- Next up is Hannah, and she is going to give us the view from HQ.

- My name is Hannah Jang-Condell. I am a Program Scientist at NASA headquarters. And I am speaking to you in my role as Deputy Program Scientist for the Exoplanet Exploration Program. I am also the ExoPAG Executive Secretary, which means that, I am the NASA point of contact between, you know, basically, the point of contact between the ExoPAG, and NASA. So, I would like to start with a little bit of a glossary, because I know, we at NASA, really like our acronyms, and that, for those of you not in the know, it can be a little confusing sometimes. So, you know, let us start out simple. NASA of course, is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA HQ, or simply headquarter, is the NASA headquarters located in Washington DC. When we talked about SMD, that is the Science Mission Directorate, which is one of the directorate within NASA headquarters. APD is the Astrophysics Division, which is one of the five divisions within SMD. The other four, being Planetary Sciences, Heliophysics, Earth Sciences, and Biological and Physical Sciences. And ExoPAG is you, of course. So that is, that is the meeting we are having here. ExEP is short for the Exoplanet Exploration Program, which is, basically run by both headquarters, and out of JPL in Pasadena, California. And Gary Blackwood and Eric Mamajek, who are speaking after me, will tell you more about their activities. And then NExSci, is the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, which is also run by ExEP, which is also at Caltech, in Pasadena. And, it is possible to take some of these acronyms and put them into an org chart, which I won't show you, maybe Gary will, but I will let him do that. All right, so I am just going to jump right in, with a few updates from NASA headquarters. And so, looking at the sort of highest level of NASA, we have a new administrator, Senator Bill Nelson was sworn in as our new NASA administrator, at the beginning of May. And just this week on Monday, Pam Melroy was sworn in as the NASA deputy administrator. And so they are both former astronauts, and, I look forward to, seeing the leadership. Within, the Astrophysics Division, this is just a chart of all the people within the division. We are led by our Division Director, Paul Hertz, who, he announced that at the, last of last meeting in June, that he will be stepping down, at the end of this year. And so there is, a search for a new Division Director for the coming year. And I just want to point out a few key people here. There is me, there is Doug Hudgins, who is the Program Scientist for ExEP. And then Lucien Cox, who is our Program Executive. And then, I just want to put in the plug, because if you, go back to this, chart here, you will notice that there is a number of future, program scientists, on this little, rogue gallery of pictures here. And, so we have some openings for positions, at headquarters. And so, I just want to put in a plug for, one of the positions that is available, which has a visiting program scientist, which is the position I have. So, I maintain my employment with the University of Wyoming. I am still a professor there, but I am basically, on leave as a visiting scientist at, headquarter. So if you are interested, in applying for this, you may speak to me, I happen to be leading this search. So, please contact me if you are at all interested, there is a, there is an ad out on the job, or just, or also, if you are interested. All right, so I want to talk about, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at NASA. And so, fairly recently, NASA has added as a fifth core value, the value of inclusion. So, NASA is committed to a culture of diversity inclusion and equity, where all employees feel welcome, respected, and engaged, to achieve the greatest mission success, NASA embraces hiring, developing, and growing, a diverse and inclusive workforce in a positive and safe work environment, where individuals can be authentic. And, you know, even though I say that it is the fifth core value, it is no less important than the other core values. It is just, the one that was added most recently. And the latest to this, as part of the Astrophysics Theory Program, there is going to be a new criterion for inclusion. So this is a pilot program this year. So, those folks who are applying to Astrophysics Theory call and ROSES-21, will be asked to include an inclusion plan. And so, this section is meant to address plans for creating and sustaining, a positive and inclusive working environment. So those carrying out the proposed investigation, and to discuss the contributions to proposed investigation will make to the training and development, of a diverse and inclusive scientific workforce. And so, this inclusion plan is going to be evaluated, and feedback will be provided. Although, that feedback will not, at this time, be folded into selection recommendation. And the reason why I am mentioning this, despite the fact that ATP no longer includes, Exoplanet Science is that, this is, this is a pilot program. So, if this pilot is successful, this will be expanded to other ROSES program. Possibly even XRP in the future. So, this is something to pay attention to, because it might be coming to an XRP call, in the near future. Also related to inclusion, and related to recent issues that have arisen within, our exoplanet community. I just want to stress, that at NASA, we are fully committed to assuring, the safety and effectiveness of our workforce missions. And as a result, we strictly prohibit harassment, and we are fully committed to creating, providing a safe, and harassment-free work environment. NASA encourages all employees to report and help prevent workplace harassment, and NASA strictly prohibits retaliation for raising allegations of harassment, or providing information related to such allegations. The agency's anti-harassment program provides for prompt, thorough, and impartial investigations of harassment complaints, and individuals reporting harassment are assured, that NASA will protect the confidentiality, of harassment complaints to the fullest extent possible. The agency will take immediate and appropriate corrective action in situations involving harassment, and proactively in other situations, to reasonably prevent harassment from occurring. And this also applies to grant recipients. Recipient institutions are required to notify NASA of any findings or determinations of sexual harassment, or other forms of harassments, or sexual assault, regarding a NASA-funded Principal Investigator, or co-investigator, or the placements of the PI or co-I on administrative leave, or the imposition of any administrative action, relating to harassment or sexual assault finding, or investigation. So, to learn more about grant reporting requirements from grant recipients, you can follow, the link at the bottom, the missionstem.nasa.gov link. The slides are going to be are, are, should already be available. And so, you should be able to find a link in my slides posted there. Okay, on to updates about the research program. So, we, we have been, dealing with COVID for the past year plus. And so, I just want to give an update on the status of SMD programs. So, basically, we have been in a mandatory telework posture, for over a year now, basically since March of 2020. But our work has continued through the impacts, and continued, although there have been some impacts, most of the impacts have been on missions. There have been projects that have, had to, replan due to changes, due to COVID. There has been changes in cost, and schedule. And so there, there have been impacts there that, that are being evaluated and, working on mitigation. NASA centers, were, are slowly starting to reopen. And so, as they reopen on on-site, activities are going to be able to be resumed. With regards to R&A, so those are our grant programs. So, COVID has not impacted our R&A solicitations or selections, in terms of any cancellation, there have been a few delays, but we have not cancelled solicitations, our reviews have continued, notifications and funding have continued to, to be put out. If you are a, and just to note that, the peer review panels are continued, are going to continue to be completely virtual, through the end of this calendar year, and likely beyond. So in part, that is going to depend on, how vaccinations go, and the rate of COVID infections in the country. So, effects on the community, so as vaccinations increase, we will be able to, do more interactions, and increase our ability to travel. And we are still continuing to work toward mission launches later this year, most notable for this community being JWST. So, I am sure what most of you are interested in, of course is, is how success rate for proposals are going. And so this is a chart, showing the, the rate of proposals being submitted, and the amount of research dollars, and the success rate of proposals. And so the, the top line in green shows, the amount of research dollars being, spent, and then the, the blue line is the number of proposals. And then, that, although both the number of proposals, and the amount of funding are increasing, the success rate is a division between those two, and so, there has been a slow but steady decrease unfortunately, in success rates of proposals, and so, and last year, its, its dipped below that 20% mark, and so we are paying close attention to this, because, the success rates below 20% are not good news for our community, of course. And, that is, the thing, the ExoPAG, the R&A call that is most interest, is going to be XRP. So, or the Exoplanet Research Program. And so, as of last year, there was a consolidation of topics between, ADAP, ATP, and APRA, and basically, all, proposals related to Exoplanet Research, from ADAP, so that is the Astrophysics Data Analysis Program, ATP, Astrophysics Theory Programs, and ACRA, the Lab Astro proposals there, were moved into XRP. The one thing that remains, in, in APRA is Exoplanet technology development. And so, what I am showing here on this plot now, we show in the gray, the gray bars, the number of proposals that have been received each year. The green bars show the number of proposals that were selected, and the orange line, shows percent of proposal selected. And so, there was a concern about decreasing, selection rates, from, say, the mid, the 2018 until 2019. And what you will notice is that last year, our selection rate actually went up, despite this movement, there was some fear that this movement, of proposals from these other R&A programs into XRP, would decrease the selection rates, But in fact, our selection rate went up, so this is good news. Now, something new that is happening this year, is the Dual-Anonymous Peer Review. And so, proposals needed to, conform to that. And, the proposals are in, and I can show you, the number of proposals we have received this year. And so the, the number of proposals went up last year, but at once, up still further this year, and so what is happening here. And so, I can only really speculate, as to causes, for the number of, the growth in the number of proposals. But, somethings I, I would like to, some hypothesis I would like to propose would be, there perhaps, is just the growth, in interest in exoplanets, as a field. There is the success of the test mission, and upcoming, JWST missions, the, the Data T mission. And so, maybe there is just, a growth in exoplanets, as a young and growing field. Some of this growth might be delayed, due to COVID-19. So if COVID-19 had not happened perhaps we would have seen, still more growth last year, and what we are seeing now is that, that people are able to, to complete their proposals, and turn them in this year instead. Another factor is that ATP was not, solicited last year. And so this year, when, theorists would have been applying to ATP, now they are applying to XRP. And so that, could have been, another reason for this delayed growth in the, number of proposals this year. And so, we are paying close attention to this, of course, because we want to be sure, that our selection rates does not drop, it certainly does not drop below, you know, to, to the levels of 2019. And, so, so this is something we are paying close attention to, as the review goes on, and, as we move towards selecting proposals. And I just want to put in, I mentioned here about Dual-Anonymous Peer Review, which, was implemented for XRP, for the first time this year. And so, what, this is called DAPR, within the NASA for short, and it has been successfully used in multiple astrophysics programs, most notably in the GO/GI program. So, for example, for the tests GO call, the Hubble, call GO program has used this for several years now, quite successfully. And last year, the first R&A program in Astrophysics, Astrophysics Data Analysis or ADAP, was, using the DAPR rules last year. And, what I am showing here in this plot, is, the effectiveness of it, so if we look at, the, this bars here, this is showing the percentage of proposals submitted, with, female PI's, and by female, I mean that, so basically, we, we used a, what is it called? Basically, it is an analysis of first name, which, is not a hundred percent effective, and does not capture, those who do not identify as either male, or female, but, it is, it is, a measure of, of how, how the anonymity process will work, because, you know, if a, if a reviewer is reading, a proposal, with a female-sounding name, they may, review that proposal differently. So, as if to say that, so what I mean by, that is what I mean by percent with, female PI, is this, this, just looking at the first name. So, if you look at the total pool, the, between ADAP18, which was not DAPR, and ADAP20, which was DAPR, we have roughly the same percentage of, female PI submitting proposals. But, if we look in each panel, and see which, which proposals were identified as the top two proposals, in each panel. In 2018, that percentage went down, quite, went down quite dramatically, so went down from about 25%, to under 20%. But under DAPR, that percentage stayed the same. And if you looked at the top three proposals, the, the percentage of female PI's in, in those top three proposals, went up slightly, over the top two in 2018. But again, it stayed the same in ADAP20. And so, this is, we are using this to say that, that it is a measure, that DAPR is being successful, in, in hiding some of these demographic informations about our RPIs, and allowing people to focus on the science. And then, on this part here, showing the, the success of the, this, this program by the reviewer. And so, overall there, there is overwhelming agreement that the, DAPR improved the overall quality of the peer review process, as determined by those who are doing the review. All right. So that is, that is it for XRP. I also wanted to give an update on the EPRV call. So, there was a call, earlier, so the, the proposals are earlier in January. So, the Extreme Precision Radio Velocity Science Program, was a solicitation, released as part of ROSES 2020. And it was meant to be a response to, the National Academy's 2018 Exoplanet Science Strategy. And there are no, currently no plans for additional proposal called, unless, there is something in the Decadal Survey, that, that says, that maybe we should continue this. So we will have to see, what the Decadal Survey says, in terms of, whether this program will continue. For, so for this particular call, the central question, was "Can stellar variability be understood well enough to mitigate this limitation on radial velocity and measurement precision?" And so, we received 25 proposals, and six of those were selected for funding. And so, these were all two year investigations, and spanned a range of different topics, including observations, theory, modeling, or data analysis. And this, it also included some, development of statistics, statistical methodologies for analyzing RV dataset. Okay, so that is what I have for, research. I want to give a quick update about NExSS. So what is NExSS? So NExSS.

- [Woman 1] Hannah, real quick, just a little bit less than 10 minutes remaining.

- Oh, lovely, okay, I will try to hurry. Okay. So NExSS is, the NASA, I am sorry, the NASA's, Nexus for Exoplanet System Science. It is an interdiscipline, interdisciplinary research coordination network. But, the, the key thing is, the update here. And so there, the website at NExSS.info has been updated, and, it shows some of the science working groups, including Planet Formation, Quantitative Habitability, Life Detection/Biosignatures, Technosignatures, Climate Model Intercomparisons, Planetary Atmospheres, and Science Communications. There is an event calendar, so you can see what kind of events are going on, in terms, there is a lots of talks going on, and you will learn how to become a NExSS affiliate. There, the NExSS sponsored, a number of workshops and webinars, and there is, just want to point out this upcoming one, the NfoLD/NExSS Standards of Evidence for Life Detection Workshop, which has had happening in July. And if you have more questions about NExSS, you can ask Dawn Gelino, who I believe is on the line. All right. Onwards. So, let us talk about missions. Okay, so let us talk about TESS. So where is TESS pointing now? So TESS is observing, sectors, 39, 40, and it is actually, making its position sometime between, today and tomorrow. So, or the 86 is, is being observed on, is, is until June 24th, which is today, and orbit 87 is June 25th, which is tomorrow. It has found 131 confirmed planets, and a whopping, 3,500 planet candidates. There is hundreds of papers that had been, submitted and peer reviewed. And, interestingly, just under half of those papers, are exoplanets. There is a lot of ancillary finds going on as well. The TOI catalog has been released. And, the TESS' prime mission since its first two years, resulted in over 2,200, of the planet candidate, including, a boundary of planets, with followup mass measurements, or sized planets, multi-planet system, the circumbinary planet, and other interesting firsts. And TESS, it continues to look, deliver, now, now that it is in its extended mission. And so, TESS starts Year 4, so it is just ending the first year of its extended mission. And it is, it is just on the verge of starting its, this fourth year, so sometime between, today and tomorrow, is, it will mark that start. Full frame image, FFIs, these quick look images are being released every orbit, typically within a week from downlink. And so, it is currently in a "beta test period". Guest Investigator Cycle 4 proposals, have been selected. There is a wide variety of programs, including large programs, that are in a wide variety of topics, including AGN, Exoplanets, Eclipsing Binaries, and ground-based supernova follow-up. And, and TESS has been a key for, for JWST proposals. And so, if you look at the, the JWST GO Cycle 1 Exoplanet Targets, of the 68 transiting planets added in those, that, GO program, 25 of these were discovered by TESS. And so, you can see a plot here of, those exoplanets in, in the Host Temperature Star, Host Star Temperature versus Planet Radius, space. And so, all the stars are, the results of TESS discoveries. And, the majority of these planets are, around low-mass stars. Okay. Onwards. So, next I want to talk about, Astrophysics Pioneers. And so, this was a call that was, issued for the first time, in ROSES-2020, so late last year. Include SmallSats, CubeSats, balloon payloads, ISS attachments, and lunar surface payloads. It is a $20 million maximum PI cost cap. And it fills this gap between, after proposals, and Explorer Mission of Opportunity Investigation. And, because it is solicited through ROSES, there is less of a burden than writing a full Explorers Mission of Opportunities proposal. There are the, the next, there is going to be another Pioneer's call, in ROSES 2021, and the due date is not yet determined, but it will be no earlier than March, 2022. And, of these four selections, one of them, is Pandora, which you will hear more about later, but it is a SmallSat that, will be doing multi-wavelength, characterization, of exoplanets and their host star. So stay tuned for, the talk later today, from Emily Gilbert, and Jordon Karbum. Quick update about, HST. So, Hubble, had a problem with its payload computer, that was altered in the halting operations on June 13th. And so, they are still working on exactly what is going on, but, it is apparently some sort of hardware issue, and they are working on through a number of tests to identify the problem, and with a solution. JWST continues to move towards launch. And so, it is still, it is undergoing a bunch of testing. The first cycle 1, GO proposals have been selected, and, they are still moving towards an expected launch date of late October, this year. The Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope is, continued to be developed as well. There is the Roman Science Interest Group, or RSIG has been formed, to provide community input to the project. It is continuing to be developed, despite COVID inefficiencies. And, perhaps the most interesting thing, being of interest to the community, is going to be the opportunities for participation in Roman Space Telescope research, that will be offered through ROSES-2021. And this is, this is just some pretty pictures that, the hardware for the, Coronograph, so that Coronagraph instrument or CGI, that, that is a technology demonstration, that will be in Roman, that the hardware exists, and here is some pretty pictures of it, and it is coming together. So, there are going to be opportunities for participation that are offered in ROSES-2021, including key project teams. And so, we can form science teams to conduct scientific investigation. There is a, Coronagraph Community Participation Program. So, that is specifically, for investigators to work with the CGI, to plan and execute the tech demo observations. And there is also Wide Field Instrument Preparatory Science, for investigators to work on, activities related to the widefield instrument. So, and all, all Roman observing time will be able, open through open processing, there will be, GO projects available and, and notably, the all data will be available to the community, with no period of limited, limited access. Okay, we just have a few more slides, so planning for the future. So this is what the President's Budget Request looks like. And so, what is this note about here, so you will see that, the, the wedge for Webb, will drop, in the upcoming fiscal year, and that is because as we move after launch, and move to observation operations, and so the costs for that will go down. Also, Roman will have its own wedge from now on, as opposed to having to be appropriated every year. And then, there is going to be a, a little wedge opened up for responding to the Decadal Survey. So speaking of the Decadal Survey, I have no updates on when it is going to come out. You all probably know as well as I do. Possibly sometime this fall, it sounds like. But, we are, we are making plans for the Decadal Survey. We have been, we are looking forward to its release as much as anyone else here is. We are looking at, the, we are particularly interested in which large mission might be selected by the Decadal Survey, as well as, what is the balance of our portfolio should be, in terms of R&A, archives, suborbital missions, Explorers, and Probes. The NASA plans to provide an initial response to the community within a few months of receiving the Astro2020 Decadal Survey Report. And we are going to be, communicating and engaging with the community throughout, and that includes with, with the ExoPAG. And, I think this is part of why we are planning to have, another meeting post, release of the Decadal Survey. And, just to end with on fair ways to get informed about NASA, there is NSPIRES net mailing list, the mailing lists for, the ExoPAG, as well as for the other two program offices, the Cosmic Origins, and Secrets of the Cosmos. There are the various advisory committees, and you can also sign up to be a, a panel reviewer. Why, why do you, why would you want to serve on a NASA peer review panel? It is a great opportunity for professional development. You can, learn how to, what makes it a good proposal by reading them. And you, will also receive an honorarium, and just a final note that, reminder that all reviews, at the end of 2021, are going to be virtual, and you can sign up to be a panel review at the website located there, or just directly contact the program officer. And so, with that, I will end.

- Thanks, Hannah, we are running a little bit behind, but, because of both of us, I am afraid, and we started a little bit late too. If there is a quick, question that is burning, let us see, let us do the one that has four, and we will have to save the rest for, the business meeting. For the ATP call for inclusion activities, what will be the criteria for success, to establish whether inclusion activities would be required in other ROSES programs for the future?

- So that, so, some of which is being developed. We are working on establishing rubrics for how to evaluate that criterion. We, we want to see what the community, what the community response is, right? What kind of responses that you can give. And, this is kind of the point to the pilot program, is we do not really know what we are going to see, and so, so, that is a good question, and it is being developed. I am not the ATP program officer, but, I believe it is Evan's canopy echo, if you wanted to get in touch with him.