 1st with the Lucy mission, ultimately headed for the Trojan asteroids out leading and trailing Jupiter and its orbit around the sun. But on November 1st, gonna fly by a main belt asteroid called Dinkinesh that allow us to kind of work through the terminal tracking and other operational activities on the spacecraft. So really exciting time for asteroid science and planetary. And then the last thing I'm just gonna mention real quick, just on Europa Clipper, giving a quick shout out to the Message in a Bottle campaign where you can submit your name to be put on a chip to fly with Europa Clipper out to Europa. And I believe that program is gonna close in December. So you still have a little bit of time to get your name in. Just search Message in a Bottle. Thanks. All right, still time to get those Christmas presents, certificates of your names on Europa. Okay, Peg. Well, we are thrilled to have kicked off the Helio physics big year this past weekend with the 2023 annular eclipse, which crossed North, South and Central America on Saturday, October 14th. I was so fortunate to be in Albuquerque during the balloon fiesta to experience this NASA's live broadcast from Albuquerque, New Mexico and Curveill, Texas, which Curveill is actually gonna experience both that in addition to the annular, they will also experience the total solar eclipse in April. We had, or excuse me, 11 million views of that video by Monday morning. So it was really a way to reach people who don't think much about NASA science necessarily to share what we do in NASA. So that was really exciting. And we're excited to continue celebrating the Helio physics big year with the upcoming launch of the atmospheric wave experiment, or AWW, which will be launching to the space station currently scheduled for November 5th. So coming right up, it's a two year long mission that is designed to help us understand the combination of forces that drive space weather from upper atmosphere and how terrestrial weather also influences space weather. So we've entered the Helio physics big year. We're excited with the big things that will happen, including more mission launches, the total solar eclipse, Parker solar probes, closest approach to the sun, all happening while the sun is approaching solar maximum. So it is a great time to be a Helio physicist. Nicely done. Julie, finish yourself with a... There, I think I've got my pack working here. Well, in our science, we have so much going on where we're really having impact in helping people respond to the changes in the Earth system. And one of those is Tempo, which has been monitoring air pollutants hourly across North American continent. Our first light was August 24th, and seeing that hourly data, seeing the pollution building over cities and how those patterns are going on is amazing. We are working with new observations from both EMET and data from OCO-2 and OCO-3. And we're getting ready and close to releasing the US greenhouse gas center coming up at COP when the UNCCC gets together. And that's a partnership with the EPA and NIST and NOAA. And that's going to be very exciting as it continues to form. This last week, our fire sense team did an airborne campaign in Utah with the US Forest Service flying over a prescribed burn with three different aircraft to really look at how the crown fires work differently, how restoration can happen, both pre-fire, in-fire, and post-fire aspects of that burn to validate different methodologies and the new science that's coming with our fire sense project. And very exciting is we are getting very close within really days to weeks of shipping pace to its launch site in Florida. That will be our plankton aerosol cloud and ocean ecosystem mission, a hyperspectral mission to really help us understand the biology of the ocean, fisheries, and toxic algal blooms. That's anticipated for launch in very early 2024. All right, lots of exciting things going on at NASA Science as always. Kick it back to you, Karen. Great, we're a little over time. We're gonna take just another minute or two of your time and we know Sandra Connolly had a comment she wanted to add and then we will wrap up. Oh, okay, so we just went through the highlights and that's what I love about this community at large. We're always doing amazing things. Science never sleeps and it's thanks to all the work all of you do. And it requires that we have a safe environment that we have treating each other with respect and professionalism that we're maintaining the proper decorum. So I just kind of wanna double down on what Nikki said earlier. Some of the questions as submitted seemed, okay, in my personal opinion, maybe a little snarky, maybe a little petty, certainly not always presented in a professional way. We welcome the tough questions. These conversations, these town halls are about having the conversation, providing the transparency. And so this is not about avoiding tough questions, but please do so in a respectful way. Thank you. Thank you so much for everyone who participated today and everybody who watched. We will have a recorded version of this up online at science.nasa.gov. There'll be one with really accurate captions going up over the course of the next week. In the meantime, we do have the YouTube video is should be linked there and you can go over this from that perspective as well. So I appreciate everyone for being here and we will talk to you next time.