John Wisniewski
NASA Headquarters Exoplanet Exploration Program Update

So hi everyone.
I'm John Wisniewski from headquarters.
I'm the Exopag executive secretary, echoing Galaria.
I wanted to acknowledge the impact that the.
Tragic fires in the Los Angeles area are having on our Community, especially our program office, our exit program, office and and the broader JPL community.
I want to.
Give extra acknowledgement to Jennifer Gregory, who's been doing an awesome job of of organizing everything with.
A team who's partially here and partially remote.
So thank you, Jennifer.
It's a heroic effort.
And I want to start off by reminding folks that this meeting is conducted being conducted in our our long standing ExoPAG code of conduct.
There's a lot of words here.
But a punch line is that we ask everyone to behave professionally and and remember that we're all professional colleagues. If you run into any issues or concerns during the meeting, please reach out to either Ilaria or myself in person.
Our emails are also up there.
You can send us an e-mail if you don't happen to run into us.
We take this seriously.
So if you see something.
Say something to to a lawyer or myself.
All righty.
Already covered a really great introduction of what the ExoPAG is, the ExoPAG is you, right?
You the the the community of researchers.
From the headquarters perspective, inside of the Science Mission Directorate, we have 5 separate divisions, the ExoPAG itself resides
in the astrophysics division.
But we have representation from the headquarters, aside from other divisions as well.
Uh.
And inside of the Astrophysics division itself, we have three separate program offices. The ExoPAG, of course, is the Community group for exoplanets.
We have corresponding groups, the PhysPAG and the Cosmic origins.
COPAG as well, who reach out to different aspects of of the astrophysics community. And just like the ExoPAG, the PhysPAG and cosmic origins.
Also develop findings, they have science interest group and science Analysis Group 6 and Sags if you're interested.
There's links for the other program.
Analysis Group and tomorrow after the conclusion of the ExoPAG meeting, there's a joint PAG discussion that will be hosted by Doctor Clanton.
Already mentioned that the community, the ExoPAG community is represented by an executive committee. We have several, so I wanted to 1st acknowledge the the volunteer contributions of that entire community.
And also put in from headquarters perspective a plug to you, the community, to please nominate yourself to become an EC member or to become the next CC chair.
Ilaria has been doing an amazing job the last several years.
Chair. So there are.
She's raised the bar very high, but want to call on the community to consider stepping into that role and not submit your nomination by the end of this month.
Are you some more specific updates from the headquarters side?
First, some personnel changes.
We always start off our updates with personnel changes.
So.
A announcement you'll be hearing at the town hall on Monday, but we'll we'll make the announcement here as well.
So Mark Clampon is has stepping into the role of the SMD associate administrator on a one year detail.
That was as of the 1st of this year, Sean Domingo Goldman starting next week, will be the acting.
Director, Division director of of the Astrophysics Division.
In the interim, before next week, Eric Smith is currently the the acting director.
Hannah Jane Condell.
Is rejoining the astrophysics division full time and is becoming the JWST program scientist.
In addition to leading the except.
Program.
And relevant to this community, the Planetary Science representative for XRP is switching over from Hannah to Rebecca Dawson.
Those were some personnel updates in terms of some RNA updates.
First, we'll start off with XRP.
So this is our histogram of.
What XRP selection rates have looked like in the historical past and including our our last year XRP 24?
The punch line is that our selection rate is for this past year was about 21%.
So kind of hanging out where it's been for the last several years.
So in this graph the the the green bars are the selections, the Gray are the submissions.
So we've definitely seen an increase in submissions in XRP 24, so the denominator increased. We were able to keep the selection rate at at at.
Slightly over 20%.
We're seeing this through several other RNA programs as well.
Where the denominator the number of submissions for programs is increasing.
Back to levels we saw Pre pandemic.
Some changes going forward for XRP 25 to look forward to.
The first is that the habitable worlds program, which is across divisional program, was F4 is being folded into both EXOBIOLOGY and XRP.
So there will be a little bit more scope inside of XRP 25.
And and specifically, we're gonna pick up.
The identification of the characteristics and the distribution of potentially habitable environments beyond our solar system.
So items that can be tested with current or future NASA space missions.
Biosignatures that are exploration of potential biosignatures that cannot be tested with a future or current NASA space missions will go into EXO biology.
And there's also an exclusion noted there the other.
More major change of note is that the Earth Science division will not be contributing to new XRP awards. It will continue contributing to existing their existing portfolio.
With this enhancement of scope.
It's expected that the.
Relative selection rates, we're hoping will remain.
Our goal is to have them remain where they are right now.
Several new programs are coming online as well that you may have seen inside of inspire.
So first is D20, the exoplanet mass measurement program.
We can propose up to two years of funding.
It's basically continuation and expansion of the prior eprv foundational science program.
Point of contact for this is Hannah Jane Condell.
And and this not only looks at enhancing.
Techniques.
For.
Eprv measurements, but also extend this into astronomy measurements.
Astronomy tree measurements. Excuse me.
The NOI and proposal due dates are listed at the bottom of the screen.
Stay tuned to see for announcements from Inspire's.
We're anticipating that some of the.
Announcement some of these deadlines in the next month may slip a little bit in response to the impact from our colleagues on the West Coast that will be formally announced widely through NSPIRE'S. When that change actually happens, it's under active discussion right now.
D21 is another new element relevant to this community.
It's the US contributions to the aerial preparatory science or us caps, again up to two years of funding can be proposed.
And this is involving characterizing.
A well defined set of targets that are of interest to the aerial mission.
This comes with potential funding and also if if required.
Potential observation. Observing time at CAC and when the point points of contacts are again Hannah Jane Condell and also Doug Hudgens and the same disclaimer about the the NOI proposal due dates.
These are the formal due dates that are listed inside of Inspire's.
These are being discussed right now actively to see if they will be slipping because of the fire impacts.
And I will end with a plug.
To yes, please stay involved.
This the exoplanet community is very active.
Across our entire NASA portfolio, I want to encourage you to continue to stay active.
Certainly nominate yourself or your colleagues to to join us on on the EC.
Already mentioned and we'll hear more about the Dare's White Paper programs.
The ExoPAG is curating the current list of that at this link up here.
In addition to joining mailing lists, we're also are always interested in an early and mid and senior.
Community members who would like to serve as panelists on our review panels.
Our reviews are reliant on you, the subject matter experts, helping us to evaluate what is what proposal said to us.
And even at the graduate student level, we're interested in recommendations for folks to serve as executive secretaries on those panels.
So feel free to reach out to any headquarters program officer and say, hey, I've got a graduate student I'd like to get them, you know.
Involved in the review process, I think they'd be a great executive secretary.
It's a great learning experience for grad students.
And we're really happy to support that at headquarters.
And then finally, Lara already mentioned some of these.
Please continue to participate in SIGs and SAGs and if you think of new findings, please bring those to the ExoPAG and.
We have new open mic forums that I encourage you to participate in today and tomorrow, and also I encourage you to talk to Megan Ansel and Josh Pepper about the announcement that went out on inspire's two days ago.
About joining the hwo clips.
C Thit program community.
Science and instrumentation teams, which has a deadline of March 17th.
I made the update in a slide that didn't quite make it here, but that's the last thing to plug.
And again, Josh and Megan to be more than happy to talk with you about that nomination process.
I'll leave it there, folks have questions.
We have just less than a minute for a quick question. Any question. OK, Eric.
Eric: With the changes in XRP, I saw that it it looked like something about habitable environments, pieces of habitable worlds are going into XRP.
I'm assuming those habitable environments are Exo related, not endo planets.
John: I said it's a good question.
The additional scope that is being added is all related to exoplanets and how searching for biosignatures or technosignatures on.
Planets outside of our solar system, yes.
Good question.
OK.
Alright. Thanks, John.