- Thank you. And we'll have our first speaker is Hannah Jang Condell, who will be giving us ExEP NASA headquarters overview. And I'll chime in seven minutes before the end of your 30 minutes slot. And it's in presenter-

- Okay cool.

- Is in presenter mode yeah, there you go.

- Is it the right mode or not?

- It's right now yeah okay.

- All right. So you can hear me okay and see the title slide then?

- Yes perfect.

- Cool all right. So yeah, so I'm Hannah Jang Condell. I am the deputy program scientist for the Exoplanet Exploration Office. And so that basically I'm Doug's deputy and I'm also the ExoPAG executive secretary. So that basically means I'm the headquarters point of contact between the ExoPAG and NASA headquarters. And so just a quick overview of the ExoPAG again, just to refresh people's memories. ExoPAG is led by a chair who is appointed from the Exoplanet community to serve a three year term. And basically this chair is supported by a 10 to 12 member executive committee. And so we try to draw the executive committee from a diverse pool of people representing different interests and backgrounds. And we are currently soliciting a new round of EC members who are rotating off their three year terms. And so what does the EC do? The executive committee is a steering group that's responsible for keeping the community informed of a ongoing activities and opportunities within the ExoPAG. And so basically distilling the views and ideas of the ExoPAG and coordinating any efforts to be organized by the ExoPAG. And so it's a great opportunity to serve and or initiate a science analysis group or a science interest group. So a SAG or a SIG, to contribute to and review the science and technology development capitalists. Contribute to DEI, diversity equity and inclusion within NASA and in the community. You get to interact with a great set of colleagues and inspire the next generation and have an impact within the Exoplanet community. So the current ExoPAG executive community, is shown in this slide here. And those who are rolling off this year include Michael Meyer, the current chair. Tiffany Kataria, Josh Pepper, and Dmitri Savransky. So their terms are coming to an end. We're looking for people to come in and fill in those roles. And I just wanna mention that because the ExoPAG is very much an interdisciplinary group, we actually have representatives who are liaisons to all the four of the divisions in the science mission directorate. So Doris Daou is from the Planetary Science Division, Richard Eckman from the Earth Science Division and Galen Fowler from the Heliophysics Division. And as I mentioned, we are soliciting nominations for the next round of EC members. There's a link here on this slide to the recruitment letter. This is on the ExEP websites. The deadline for nominations is coming up on January 21st. If you have any questions you can contact me, you can talk to people who are currently, or have previously served on the EC about their experiences, but feel free to nominate yourself, feel free to ask colleagues who you think would be great members of the EC to join the EC. We are looking for some, people who are willing and able to fill these roles. All right. And now just for a quick update from headquarters and I wanna start with personnel. This is actually one of the slides that Paul Hertz showed at his town hall yesterday. And I just want to, highlight that we have some new people who are new to APD including Sandra Cauffman, the new Astrophysics Division deputy director. She comes to us from the Earth Sciences Division. And she's basically filling in for, taking over the role that Jeffer Lawson had. And then we have some new program scientists and new administrative support people. And this slide is just highlighting those of us who at headquarters who you'd probably most see most, would be most relevant to the Exoplanet community and ExEP. So that's me, Doug Huggins and Lucien Cox is our program executive. And as hopefully you're aware now Paul Hertz is planning to step down this year after 10 years of service as the Director of Astrophysics. And so we are looking for a new Director of Astrophysics and the job advertisement is out. It's been posted to the Beverly's job register. The application period closes on March 21st. But this is a senior executive service position. And so it's actually quite, doing the application for a position like this, is a task. And you don't wanna put it off into the last minute. So if you're interested in this position at all you can feel free to reach out to Dan Evans. If you have questions about this position, if you have people who you think would be great, and would be, someone who you might think would be a great next Director of Astrophysics encourage them to apply. But this job is basically open to the whole community. And so everyone who might be interested is encouraged to apply. All right, and so now, I wanna go on to some research program updates. And so the first thing I wanna talk about is Paul in his town hall yesterday showed this slide about Astrophysics Research and Analysis proposal statuses. And so you can see there's the number of proposals that were submitted to each of these calls. On the left, the selection rates for each of the programs, and then the PI notification days. And so I'm sure what you're most interested in is XRP line. In case you can't read it, here's where XRP stands. So we had 173 proposals submitted in the ROSES-2021 call, and we had a 13% selection rate. And so you might notice, look at those bars and compare them to other programs within R&A and wonder well, what's going on here. So let's go into a little bit more detail. Okay. So one of the things that sets a fairly recent change is that beginning with ROSES-2020, so not this past round of XRP, but the one before, research elements from ADAP, ATP and Lab Astro were moved into XRP. The exoplanet technology development remains in the APRA Program, but basically all other research analysis elements relating to exoplanets research was moved into the XRP Program. Now the money for those proposals came with it. So basically the budget for XRP was raised accordingly. Beginning this past year we had XRP proposals reviewed with a dual anonymous peer review or DAPR. And this is a one way to work on mitigating unconscious bias with the idea of being more inclusive and having a more diverse selection pool of selected proposals. Now, what I'm showing here on this graph is the growth in the number of proposals we've received over time. So those are those tall gray bars that you're seeing. And so things from like 2014 to 2018 were relatively constant. In 2019, we saw a fairly big increase. And the number of proposals continues to increase in 2020 and 2021. And so mind you, this is despite COVID happening. So in 2020, that's when COVID started and might have expected that there would be a decrease in the number of proposals because people were locked down. There were more, just the general issues with having to deal with COVID on top of being able to be a successful researcher. And so part of the reason why it's still rose is because of this change in the Exoplanet Research Program to include elements that were formally in ADAP, ATP and APRA. And so that explains that rise in 2020. But then in 2021, we saw an even bigger rise. And so I would say that the rise from 2021 to 2020 is a result of people being able to now submit proposals, after despite COVID 19, right. And so basically those proposals that weren't able to be submitted in 2020 were submitted in 2021. So that's what I'm interpreting that continued growth to be. And then, but if you look at the selection rates, so that's the, so the number of proposal selected are the green bars. And then you can see the selection rate or that, the percent selected is the orange line. And so what we had an in increase in the number of proposals in 2020, but then a decrease in 2021. And so a part of, we did make an effort to try to bring up the number of selected proposals in 2020, but unfortunately in doing so we had to borrow a little bit against what we could select in 2021. And so that's part of what's going on here, but really what's going on here is that, another major factor is that the growth of the average proposal budget is outpacing the portfolio budget growth. And so that's what I'm showing in this next slide here. So the green line is showing the amount of funding available for total for XRP over time from 2016 to 2021. And so you can see from 2019 to 2020 to 21, the budget is growing. And this is because of, that we're moving those proposals that were formally in ADAP, ATP and APRA into XRP. And so the budget is growing, but if you look now at the average proposal budget, so the average budget of the submitted proposals is shown in the blue dots. And then the selected proposals is those orange Xs. And you can see that, whether you look at just the submitted proposals or the selected proposals, those proposal budgets are growing faster than inflation and are outpacing the growth in XRP funding. So this is an issue in addition to just the proposal pressure we have. So we're absolutely paying close attention to this. Budgets are hard to, at some level the budget we have is what we've got, but we are paying close attention to this and actively discussing with an ATP, within APD the Astrophysics Division, how to mitigate some of this. Okay. So now I wanna go on to the mission program update, some mission program updates. And I wanna show this slide showing the Astrophysics fleet of mission. I think it's a nice diagram showing, the history of missions that have been launched basically, starting with Hubble in the 1990s all the way through today. And you can see that, the bigger missions are along this swirl that's labeled traditional missions, but now we have a class of very small missions as well that are being launched, which includes things like CUTE and Pandora and SPARCS too. So the circles are missions that are, that have a specific exoplanet focus. And so I'd say as a Exoplanet community, we're doing pretty well in terms of having missions that are focused in exoplanet science. And then of course there are missions like Webb, like Hubble, like Roman that are more generally astrophysics missions, but actually contribute significantly to exoplanet science as well. So I think this is great showing the importance of exoplanets science within the portfolio of science of missions within the astrophysics fleet. Some very quick highlights. Webb launched on Christmas day. I don't know about you, but I woke my whole family up at 4:30 am local time for me. And we all watched the launch and it was an amazing Christmas gift to watch the successful launch of the Webb Space telescope. And if you want more details on that I would invite you to revisit Knicole Collon's talk from Monday. There will also be oops sorry, duplicate slide. There will also be an update from TESS, in a talk to follow later this afternoon. So stay tuned for that. Just wanna highlight that the CUTE satellite CubeSat, was launched last fall in September. So the spacecraft commissioning was completed in mid-November. Science payload commissioning is ongoing and expected to be completed soon, and science operations will begin in February. And so this is exciting. This is one of the first of the CubeSat that APD has has launched in that very small mission category and to see it be successful is really great. A quick update about Roman. So Roman completed its mission critical design review on September 27th. The project continues to make progress despite COVID delays. And right now, the projected launch date is in May 2027. Most of the hardware has been completed and they anticipate completing the telescope later this year and opportunities for participation, enrollment space telescope, research and support are being offered now. The draft solicitation is already out. So please take a look at that if you're interested in being involved, in some of the early science with that. And then, this is just a pretty picture of some of the hardware that's already fabricated for Roman. It's a real thing, it's not just a mission on paper anymore, so that's exciting. And just again, about the proposal opportunities for Roman. So the there is a Nancy Grace Roman space telescope and research and support opportunities call that's being solicited as part of ROSES-2022. So again, ROSES-2022 will be released in mid-February. But this solicitation will be released along with that call. So there are a number of opportunities to take part in this. There's a chronograph community participation, wide field instrument preparatory science, and key project infrastructure teams. So these are separate from the preexisting sit teams. And so basically if you wanna become involved, this is the way to become involved with Roman science. There was originally supposed to be a town hall on Roman in conjunction with the AAS meeting. But that has been deferred later this month and those details will be forthcoming. And I know this community is very interested in the decadal survey recommendations from Astro 2020. And so I just wanna spend, a brief amount of time discussing the parts of those that are relevant for this community, that Paul touched upon his talk yesterday. So we have a new decadal survey, that's part of a series of long history of decadal reviews over the past several decades. There's actually a decadal survey wedge hat's been budgeted. That's in the presence budget request, I should say. And so that's the planning budget that's been proposed for FY 23 to 26. And so there's actually a specific wedge, that's been allocated towards implementing some of the recommendations of decadal survey. And so there's a number of, this is basically looking at the different topics addressed by the decadal survey. And I'm gonna focus, I'm gonna skip talking about the media initiatives, about time domain and multi-messenger astrophysics and the probes, because I think those are less relevant to the Exoplanet community and focus more on some of these, the other topics. One of the most important things I think is the chapter in the decadal survey about the foundations, the professions. So this is the first decadal survey that's had a panel dedicated to looking at state of the profession issues. And so there's a lot of recommendations in here of about foundations of the profession. And I'm pleased to say that, the APD has been taking actions already in advance of the decadal survey to address some of the issues. And so there's a number of responses that we already have under development about recommendations about the foundations, the profession. Including, there's a investment in Bridge Program starting this year. There's planning for an astrophysics mission design summer school. There's the Inclusion Plan pilot that took place with ATP last year. That Inclusion Plan pilot is being expanded to other RNA elements within across SMD actually. I believe it is not yet going to be part of XRP this year, but be aware that it is likely to be XRP is likely to have inclusion plans required going forward in ROSES-23 and beyond. We're gonna start including diversity and inclusion of teams and evaluations of AO proposal starting this year. There's already been a review of the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program. And there's a community webinar plan for February that we'll discuss some of the results of this senior review with particular emphasis on development of scientific leaders who advanced diversity and inclusive excellence. And so that was one of the things that the senior review looked at in the Hubble Fellowship Program already. One of the recommendations about foundations, other professionals also looking at climate issues. And so we've been successful with virtual panels over the couple years, and we're planning to keep open that virtual panel option to reduce the carbon footprint of the astronomy community for, with regard to doing panel work. And also virtual panels often increase accessibility of people who might otherwise have difficulty traveling. So that's another thing. We're going to continue, we're gonna continue working to get access to demographic data and indicators pertaining to outcomes of proposal competitions. And we're working on partnerships with NASA's office of STEM Engagement to increase support of HBCUs, by colleges and universities, tribal colleges and universities, and other minority serving institutions. And we're already discussing, having discussions with the NSF on other discussions relating to state of the profession. With regard to research, the research foundation. So this is showing that, one of the recommendations is to release data on proposal success rates. And so this is the slide doing that. There's also recommendations regarding ATP, which are less relevant to this community now that exoplanet proposals are not an ATP, but if you're interested in that there's details about upcoming changes to ATP here. And also NASA and NSF have begun discussions on coordinating data archives. One recommendation that I suspect is of interest to the Exoplanet community, is the recommendation of ending SOFIA operations by 2023. And so this is one of the items that we are still developing a response to. So we do not have any further response on this item, sorry.

- Hannah.

- Yes.

- Seven minutes.

- All right. I'm almost done. So I may just have a couple more slides with regards to the technological foundations. So NASA has already modified the SAT call from ROSES-21 to include technologies identified for great observatories and identified future probe missions. So basically if your technology proposal, is relevant to development of the missions recommended by the decadal survey, they're put into the SAT call. Any other technological development is still, you can still submit that to APRA. So whatever technology development proposal you might have, there is a home for it. There is a Balloon Program recommendation to do an external review of the Balloon Program. And so we are looking into that. With regard to explorers, NASA's gonna maintain the established cadence of four AOs per decade, alternating between MIDEX and SMEX. So the medium class and small class and including missions of opportunities and these explorers will remain open to all areas of science. with regard to future great observatories all I'll really say here is that, right now we're focused on commissioning Webb and launching Roman. And so as long as we are working on that, we can't really start building the next great future observatory. So what we're doing now is doing pre-phase A work including preliminary and precursor science for these great observatories. And finally just want to put a couple slides, if you wanna keep informed about NASA there's various links here to different mailing groups you can subscribe to. And then I wanna encourage you all to volunteer to serve on a NASA peer review panel. It is a great way to further your professional development. It'll help you learn how to write better proposals. If you want to be involved in ensuring a fair and competent review, this is the way to get involved. Reviewers will receive an honorarium, and all reviews through, basically all the remaining ROSES-21 calls will still be virtual. We'll have to see yet about what we're gonna do about reviews for ROSES-2022. It's kind of up to COVID. And these slides will be posted publicly in case you miss some of the links, but with that, I'll just take any questions thanks.

- Awesome thank you, can have some virtual applause and we'll jump right in cause there's several questions. So I think Jenifer might share the screen, but I'll start off by asking the top ranked one right now is how does NASA APD envision PAGs supporting the execution of the recommendations from the Astro 2020 decadal report?

- We absolutely plan to involve the PAGs in some of these recommendations. I will emphasize though that, we've only had the decadal survey for a couple of months, right? And so we're still formulating our priorities and figuring out what role the PAGs will play there. There absolutely will be a role, but we're still formulating what that role will be.

- Okay thank you. So let's see the next top ranked one here. So is about exoplanets. The impression is there's a larger number of young researchers than in other fields in exoplanets. And if NASA continues to maintain budgets on historical allocations, then they're indirectly making it harder for younger scientists and favoring older scientists. So is there any hope of getting increased funding to XRP and other exoplanet programs to help address this issue of young researchers?

- Yeah, I mean there's, so yes we always want more money right? I would love to have more money in XRP. We are already getting contributions. So mind you, we get contributions not just from astrophysics, but also from planetary sciences, earth sciences and heliophysics. So the funding primarily comes from astro and planetary. And so we're absolutely keeping an eye on this and trying to lobby for more funding for our program, but there are, everybody wants more money and the pot is limited, right? So if we get more money, somebody else gets less. And so that's the issue there, right? So this is basically arguing for a bigger piece of the pie. That's always gonna be a tricky negotiation.

- So on the same topic of funding, the next ranked question is so it's apparent that the selection rate is extremely different among programs with the XRP being in the lowest category and NICER in the upper, can a redistribution of fundings be considered to account for higher pressure on some programs?

- So in particular, I don't think it's fair to compare XRP to something like NICER because there are RNA programs and there are GO programs, right? And they're all in ROSES. And so if you're talking about GO programs for a specific mission, I don't think that's a fair comparison, right? Cause it's in part because the budgets are different, right. So you're not asking for a piece of this, you're asking for pieces of different pies so that I don't think that's a fair comparison. So I don't... Now, if you wanted to compare XRP to APRA, that might be a fair comparison. Again, redistributing the funds, is something we have to think about strategically within the division, and think about, who gets which share of the pie and how much of it, so...

- All right thanks I think we have time for one more. So we'll do the last one about EPRVs. So the topic was pushed about EPRVs until after the town hall, what are NASA's intentions in the areas of plans for EPRV in .

- So I think John Kaus is talking about NN-EXPLORE in a little bit, so he might have more to say. I mean, we did have an EPRV initiative last year, right? So there were a proposal solicited for that call and there is a, what's it called? An RCN that was set up for EPRV. And so those are continuing. So you can absolutely argue that EPRV is necessary precursor science for a mission that's going to be looking for habitable planets, right. And so that's where that, that's where EPRV fits in within the recommendations of the decadal survey. We're gonna do, we're still, again, we've had the decadal survey for two months, so that's still in formulation.

- Yeah, and John did talk on Monday actually. Yeah so.

- Yes.

- Yeah their slides should be available. Okay, so thank you so much there's more questions than the tools. So I think I'll probably ask you to respond to those offline. If we can also give Hannah a round of applause.