AAS Public Policy Blog

At the Keck Building at National Academies in DC next week, the Planetary Sciences decadal survey gets underway. Here is the final agenda in PDF form. There are open sessions on Monday and Tuesday, which the public can attend. You can also see the decadal in the current projects system at the Academies.

Open sessions at Academies events such as these occur when people from outside the committee are presenting to the committee. In this case, the decadal panel will be hearing from the agencies (NASA, NSF) as well as from OMB and staff from Congress.

Update There will be a webcast of the open session available as well. Open session begins at 11:30 EDT

The Senate appropriations bill covering NSF and NASA is out. You can see the press release which summarizes the bill as well as Sen. Milkuski’s statement.

The Senate’s NSF number is $6.916 billion, a 6.6% increase over FY 2009, but lower than the administration’s 8.5% increase request and the House bill’s 6.9% increase. However, the NASA number matched the administration’s request of $18.686 billion, with none of the cuts to manned spaceflight present in the House bill.

The latest FYI discusses the bill, as well as pointing to the administration’s response to the House bill. For example OMB says in the statement, “The Administration is concerned with the reduction of $670 million from the President’s FY 2010 request for Exploration Systems. This large reduction would likely cause major negative impacts to any options that may emerge from the ongoing blue ribbon [Augustine committee] review of U.S. human space flight plans.”

The conference report for the Senate bill is also available. Either on the Thomas Web Site or the full PDF from the GPO site.

Here is the section of the report on the NSF, or the text of the NASA Science section.

It’s interesting to note where the Senate CJS appropriation deviates from the President’s request. Overall, NASA Science receives $4.517 billion, where as the request was $4.477 Billion. By division the Senate versus Request are as follows:

Division - Request - Senate
Earth Science - $1.405B - $1.405B
Planetary - $1.346B - $1.355
Astro - $1.121B - $1.169B
Helio - $605M - $646M

In Astrophysics, $50 million is added to Cosmic Origins in a new line for servicing opportunities for science missions. (The House had added a similar amount in their appropriation bill ) The R&A request of $61.1 million is reduced to $60 million.

Within Planetary Science, notable changes from the request include an increase to Lunar Quest, in the form of $21 million for the International Lunar Network, and a reduction to Mars Exploration – specifically the “Other Missions and Data Analysis” line is reduced from a $162.1 million request to $150 million.

Within Heliophysics, the largest change is a $50 million appropriation to Solar Probe Plus, from a request of $3.4 million. Heliophysics R&A’s requested budget of $35.4 million is reduced to $31 million in the Senate bill, equal to FY 2009.

Below is the explanatory text directly from the Senate committee report that touches on a lot of these changes:

Read more »

A variety of PDFs are reports are available covering the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science subcommittee bill. There is the full appropriations committee summary, the statement from Rep. Mollohan on the markup of the bill, a summary table of the appropriations.

Much of the detail, however, is in the committee report. The entire report can be viewed as a PDF from the Government Printing Office, complete with numerous tables. It’s also available on the Library of Congress site as a web page – here is the section on NASA science for example.

FYI does their usual, excellent job in discussing the NSF report language. The NSF mark is below the President’s request, a 6.9% increase over FY ’09 instead of a 8.5% increase.

The biggest notable event is that NASA space exploration receives a significant cut over the request – to quote Chairman Mollohan:

The recommendation, however, acknowledges that the Administration has established a blue ribbon panel, led by Dr. Norm Augustine, to review the current vision for human space flight. Funds are provided in the bill to continue investments in human space flight at the same level as provided in fiscal year 2009. Reductions from the budget request should not be viewed as a diminution of my support or that of the Subcommittee in NASA’s human space flight activities. Rather, the deferral is taken without prejudice; it is a pause, a time-out, to allow the President to establish his vision for human space exploration and to commit to realistic future funding levels to realize this vision.

The deferral amounts to a change of 212.3 million less than the request in Exploration. Also, a new budget line was created for the “Construction of Facilities” and some internal budget shifting occurs out of Cross-Agency support.

None of those budgetary changes effect NASA Science or the comparison of NASA science numbers to the request. Science sees a slight increase over the president’s request – $18.9 million more than requested. The details are from the above-linked Science section of the committee report, which you can see below. Read more »

Here is a pdf link to the Mathematical and Physical Sciences FY 2010 budget request. The complete NSF FY 2010 budget table of contents is online. Astronomical Sciences FY 2010 request is $250.8 million, a 9.7% increase over the FY 2009 plan. That increase over FY 2009 does not include the $85.8 million that NSF estimates AST will receive from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus bill).

Astronomy is also featured in the facilities chapter of the request and the MREFC chapter. The latter notes that the ATST (Advanced Technology Solar Telescope) initial construction is being funded with $146 million from the stimulus bill.

Additional details below for specific NSF AST activities:

Individual investigator program (+7.50 million, to a total of $57.0 million). This is primarily for activities in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Grants and the Education and Special Programs, to address priorities expressed in the Interagency plan for the Physics of the Universe program.
CAREER program (+$1.0 million, to a total of $4.10 million). This is to increase the division’s support for beginning faculty.

Instrumentation Activities (+$8.25 million, to a total of $31.53 million). This funds increased activity in partnership with the academic community, taking advantage of opportunities for scientific discovery that requires instrumentation and experimentation at the mid-scale range of $5.0 million to $20 million.

Science and Technology Center for Adaptive Optics Funding ends in FY 2010 as ten year support for this center sunsets as planned.

Astronomy Facilities (+$7.51 million, to a total of $136.19 million). Changes are:

• Gemini Observatory (+$390,000, to a total of $19.10 million). This will enable continued operating and visitor support per the international partnership agreement.
• NAIC (-$1.20 million, to a total of $8.40 million). AST support is reduced following the recommendation of the AST Senior Review. This will result in reduced levels of programming, user support, and observing time.
• Combined NOAO/NSO (+$2.02 million, to a total of $41.60 million). Within this total, funding for NOAO primary operations and maintenance funding increases by $1.92 million to $27.50 million and the Telescope System Instrumentation Program (TSIP), administered through NOAO, increases by $1.0 million to $5.0 million in FY 2010. NSO funding decreases by $900,000 to $9.10 million, with the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) being funded from the Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account. For more information on ATST, see the MREFC chapter
• NRAO (-$270.000, to a total of $49.52 million) and ALMA operations ($+$6.57 million, to a total of $17.57 million).

The National Science Foundation has a new page and specifically a new document to potential grant recipients. Some highlights:

The Recovery Act supplements NSF fiscal year 2009 funding by $3.0 billion. NSF currently has many highly rated proposals that it has not been able to fund. For this reason, NSF is planning to use the majority of the $2 billion available in Research and Related Activities for proposals that are already in house and will be reviewed and/or awarded prior to September 30, 2009.
… The Foundation also expects to expeditiously award funds as specified in the Recovery Act for: the Math and Science Partnership program (funded at $25 million); the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (funded at $60 million); the Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction Account (funded at $400 million); the Academic Research Infrastructure (ARI) program (funded at $200 million); and the Science Masters program, (funded at $15 million). Solicitations for these latter two programs will be posted this spring.
… NSF will post a solicitation this spring for the Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) in order to make a sufficient number of awards to utilize the $300 million provided in the legislation. The Foundation currently anticipates that no other solicitations will be posted that are solely in response to the Recovery Act. … In keeping with this, NSF’s overall framework for Recovery Act investments emphasizes the following:

• All grants issued with Recovery Act funds will be standard grants with durations of up to 5 years. This approach will allow NSF to structure a sustainable portfolio.
• Funding of new Principal Investigators and high-risk, high-return research will be top priorities.

With the exception of the MRI, ARI and Science Masters programs, the majority of proposals eligible for Recovery Act funding include those that are already in house and will be reviewed and/or awarded prior to September 30, 2009.

NSF also will consider proposals declined on or after October 1, 2008. The reversal of the decision to decline must be based on both the high quality of the reviews received on the initial submission and the lack of available funding at the time the original decision was made. The cognizant program officer will contact the institution when a reversal is being considered by NSF. Specific procedural information regarding this new process is available on the NSF Recovery website.

Indications are that the Senate will end debate on the Omnibus appropriations bill left over from FY 2009 and pass the bill today, unaltered from the House version that passed last month.

The omnibus bill, a collection of several leftover appropriations bills from last year, contains considerable increases to science, compared to the funding levels of the continuing resolution.

The summary for the recently released Commerce, Justice, Science appropriation bill is available along with more detailed documents and bill text for all the the remaining appropriation bills from 2009.

NASA and NSF both received modest increases, though remember the stimulus bill (PDF link to bill text) is effectively a FY 2009 supplemental, so to fully appreciate the agency’s budgets one needs to add in the stimulus money to these numbers. Never-the-less, for NASA and NSF:

• National Aeronautics and Space Administration: $17.8 billion, $385 million above 2008, for scientific discovery, national security, and space exploration.

*National Science Foundation: $6.5 billion, $363 million above 2008, for the most promising scientific research at America’s colleges and universities, and supporting scientists with cutting edge labs and equipment.

The NASA breakdown is $4.5 Billion for the Science Mission Directorate, $500 million for Aeronautics, $3.5 for exploration, $5.76 billion for Space Operations, $3.3 billion for cross-agency support, $169 million for education.

Update More details are found in the explanatory supplements linked above; for the NSF for example the bill includes:

National Radio Astronomy Observatory: The bill includes $49,790,000 for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Astronomical sciences: Within the funds provided, $2,500,000 has been provided above the request to fund the design work of the advanced technology solar telescope. In addition, a total of $2,500,000 from astronomical sciences is included for the maintenance and operations costs associated with IceCube.

MAJOR RESEARCH EQUIPMENT AND FACILITIES CONSTRUCTION

The bill includes $152,010,000 for major research equipment and facilities construction for fiscal year 2009. The bill provides for the following allocation of funds:

• AdvLigo $51,430,000
• Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) 82,250,000
• IceCube Neutrino Observatory 11,330,000
• Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) 7,000,000

The Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee met last week at the NSF headquarters in Virginia. The committee received a wide variety of presentations focused mainly on projects that involve inter-agency cooperation. Other topics included NSF facility planning and the decadal survey.

Those presentation slides (in PDF form) are available for download at the AAAC meeting page, and the all topics are listed below:

Meeting Presentations

• NASA/DOE Joint Programs — Jon Morse and Dennis Kovar
• DOE/NSF Joint Programs — Craig Foltz
• DOE/NSF Point Programs (Cont.) — Dennis Kovar
• DOE/NSF Point Programs (Cont.) — Joe Dehmer
• NSF/NASA Joint Programs — Craig Foltz and Jon Morse
• NSF Polar Programs — Vladimir Papitashvili
• Decadal Survey Update — Roger Blandford
• NSF Large Facilities — Mark Coles
• MPS Facilities Plan — Wayne Van Citters