Technology Maturation Section of the PICO report.

I have been tasked to draft the technology maturation section of the PICO report, a NASA probe study for a CMB polarimetry satellite that Shaul has been leading. I'm interested in feedback on what we have from people in the community outside the team at JPL. Since this may impact NASA funding decisions, you should all have incentive review this and offer feedback.

This section outlines how we will have all novel technologies at TRL5 by 2023. We stress that many of the decisions made here were to retire as much risk as possible, so the design does not use “cutting edge” technologies, but rather uses established hardware. The design is basically finalized for the report at this point, so we can't really change that at this point, but are instead interested in knowing how to get to TRL5. There is a subsection that includes “enhancing technologies” that are more speculative and that may of you may be working on now. Also note that this really can't exceed 4 pages since the entire report is limited to 50, and this is but one small part.

Jonas Zmuidzinas and Peg Frerking (from JPL) will review this section and offer comments as well for an internal review. This needs to be finalized over the next week, so if you have opinions, please provide them sooner rather than later.

For obscure (nonsensical?) reasons related to export compliance, I cannot email this draft to you. Rather, I posted it to the UMN wiki for Pico, at the bottom of this page: https://zzz.physics.umn.edu/ipsig/techmaturation

Please ask Shaul for access if you do not already have it.

PICO's Technology Maturation Section

Thanks in advance,

Roger