- So we're really meant to be a broad-based, community-based group, providing communication in both directions. The Exoplanet Program, as you'll hear in just a few minutes, provide some excellent updates on all the activities within the program. And in turn, we try to provide analysis and make those reports and findings and other things useful to the leadership, we pass that along up. 

Who is part of the Exoplanet Program Analysis Group or the ExoPAG? It is really everyone in the community who is interested in the NASA Exoplanet Program. And so by definition of you calling in today, you are, maybe not a card carrying member, but you are as valid a member of the ExoPAG as anyone else. We don't have cards that you could carry around. But, you're all welcome. And we're really glad that you were able to call in today. 

The activities of the ExoPAG are steered or try to be coordinated, but not strongly managed I hope, by the ExoPAG Executive Committee. These are people that are chosen by Paul Hertz to serve right now, three-year terms. We have a varying number of people who are on the committee, and this is our current makeup or I should say our up until recently current makeup. And just rotating off are Tom Barklay, Jessie Christiansen, Rebecca Jensen-Clem, and our past chair, Vikki Meadows. And we wanna just take a moment and thank all of them for their excellent work the past few years that they've been involved. And Vikki for her leadership a few years ago until she had to step down and remained as chair emeritus for a year. So we're very grateful to these colleagues who've given their time and energy to help us coordinate activities. This is the current makeup of the executive committee. We've added our four new members. We wanna welcome them right now, officially today. Michael Bottom from The University of Hawaii, Ofer Cohen from The University of Massachusetts Lowell, Knicole Colon from the Goddard Space Flight Center and Ilaria Pascucci from The University of Arizona. 

So welcome to you four, and again, thanks for making yourselves available for the important work of this group. You'll also notice there are several members of the headquarters who are joining us. And our relatively recently executive secretary is Hannah Jang-Condell, who's really stepping up and helping lead us through this time. Doug Hudgins is our program officer. And we have three liaisons to the other divisions within SMD and this is relatively new, but we are very excited to recognize officially in this way, the interdisciplinary nature of the Exoplanet Program. 

Well, here is our agenda for today and I will try to be brief before we kick off with our programmatic talks. We've split up the short one-day program into three sessions. One are the ExEP updates. The next is a kind of a mini science session with a focus on Heliophysics and how that impacts the exoplanet studies from transit spectroscopy. And then we will go into our business meeting at the end. We have a couple more reports that won't appear previously, and then we'll have our regular one-hour business meeting with discussion of future activities and possible future findings that this group could make. 

Let me just briefly summarize what we've been doing the past few months. You heard us talk about the Exoplanet Explorers Program and Tiffany is going to give an update on that in just a few minutes. So I'll let her speak to that. Some of you will remember we conducted an online poll that was based on a finding that we had worked on through a community forum last December. And we talked a little bit about it, and then we did that vote. I'll talk more about findings in just a second. Now that our remit is sort of officially recognized within other divisions, we now have responsibilities to report out as an analysis group to the Planetary Science Advisory Committee, and so I did that in March. And then Laura Schaefer kindly agreed to replace me last week when I couldn't make it. And of course, we also report out to the Astrophysics Advisory Committee, the APAC, and the next meeting will be next week. And I will tell them a bit of what we're doing here today. We're also now involved in kind of a joint AG, analysis group, and NexSS round table set of discussions. And this is really exciting and fun and interesting where these different groups that touch on different aspects of exoplanet science, but are formerly and slightly different programs, can at least get together and share notes. And one of the new things that will be happening next year is another version of the very successful, Exoplanets in Our Backyard Conference. And there will be exoplanets in our backyard too. So stay tuned. We'll make more announcements about that in the future. 

A major activity in the last several months have been coordinating Cross-PAG activities. So program analysis groups, there's Cross-PAG, cosmic origins, there's PhysPAG, the Physics Program Analysis Group, and ExoPAG, exoplanets. And between these three analysis groups, we have common interests and so we get together frequently and talk about them. One of our major activities is to propose a new Cross PAG SAG, which is a Science Analysis Group that will have members from all three PAGs, related to barriers to participation from underrepresented minorities at under-resourced institutions. And that will be proposed to the APAC next week. And I believe it will be affirmed. And then later in the summer, we'll officially launch this new activity, largely focused around trying to do a survey of the community to try to learn from as broad a set of voices as possible. What are the barriers to participation in NASA Space Science given under-representation in many of these activities. And then we hope to report back with a report to the Astrophysics Division leadership, after that activity is concluded in about a year. No official schedule on that. We're also discussing Cross-PAG synergies that could be related to certain technology developments. And we'll hear a little bit more about that from Brendan Crill in just a few minutes. And there's a currently a review of data science policy within NASA, and we try to keep our eyes and ears on that as a community. And I think we'll hear more about that at the APAC next week. 

I see my time is up. So I should have a few more slides. Jennifer, be patient with me. What are "ExoPAG's Findings"? This is a relatively recent thing that we've started to do. We realized that other analysis groups were creating formal letters, which stated findings of fact, that they would pass to their division heads. And we thought we could try to do that too. It's important to remember that we're not an advisory committee. We're not officially chartered in any legal way by Congress or any other oversight body. So we do not make recommendations, but we can do analysis and create findings based on those analysis. And in the past 18 months or so, we've done this four times. 

We have four separate findings, and here's the link that you can use to find those. If you go to the ExoPAG website at NASA JPL, you'll find other ways to find this link and someone can put it in the chat. We try to solicit new ideas for findings from the community. We sent a couple of emails in the past month, trying to encourage people to propose activities that we might conduct as a program analysis group in the future, or even propose new findings. And we try to guide you to examples of them. So you could see what kind of language we're talking about. And if a finding is reviewed or supported by the community, the EC takes a look at it. And then if there are five of them, maybe we would pass the top one or two, maybe three. Forward to the ExoPAG for a vote. And we've come up with a plan that if it's more than two thirds support that we will consider a pass, and then we would pass it along to the division director. If it doesn't meet that super majority, we would not do it. And we also report the results of the voting. So we don't just say it pass, we tell exactly what the voting numbers were. And if an idea isn't adopted in one meeting, we can keep it and re-discuss it in the future. 

This is not meant to be some very precise process where things are upvoted or downvoted, and gotten rid of. It's just meant for the community to think about things they might want to pass along through acclimation, a very large, super majority to the division director in the future. And we try to have a discussion at a community forum or a Summer ExoPAG. And then we would probably do the voting in the January meeting. That's typically how things have gone so far. The most recent one was on the value of investing in interdisciplinary exoplanet science of scale over longer periods of performance. And this was meant to mimic some of the funding instruments that are available in the Planetary Science Division through the Astrobiology Program. And if there were resources that could be made available to this, without cutting any other existing program. Which we acknowledge are extremely important for NASA to achieve its strategic goals. We thought there could be some interest in this kind of mechanism in the future, if some new funds were to become available. 

So this pass, with the super majority I mentioned, 47 yes, and seven no's, and two abstentions. And then the letter with this finding was passed along to Paul Hertz. We have a number of ongoing Science Analysis Groups, which are meant to be shorter term activities of several months to a year. And two active SIGs, those are Science Interest Groups, which are meant to be ongoing and not end at any particular time. We'll hear reports from several of these during the meeting today. And SAG number 19, I am happy to report is closed, and the final report was accepted by the Astrophysics Division leadership. 

The slide is posted through the agenda for the meeting. You can take a look at it. I just summarize the findings. It was very successful. There were four referee papers as a result of the work. And it was really to focus on signal detection theory and come up with rigorous contrast metrics. And it was a very valuable activity that this group did, in collaboration with colleagues in Europe. There was also a data challenge. So I invite you to go and take a look at that report if you're interested in the science area, and you can look at the final report from SAG 19. 

So our session today is a brief, at the end of the day, I just wanna preview this. At 4:10, we'll start the business meeting. We'll have just a very short report on SIG number 3, which had a very large, mini symposium at our last meeting in January. Very successful, lots of activities going on. We will also have a review of the progress on previous actions that this group has proposed. And Karl Stapelfeldt or Eric Mamajek will walk through that spreadsheet of actions and tell us where we've made progress or still need to work on. We'll also, hopefully, discuss some new ideas for activities that you would like us to undertake in the future. And if anyone wants to propose a finding for future discussion, we're happy to entertain that too. And please feel free to share announcements at the end of the day. 

I should also say, this is not the last time we will all get together this summer or in the next four or five months. We hope to have another community forum, but we felt it would be best to save one of the days of our getting together until after Astro 2020 is released. And as many of you know, there's a delay. Maybe it would be released in August. We don't really know, but we thought we'd plan for a future community forum after the report is released. And I'll talk about that at the end of today. This is an attempt to summarize some ways you can navigate today's activities. There's the meeting agenda and website there. And people can please put these links in the chat, so that people can click on them without having to go through this PDF. There's a Frequently Asked Questions document, if you confused a little bit about what we're all about and what the ExoPAG is doing. There's a Q&A Tool, I should have mentioned this maybe earlier, where people can post questions. They're moderated, and then people can upvote the questions as well. And then our session chairs should ask those questions that are most popular. There's a suggestions form for future activities you want to see the ExoPAG undertake. And there's a Proposed Findings Forum, in case you wanna formulate today a possible finding for future consideration by the ExoPAG. So we don't want this to be a back room discussion. We want the whole community to participate in these activities. So please feel free to make your voice heard through these various mechanisms.