 Hello and welcome to today's NASA Science Town Hall with Thomas Urbuchen, the Associate Administrator for Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. We have members of the science leadership team with us today as well to share updates and highlights and to answer your questions. In addition to Thomas, we have Mark Clampen, the Astrophysics Division Director, Craig Kundrugt, the Biological and Physical Sciences Division Director, Nicky Fox, the Heliophysics Division Director, Laurie Glaze, the Planetary Sciences Division Director, Julie Robinson, the Deputy Division Director for Earth Sciences. Today's Town Hall is being recorded and the recording and slides will be made available later today at science.nasa.gov. If you have a question that you haven't already asked in the IO system, we will share the link in the chat and you can find out information about how to submit a question or to vote one up. With that, I think I'm ready to hand it off to Thomas Urbuchen. Well, thanks so much, Karen. I'm just so excited to be here. I want to just recognize that this is very likely my last such town hall. That, of course, is on the one hand fills me with joy. On the other hand, mostly actually right now as I'm sitting in the middle of the team, it, you know, makes me sad. And as always, when we make big changes, whether it's when we graduate from grad school or make changes later on, I think both elements are there. So what I'd like to do is go to the next slide and just tell you what's waiting for you. What's waiting for you is kind of news and updates and then division highlights and questions and answers as we go forward. The news and updates to next slide. Frankly, what I asked the team and is just that I quickly just spend 10, 15 minutes because it's my last time kind of focused on the work here. So basically, as we said, mostly have added kind of division directors to talk about their updates and kind of do less of the front office updates than we normally do. So what I wanted to say first, and I already mentioned it earlier, is that everything we do here and certainly everything I've been involved in personally in the last six years, six plus years here at NASA has and certainly all the successes have everything to do with the team. And just for this presentation, I wanted to just put the team members up. Some of them are in the room here. Some of them are not. All of them together are really what make us successful. So I just really want to be sure to thank all of you who are in the room and those are up here for your leadership on this important activity, both under your partnership in the last many years for me personally, but also for the science community as a whole. And so I just really want to express my appreciation to each and every one of them. What I want to mention, of course, is that you saw that last week the job announcement regarding my job became public. So all of you who are on there, I ask you to do one of two things. Either you apply yourself if you're so inclined and this chair, as I said, is going to become free or you twist somebody else's arm was really, really excellent and apply themselves. I already twisted some arms here in the room and I'll continue to do that. Kind of and I really hope you do the same again. As a community, we do need amazing leaders that are part of this organization. So the next slide is just kind of in a kind of survey sense. And I thought it's it's worth it's less about me, as I said, it's about the team. But I wanted to just tell you some of the things that have happened in the last six years. Sometimes it helps looking at it. The first one is and again, this is because of the team here, but also other stakeholders that are really important, and some that work in the White House, some that work on Capitol Hill, the community overall that is up there on Capitol Hill supporting that with their own elected officials. The budget in science is up and frankly, it's the largest increase of a budget kind of forward that time period we've ever had in science. I want I want you to know the number two such increases my mentor Len Fisk, and we've had this friendly competition, which of course, none of us cost ourselves, but it's always fun to pander. Anyway, so we we're at 7.6 billion this year. And you saw the markups on the hill, which are there, which a little bit higher even. We have since I'm here, launch 33 missions. And you know, some of your favorite missions that are there, you know, missions that are landing on the landing on the surface of Mars twice. You know, if you added the helicopter, it's kind of its own thing three times, right? A mission that passes kind of set all record relative to speed and distance to the sun, you know, the park is all a probe amongst and many other things. You look at dozen or so Earth science missions that are there, kind of giving us insight of our most beautiful planet. And then of course, in astrophysics, the the telescope that is sitting a million miles from Earth and kind of looking at the sky in absolutely in absolutely new ways. And so so for me, of course, also on the space station and instruments that are doing fundamental science, both on the inside, but on the outside and biology or also kind of the missions are there. I wanted to tell you we hired quite a number of people. I want to explain why we did that. First of all, when I came in and frankly, by independent reviews as before, I actually believed that we were understaffed. What's really important is I believe authority and accountability. We want to make sure that our division directors actually have the tools to people to do run their missions. But I already showed you the budget is way up. We have many more missions. And so as and which is the next number, which is 47 new missions that we're doing. And in addition to that seven clips mission, so it's north of 50. So these missions need to be managed. And you know, and so do the research programs, which also have gone up during that time. So so those are the reasons I just want to tell you, just so excited to meet many of these new hires as they come in, because they really add so much to this team that's already here. Next. So just to give you a visual. So this is the chart that was in the calendar early in 2017. It's actually the 2016 chart. I remember Channy Modder, our artist did that. You see all these missions there. So I want you to go to the next slide. Next. This is the mission there. So Andrew, if you could go back and forth every five seconds or so. I want you to just look at this. So first and foremost, there are some missions that are no longer with us. And I just want to thank all these missions that have completely successfully completed their missions. Go back and forth, Andrew, every five seconds or so. You also see that, of course, there is this kind of stripe across the earth, which is much of it is biological and physical sciences that joined. And then you see that we also have quite a number of new earth science missions. But look at how populated the moon has become from missions before. So for me, just again, this is kind of another indication of a portfolio that is growing, but a portfolio where every one of those names really matter. As I always said, I'm really excited. Wind is there still because every time I talk to students, I said it's the most important mission for me because it's the first time I've ever built hardware that is still in space. So so so missions that are also have extended life. So at the next slide, it kind of talks about some of the things we care about. And next, I have no intent of talking about all of this because I want to stop in less than five minutes. I really, I really want to point out that I believe that all the successes that many people are giving me credit for kind of in messages and kind of reach out. By the way, I appreciate those very much. But I want to just make sure that you understand as I do that the successes really are the ones of the team. And we put a lot of effort building the team already showed you kind of the top leaders of that team. But of course, that also is kind of pick people that do not fit on this particular chart that people who are elsewhere in other organizations that have led these missions, managers, system engineers, kind of people all over that have supported these missions. And the leadership team here at SMD is second to none. You know, again, our focus has been to build the best teams. And that's why we're so passionate about kind of looking at diverse workforce and then really making those teams inclusive. So we actually benefit from the voices that are in the room. Innovation, frankly, one of the things I did, friends, those of you are journalists, I started reading your articles you wrote since 2016. Just kind of to say, and I was this article that said, we're going to focus on innovation. I just hope you understand and see that we did. And I'm going to very strongly believe that this is part of the DNA of this team. We already talked about the helicopter on Mars. There's many other examples we could give technology demonstrations that are up there and a whole slew of small missions that are out there, kind of at the level that we have not seen. I want to tell you that I'm particularly proud of the partnership we have across the agency with space tech, but especially with human exploration, kind of a partnership that I surely hope and believe needs to persist as we go forward, as well as partnerships with commercial entities and international partners. Over 100 new agreements in the last six years that have been done there, but also the commercial partnerships where we really have new opportunities that can go forward. So the accomplishments here are many. If you just look, I think of this like it's one team with a capital T with many elements. The next slide kind of tells you some things that are there. I really appreciate the work that Michael New and Dan Evans and their team are doing across all of SMD with each one of the divisions by focusing on high-risk, high-impact science and technology demonstration, which of course are also in Manda Peter's shop. Again, we talked a lot about small sets. These capabilities are there now, frankly. If there's anything I would like to say is it surprised me how fast that happened. I probably surprised me by a factor of two. So in other words, I was wrong, which happens often when it comes to innovation. Again, the earth science and as we go forward, the earth system observatory as the next generation and integrated capability is something I'm particularly proud of because I live on this planet and I really deeply care about its health and its well-being as my kids grow up and I think of what we leave here also. I already talked about Parker Solar Probe, but it's also the other heliophysics missions that focus on the physics of the corona with multiple missions, including some under development, but also to focus on that interface, the upper atmosphere, ionosphere of the earth, which we have multiple missions are looking at this. An interface that's, of course, very, very important as we go forward, because the lower Thorbit is such a populated area and that is where orbital debris interacts with nature, so to say, and of course becomes the loss. All the work at Mars, including the work that Jeff Grammling is doing and their team on Mars sample return, I'm immensely proud of. I just want to know, this is going to be really hard, just like when it was really hard. And by the way, that's why we're NASA. Like if it was easy, I don't know why we would do it. And I mean, I have full trust in a team that is there and I just want everybody to know that's what it is. The James Webb Space Telescope in operation gives me joy every day just thinking of that but also seeing some of the new data and Mark and Paul, both of you at various times in a position of astrophysics director, keeping Roman on track and really demonstrating kind of bringing that telescope forward, creating, of course, technical success, but also really focus on that programmatic success, which is something we really want to learn as we lean forward. And of course, surely in the next five years, kind of really focus on the next big telescope that we go forward. Planetary defense is a thing, you know, and there's a body that is sore in the head, somewhere in the solar system because it got hit with dark, just really, really excited about the work and hopefully kind of learning soon from the ground-based analysis what really happened there, neosurvey or kind of getting through confirmation in the next few months. And then, of course, your favorite planet, Lori, if there's such a thing for you now, but one that you have done a lot of work with, you know, Venus back kind of on the radar for all of us now. So there's many, many more things I could say. The most important thing I already said at the beginning, thanks to the team. One person I want to just quickly point out is Sandra Conley, who has been my deputy for most of the time here. And Sandra, of course, largely runs half the program here and has done just amazing work. And she will once I step off, depending on when the next person can run the whole program. And I just want to thank her for both her friendship, her partnership and everything that she has done for the broad community. Everybody should be really grateful to you as I am. With that in mind, what I'd like to do is kick it back to you, Karen, on the next slide. Thanks so much, Thomas, for your thoughts. We will now move on to the various leads for around the science mission directorate, who we have here today, to provide highlights from their division and their offices. First up, Mark Lampin. Hi, good morning, everybody. So here are the astrophysics division highlights. We just recently selected four explorer program missions for step one studies. Two of those are the mid-ex class mission called ultraviolet explorer and a second mission called survey and time domain astrophysical research explorer. I wanted just to mention that these two missions and the two I mentioned in second all tie closely back to the Decadal Survey recommendation for time domain and multi-messenger astronomy. We also selected two missions of opportunity, moonburst energetics or sky monitor, also known as moon beam and the large area burst polarimeter leap and we'll be making selections from those in due course. We also just recently selected a new astrophysics pioneer mission and that's called trans ion galactic element recorder for the International Space Station. And that's why we have acronyms. This one's called Tiger ISS. And as I said, that's the new most recent pioneer selection. We just last week completed the Sophia science mission the last flight was on September 30th after more than 12 years in operation. Just a reminder, the first flight was May 26th, 2010. And I just wanted to thank the whole Sophia science team for their really hard work bringing this to the close on September 30th and great work they did making that happen. We've also been operating a very successful balloon campaign this fall for Sumner. We had two engineering test flights at the beginning of the season. We flew a student experiment platform flight known as Haas. We had a heliophysics flight known as Balboa and we had two astrophysics flights, picture C and a hand launched balloon flight in man. The next astrophysics advisory committee APAC meeting is October 17th and 18th. And I just wanted to finish up. As Thomas said, I also look at the new data that we're taking with James Webb every week with joy. And on the right, you can see one of the recent near infrared images that Webb took of Mars. And this is also coupled with a set of spectra which are giving us new information on the atmosphere of Mars. I also wanted just to mention that we are putting up every week now on the blog notifications when we have things coming and we will have something new from Webb every week this coming month. So look out for those. And finally, I just wanted to finish up by thanking Thomas on behalf of the astrophysics community for his exemplary leadership of the science mission directorate. So thank you, Thomas. Good morning, everyone. Highlights from biological and physical sciences include a busy period coming up in the next month or so. With launches, we have three spanning a broad range across the portfolio. But of particular interest is Artemis I, where we have a suite of four investigations headed to the moon. So the first space biology experiments in the lunar vicinity for BPS, we're very excited about that. Some important public events coming up are Academy's Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space is meeting this month. And next month, we have the annual meeting of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research that will be in Houston. And we'll have our first meeting of the Biological and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee or BPAC. We have several solicitations and selections out or being announced and there's a link to those. I'll just call out one. And that is the request for information for commercial capability for in situ analysis or in situ experiment preparation in low-earth orbit. We're getting good input on that and that's still open. So we're looking forward to more. And in conclusion, I would also like to thank Thomas for his leadership bringing BPS into the mission directorate and giving us a warm welcome and a thriving environment. So thank you for your leadership. With that, we can go over to Niki Fox and the latest in Helio. Thanks so much, Craig. I have to say I love looking at those flames in space. It's such a cool image. Anyway, so just to tell you a few things that are going on in the Helio Physics Division. So we actually had our very first sounding rocket symposium that was held in August at Wallops. And we actually timed that with a visit of the Helio Physics team to go down and meet with the sounding rocket folks. And also we got to tour their facilities there. And you can see us looking at some of the great stuff that they do there. We also got to see a couple of rockets being integrated. And we even got to see one on the rail. So it was a really exciting visit for us. We can see a new image there at the bottom taken by Solar Orbiter by the extreme ultraviolet imager. And it's really amazing. The new images stay tuned for many, many, many more being released over the next few weeks. They debuted a lot of them at the IAC meeting two weeks ago. And it's really fabulous to see those incredible images and looking forward to seeing what Solar Orbiter sees. Well, Parker Solar Probe is really close up too. So as Thomas said, just the opportunities we have with these multi-platforms looking at the same type of phenomena. We did release our SMEX announcements of opportunity. And in fact, we have the kickoff meeting for the SMEX proposal or pre-proposal conference is going on today. And I'll do a quick thanks to the organizers for that, for taking an hour break so that everyone could join this SMD town hall today. The GDC, we had our Geospace Dynamics Constellation mission. We had an independent, that should say independent, review board. And they met. It was co-chaired by Orlando Figueroa and Mary Hagen. Thank you to both of them for their great job as co-chairs. And that we are actually ready to release those review board findings and our responses. So that will be coming out imminently. And then just to raise your awareness, we are having a heliophysics town hall, which is a virtual town hall on October 24th. So watch out for more information on that, including how to submit questions and how to join. And of course, I would also like to join my other division directors in thanking Thomas for his amazing leadership at SMD I actually said on the pre-proposal conference, this is going to be a very sad town hall today for all of us. And we were going to try not to cry, but it's very sad to see Thomas going. So thank you for your leadership. And with that, I am delighted to hand over to Laurie with the words, congratulations, go Dart. Thank you, Nikki. Yes, let's start with Dart on the next slide, please. Hopefully everyone has been paying attention and saw that just, I guess, a little over a week ago, maybe two weeks now, I guess, on the 24th of September. On the 26th of September, we successfully impacted the asteroid dimorphous with the Dart spacecraft. You can see on the top right there, dimorphous moments before that impact, where we were starting to see the full shape of dimorphous coming into view. You can actually see the texture on the surface. It was an incredible image. And then down on the bottom right, you can see us literally two seconds before hitting the surface, the last complete image. It was an amazing event, very, very successfully completed by the Dart team up at APL. Now the investigation team begins the work or have been doing the work with the ground-based observations, trying to look at the dimorphous system and assess just how effective our impact was. So stay tuned for more information on that. Talk for a moment about insight, an amazing mission. Thomas mentioned there were two landings on Mars in his tenure here, the first one being insight, which happened in November of 2018. This mission has done an amazing job of collecting seismic data on the surface of Mars. But as a solar-powered mission, it's been accumulating dust on the solar panels and the available power is continuing to drop. We are trying to run it full steam to get as much seismic data as we can before we completely lose power. I encourage people to follow along on the blog to get the most current information on how the insight spacecraft is doing, but we fully expect to lose power or be able to have to cease the operation sometime this fall. As early as perhaps sometime in October or as late as maybe into January of next year. But stay tuned. Psyche mission, as most are probably aware, did not launch in August as was originally planned, nor in the contingency window in September. We being Thomas and the director for JPL, Laurie Lushin, have established an independent review board to make sure that we understand the reasons why Psyche was unable to meet its launch and to assess any potential plans for possible launch at a later date. We are holding a continuation termination review. It's actually taking place, I believe, later this month. And so that will determine whether or not Psyche will continue and if so, when it would launch. So stay tuned for more information. We'll try to communicate the results of that review as soon as we can. The Exploitation Science and Strategy Integration Office has been doing great things. They wanted us to mention here that the next prism call, Prism 3, is open with Step 1 proposals due October 24th and Step 2s due December 20th. And then on our sample return, just a quick note that it's really, really exciting. We now have 13 confirmed rock samples as well as one atmospheric sample and two witness tubes. There was a big workshop held last week to assess those samples, the scientific worthiness of those samples, and are we ready to establish our first cash depot on the surface of Mars at a potential landing site for the sample retrieval lander? And so that's going very well and we expect a decision on that very, very soon. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Julie Robinson to talk about Earth Science. I'd also like to just say thank you to Thomas for allowing me to be a part of this team. It's a fantastic group to work with and appreciate all that you have done for Planetary Science. Thank you. Thanks and Thomas for Earth Science in our entire team. We also want to thank you for your leadership and today we're going to show one very concrete and short video in lieu of our regular highlights that kind of illustrates this shift because we've been collecting data and measurements of the Earth's land, water, ice and atmosphere for more than 50 years, but we're recognizing that understanding your system isn't enough, as you said, in your opening remarks. And so as we are envisioning a time when Earth Science at NASA also helps our nation and the world to take action, we wanted to share this video that was shown at the recent Space Council. For more than 50 years, NASA has been collecting and providing data on Earth's land, water, ice and atmosphere. Now a new era of Earth Science has begun. Together with international partners, NASA will launch the SWAT mission to provide the first ever global survey of Earth's surface water, the oceans, lakes and rivers that affect all of us. But we also need to understand our planet as a complex whole. That's why NASA will launch a fleet of state-of-the-art satellites forming the Earth System Observatory, which will create a comprehensive 4D view of Earth from bedrock to atmosphere like never before. The Earth System Observatory will arm us with crucial data to help us address climate change and protect our communities. But how do we get this critical information to the people who need it? Introducing the Earth Information Center. NASA, working with our federal partners, will equip decision makers with the information they need to mitigate, adapt and respond to climate change. We will create a greenhouse gas monitoring system and make data about our changing planet accessible to those who need it most. New satellites observing in the sky and an information center here on Earth, protecting our planet for the next generation. So the Earth System Observatory is our plan to implement the Decadal Survey and the Earth Information Center is the way that we plan to deliver that information, data and science applications to decision makers at every level. Last Tuesday, or this Tuesday, just two days ago, we did issue a community announcement for Earth System Observatory. That includes the opportunity for a two-step selection process to address the seven themes that are not in direct admissions in our Decadal and in particular greenhouse gases is a likely emphasis for one of these competed selections. The first mission there would be 2029 and a second mission in 2031. And last week, we announced our first commercial data buy through greenhouse gas sat and that also provides significant new information on greenhouse gases through and shows our support at NASA for commercial procurement approaches and having that broad suite of commercial, academic and industry partners helping us make this observatory work. So thank you and I'll hand it back to Thomas. Do you mind if I just quickly say that a couple of you have let us know that the audience did not work for you? I just want you to know within minutes on my Twitter account, the audience being tweeted with the, with their movie is tweeted with the audience so you can listen to it and watch it as many times as you want to. I really love it. Thanks so much, Joy. Great. Thank you so much to all of our presenters. We have about half an hour to move on to questions. I know that some people are having a hard time seeing the questions. If you put them on, they are going in and we are trying to see if we can adjust our, our, our settings. But in the meantime, I will be going through them and reading them and making sure that people know, know what, what there is available. There are quite a number of questions about the independent study on UAPs. And so we wanted to just have Dan Evans, who is helping run that study, just kick off with a description of the study and, and we'll check a box on those questions. And then we'll move on to the next set. Thanks, Karen. I appreciate the invite to be here today and spend a few minutes discussing the, the plethora of questions that we received over the past week or so about UAP. It looks like the UFO Twitter community has been very busy. You'll be pleased to know that we are in the final stages of standing up our independent study team. And this is a full federal advisory committee act type of activity. Federal advisory committees are the gold standard. We don't just get together a bunch of people in a room. We require them to, to disclose all their financial details. Those details get vetted by our Office of the General Counsel. And we do this because we take the commitment to ensuring the panel's independence and objectivity extremely seriously. We are planning to release the names of the committee members this month. And the team is going to have a series of preparatory meetings. And in late spring, roughly 2023, there will be a full and open and public fee broadcast meeting. And we expect the study to be finished in the June-ish timeframe. There are a number of questions that have been submitted about when NASA will release data and sightings, things like that. But remember that this study is only primarily to advise NASA about what data we could use to shed light on UAP. But the actual analysis that would ensue from those recommendations, from that roadmap, that would be a future step. And finally, I want to speak about classified data because there are a few questions about who has clearances, who doesn't special access programs. All of this stuff got submitted. But I do want to underscore that the real value of our independent study is that we are trying to bring a scientific perspective and to tell us how to potentially examine NASA-owned and commercial data. So we're primarily focusing on those two data avenues, recognizing that other aspects, other parts of the government have the classified thing well under hand. So this is an unclassified study, which NASA personnel do and don't have clearances is moot because the work is going to be done by an independent body. And again, that is the true value of what we're trying to bring to shed light on UAP. Karen, I'll hand it back to you. Do you mind if I just add a comment? There's a lot of people who have contacted me directly and I just want to assert and state again, on the record, I have talked to my entire leadership chain and I just want you to know that this study will go forward even after I leave. By the way, I fully expect that there are certain things that this team will correct mistakes I may have made or things like this. But I just want you to know, generally speaking, kind of decisions we make in this room, we make together. So kind of whether it's this or others, the way we don't generally run things is that the one person just dictates from the top how we do things. And that's certainly not the case here also. We put a lot of thought into this. We're convinced that this study is important. And the reason we're doing all the checks on financials is that there's a full expectation that we're going to spend more money on this. So we want to make sure that from the beginning, the checks are there, so we don't preclude such recommendations going forward. So I just wanted to say that in addition, Dan has found his new calling here, kind of at the interface, kind of is the most red email box it seems with some of the requests that are coming and thanks everybody for their interest. Back to you, Karen. Great. Thank you so much, Dan, very much appreciated. Moving on to one of the first questions that we have after those. How would the transition to a new Associate Administrator for Science look like? Specifically, what role will the science community play and will it be involved in the decision-making process? So I think that's to you, Thomas. So I really appreciate the question and need to say what I'm describing as the process that also got me here from the science community. And what happened? I just wanted to know the only reason I applied and you could say that was a good or a bad thing. I'll leave that up to you. But the only reason I applied is because multiple members of the science community reached out to me and encouraged me. And actually, in some cases, actually kept calling me. And basically said, you should really apply, which is why I'm so vocal about you need to call people you think would make good leaders. Some that are on NASA already, some that are not on NASA. All of them encouraged them. What then happens is there's a process and the process is outlined. If you are interested yourself, process is outlined. You can buy NASA kind of communications at various places. It basically says how do you get to USA jobs? I hate to break it to you, but this is a big government organization. And when you apply to it, you'll know that if you cannot handle doing an application, you probably shouldn't have my job. So basically, it took me to apply. It took me off the order 10 days or so on and off. Now, we have tried very hard to actually create an interface. So Paul Hertz, who is not directly involved in the search otherwise, is really helping to make sure that multiple people get on the inside. We really create kind of energy behind this search. And basically, what you could do if you needed, wanted some help, just like, hey, you have not done this. Paul, get in touch with Paul Hertz and he can direct you to the right kind of HR people. Once you're through that, there's two kind of processes that are happening. And frankly, I'm not in that room, but let me just tell you how it was from my end. There was quite an eclectic view, at least two, if not three of the people were in the room who interviewed me, were scientists that as part of a group and then a recommendation goes to a decision authority. And in my case, that was Robert Lightfoot, who was in the job that Bob Cabana has right now. But it was really important that Charlie Bolden and David Newman, they were actually involved in the decision as well, ultimately. And of course, the jobs there, they're held right now by Senator Nelson and Colonel Melroy. So those are the steps. So again, the way you can engage yourself is to recommend. I just gave you the names of the people who are really involved. Should you have a direct channel with them, use them, tell them that science is important. And by the way, I have no doubt that they believe that no matter what, there'd be nothing but supportive during every day of our work together. I'm very close to them. I consider them my friends, each of them. So I have no worries there whatsoever. And my point is that kind of connection. I mean, they told me when I was hired, individuals told me how important it was that they actually also really felt support behind some of the candidates that were there. So that's the process a little bit longer, perhaps, than you wanted to hear. But most importantly, USA Jobs. All right. Thank you so much, Thomas. Moving on to a research question. This is about no due date programs. And I'm combining two questions here. The questions are, how are the R&D programs handling proposals submitted at the end of one Roses year, while more proposals are coming in for the new Roses year? And the selections funds come from the same pot of funds or are they separate? Additionally, in the early 1980s, all proposals were handled without due dates. It came to pass. There was a sweet spot in the calendar for favorable action on proposals. Those submitted too early would be set aside and forgotten while those submitted too late would not get funded because the money was gone. What will be done to avoid this feature? Passing the Lori Glace. Yes. And both of those are good questions. We continue to get these questions. I just want to remind folks that there is an FAQ out there on Nod. Nod, of course, the no due date program that's being implemented on a trial basis in Planetary Science Division. We are committed to a three-year trial of this pilot program of Nod. And I believe we're kind of in the middle of our second year of Nod. So first, let me just say that when we say no due date, and I'm going to say this a couple of times, when we say no due date, there is no due date. And what that means is that there is no barrier between one fiscal year to the next or even one program year to the next. We just roll right from one through to the next. So whenever your proposals come in here, we run a panel and we assess the proposals and then we make a decision on whether or not it's selected and which program year we're going to fund it out of. But there is no boundary there between the two program years. We just encourage people, when your proposal is ready, send it in. And to the second question, there is no sweet spot. The program is specifically designed to, number one, hold these micro panels continuously throughout the year so that proposals don't sit around and get forgotten. They are actually actively being assessed continuously. We run these micro panels. And we also have designed the program such that the funding is kind of distributed through the year so that we don't run out of funding at the end of the year. We always make sure that we are kind of metering that across and making selections on a prorated basis according to the funding that we have available in that program. So honest to goodness, when we say there's no due date, there is no due date. There is no sweet spot. There is no boundary. So please submit your proposal when it's ready. Thank you so much, Lori. Moving on to our next question, which is about the NASA postdoctoral fellows. The question is about how the numbers were recently reduced to 10% because of the budget. Is the postdoc program really the first and best place to make reductions? And what is NASA's commitment to raising and grooming the next generation of scientists and engineers? Really engineers. So we've got a couple of people in the room. Thomas is going to address it first. We have Michael New and Paul Hertz who can also weigh in. Yeah. I think I'll just start and then go to Michael first and then Paul because both of them have really important roles. I want to state first that we actually went and communicated the details, both the rationale of why certain adjustments had to be made and also the reasons why we think it's the right thing to do because of the enhanced services and in the transition for a small number of years, why that is very much defendable, frankly, almost noticeable, I would argue, on a broader time scale. We did that, put it in a blog post, and it was posted on my blog, which is easily found with my search, Sirbook and NASA blog, one of the last areas. The full details are there with all the numbers. I just want to tell you, we've been very transparent about this. I, of course, appreciate the question and you should know that this team is really proud that we have supported across the board, not just at NASA, but across the board, early career scientists also said salaries higher more than once and have really taken a leadership position. With that though, what I'd like to do is just kick it over to Michael before Paul speaks about the review that he's leading later. Go ahead, Michael. Thanks, Thomas. So the question to there was a budget snafu, and I'd like to correct that. It wasn't a budget snafu. It was an unexpected increase in the cost of running the program. That's not a snafu. That's just something that surprised us. I also point out that we've not really run the program under the new contract for a full year yet. So we don't actually know what the real cost of running the program is going to be. It might very well be about the same as it used to be, in which case nothing will in the end have changed. We'll go back to more normal numbers. I think one of the points Thomas made though is I think important is that the current MPP program offers a tremendous number of new services to the fellows. This includes a participant, a PAP participant action program that provides legal services, immigration services, and mental health services to people. The stipends are now baselined at 70K per year, but there are locality adjustments across the board. So people who are at NASA Ames in Bay Area, for example, make a lot more than 70K a year. We are continually trying to improve the program, make it more exciting and more valuable to the participants. And hopefully within a year or two, we will be able to go back to the past numbers once we have a really good idea of how much it actually costs to run the program. This is Paul. Yeah, I've got it, Michael. Thank you. This is Paul Hertz. As Thomas mentioned, we are going to be doing a review of the NASA Postdoctoral Program. This review will help us answer the question of is this the right place to solve budget problems when they arise within the Postdoctoral Program? We're going to be looking at the role the Postdoctoral Program plays in the NASA Science Mission Directorate, at the goals and objectives that we want the program to accomplish and how meaningful it is to the various stakeholders in the program. And this will allow us to both improve the way we're running the program, but also to set it in context with the entire science program. We will be putting together later on this year an independent review panel who will serve as the review board. And they will reach out to the community and the participants in the program to carry out this review. Thank you so much for those answers. Moving on to the next question. Does the Science Mission Directorate have a rough timeline regarding release of a community announcement for the next Simplex AO cycle? Is that a Lori question too? That's a Lori question also. Thank you, Karen. So let me give the short answer first, and the short answer is no. We don't have a timeline for that. Let me give the more complex answer, which is we really do love the Simplex Program. I really do want to have another call for Simplex ideas. But we do need to make sure that we have the funding and the budget secured in order to be confident that we can make selections in the next Simplex AO and carry those forward. And so instead of giving a date and then having to pull that back and change it later, we are at this time waiting until we have more confidence and when we think we can offer that. You can perhaps differ with my approach there, but that's the rationale behind why we haven't put one out at this time. What I've said to others openly is that as soon as we do have a sense that we will be able to offer one, we will make sure there's a community announcement so everyone knows as soon as possible and can begin their planning. Thank you. All right. I'm afraid the next one I think is for you as well. There's a series of questions. The Decadal Survey is recognizing the preeminent size of Enceladus in the search for accident life, placed it a flagship Enceladus lander as a number two priority for 2022-2032. What is S&D's plan to ensure that the budget of the next decade will be adequate? Well, that is a big, big question. And as noted by the questioner there, it is the number two recommended flagship to be executed. And the number one is Uranus Orbiter Probe. And so that is our highest priority is to make sure that we can get the Uranus Orbiter Probe underway in this decade. And what I've said to the community is that we expect to get studies underway no later than 2024 to kick out that Uranus Orbiter Probe activity so that we can assure we can execute on that recommendation. As for the Enceladus Orbi lander, that's recommended as the number two. If you take a close look at the budget that was assumed in the decade and what we have currently, this is necessarily going to have to move to the right until we can secure additional budget funding to support it. And what we have said in our official response, which is posted online, is that the community can expect studies to start looking into the Enceladus mission to happen no earlier than 2026. Do you mind if I add one comment to this? I think what's really interesting in planetary sciences is how many people miss. Of course, we are all still living with COVID at various levels, but what really people miss is because of the fact that there's planetary windows that dominate planetary science. There's all the other missions as well, such as Parker Solar Probe, which had a planetary window. But adjusting the missions for these kind of unexpected inputs and that costs more money really creates fewer variables. And so what happened is frankly, just during the last two, three years, there have been a wave of extra costs that in some cases, if it was in earth science, for example, or in many of the other missions, you could just move a couple of weeks to the right and make up for that. You cannot do that if you have a planetary window. So you have to spend the money and it's kind of clear which year you have to spend it in. And so as a result of that, even though there's tremendous support kind of that I'm hearing about up and down the whole way of simplex and similar missions, it just kind of it ended up in some of the cases just not being able to get funded because of course we are funding limitations. So it just I think it's what's also really important is to give the planetary community time. You know, Laurie already talked about psyche kind of being in that discussion as well. I really have give the planet community time to kind of kind of come to a more normal kind of less kind of delayed type of reaction type of situation that was imposed on them. And so so I just kind of the closure with the farther faster we get there, the easier it is to do that. I just want to also point out that I would say we were more successful on simplex than any one of us expected. There are three missions. One in planetary, one in the exploration side of Laurie's budget and one on your side of the budget that are out there coming to completion and kind of being developed. We did not expect that kind of initially that we would do as many. And the good news is we're getting experience with simplex. That's all I'm saying. And if we're getting experience right now that surely will help us also as you go forward to a call kind of including that experience. So there's a lot of energy, a lot of excitement that some of the delays are obvious and really easy to explain. But the good news is there are three kind of initial simplexes that are moving forward at various speeds. I'd like to point out the ones in Helio. I misstated. One of the simplexes is actually in the Helio physics. Absolutely, the one at Mars. Yes, exactly. Thanks. Well, that goes very nicely into the next question which is about Mars and Helio physics. One of the primary root causes of Mars' hostility, Mars' hostile environment, is solar wind and the fact that solar wind strips atmosphere from the planet. This exposes Mars to both significant solar and cosmic radiation. Is there any research by NASA underway for creating a shield between Mars and the Sun or as a surface planetary solution? That's a great question. So I guess I'm going to go to the simplex and say that we do have our simplex, our escapade mission, that we'll be going out to Mars and certainly starting to do that kind of thing of studying the upstream and the downstream solar wind with the two spacecraft, the two small sats, as Thomas said. We've really brought those into our main goal. I will comment that we have our decadal survey underway, kicked off in August and thanks to the community for a tremendous response with 492 white papers. And I'm really excited to see what's in all of those white papers and see what we actually have asked for recommendations from the decadal for our support of the agency's Moon to Mars program. And so that fits very squarely into that program. And so we're excited to see what is coming out of there, what recommendations we get and how we can move forward to continue to support that. But as for creating a sort of dynamic field, we don't have anything in the plans right now, but really excited to see what people want to propose for that. And I'll just note the smex kickoff is going on now if you want to propose something there. All right, thank you. We are coming up on time. We'll probably just get one or possibly two more questions in. But thank you so much for all your submissions. I'm going next to a question on diversity. What action is the science mission director at taking in response to recommendations from the recent National Academies Report, increasing diversity and inclusion in the leadership of competed space missions? They're also noting specifically for earth sciences. And I know we have Thomas who might be able to respond and Michael new I believe is also has been involved with that. So I will pass to you all. I will start and then kick it over to Michael. I just want to say that one of the things I'm really excited about is that as we look at proposals that are submitted today, that pool of principal investigators and team members looks substantially different from the pool we had before. By the way, we're not doing a celebratory loop yet because we're not there that I'm not suggesting that. I just suggesting we're on the path to kind of being more inclusive to be kind of really be more of a reflection of the U.S. as a whole and this. And we're so excited about this report that we got from the academies. And of course, the reason we asked for this report but we're fully intending of continually improving and actually implementing some of these recommendations in all dimensions, especially also in our science where kind of principal investigator mission class missions are more new than in other communities and kind of therefore deserve the attention to really make sure that it's part of the DNA of the whole community in our science and beyond. Michael, I'll let you answer the specific question. So yeah, we are in the process of sorting out what we want to do. Fortunately, some of the recommendations are things that we were already doing. So we are already collecting a wealth of demographic information about our proposers as well as our reviewers. We are providing analyses of these as well. As Thomas has said, we are seeing an improvement in general in the diversity of our science mission teams. Of course, we're nowhere near where we'd like to be. We're not anywhere near reflective of the population of the United States or even the demographics of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics PhD recipients. We, as part of our broader diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts, we are looking into what are the various barriers that are preventing people from institutions that service the historically marginalized communities from proposing to us. That will also extend to how our mission teams get put together. We are trying to formulate a effective and legal way to ask mission teams to provide us with inclusion and diversity plans, and we're working on that right now. We had one idea about six, eight months ago. We put out an RFI about that. Hopefully you've seen it. That closed a while ago, and we come up with a new idea. When we finish coming up with a new idea, we'll probably also put an RFI to get community response on that. Julie, I know I wanted to comment on the Earth Science Division and specific parts of this. Julie? Yeah, thanks, Michael. I just wanted to add a couple of notes. We have been looking across a variety of our programs, and especially in Earth Venture, we asked the academies to do a look at that, and that is our smaller, more entry level. And it has several different levels and had gotten very complicated. So we've had discussions both with our advisory committee, as well as with the academies, and we're expecting to be making some changes and adjustments that help there be better on ramps. At the same time, we're also thinking about an earlier stage, and our inclusion of those investigators that are not maybe ready to do a full instrument proposal, but are ready to start bringing students in and using Earth Remote Sensing data. So for example, our environmental justice initiatives are partnering with HBCUs in collecting ground data that links to Earth Remote Sensing data, and that is bringing in a much larger community, both with gender diversity, but also with other aspects of diversity and underserved communities participating. So we're thinking holistically, we think we have work to do, and we're expecting to have some clearer plans emerging in the coming year. So thank you for that. That is the end of our session today, though Thomas, I'll give you a moment to wrap up if you would like to. I'll just remind everybody that there will be a recording of this at science.nasa.gov. Thomas also mentioned that on his social media, they've put out where you can listen to this and hear the recording again. Again, apologies about the questions. There are some settings we will figure out for the future. Just know that I did read them in order of what had been voted up. The only thing I skipped was a question that didn't have to do with the science mission directorate. So I was faithful to what was on there, and thank you for your questions there. And Thomas, any last words before we go? Oh, I just only have a couple, and that is go team, go science, go NASA. Really appreciate everybody's work and help during this. And the best is yet to come. This is, you know, we all are just here for a certain time. Some of us for longer times, but the best is yet to come. I seek to continually improve it, make it better, and make it more ambitious and exciting as we go forward. So thanks, everybody.