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aaac:nasa_heliophysics

NASA Heliophysics

  • Demographics Committee member: Todd Hoeksema
  • Contacts: Arik Posner

Overall Funding Structure

NASA published the funding numbers in the slide in the Heliophysics section of the general NASA 2014 ROSES announcement, so that is our source. There was an update for 2015 in the most recent ROSES, I believe. It covers all of the Heliophysics competed research and analysis programs.

NASA Heliophysics supports both solar and heliospheric physics as well as geospace - which is also divided into two parts - magnetosphere and ITM - Ionosphere, Thermosphere, Magnetosphere. There are several programs to which all science areas apply. The two largest are the HSR (heliophysics supporting research) and LWS TR&T (Living With a Star - Targeted Research and Technology). The next largest component is the Low-Cost Access to Space (LCAS) program that supports rockets and balloons across the discipline. The other programs are small. The statistics for the different science areas are essentially the same, thus Solar, Heliosphere, Magnetosphere, and ITM have essentially the same success rates.

The organization at NSF is a little different. NSF supports solar and space physics (Heliophysics is the NASA term) in two places - Astronomy and AGS. Astronomy, which we both know and love, supports almost exclusively the National Solar Observatory and no competed research. All (or virtually all) of the competed research is handled by AGS - which is Atmospheric and Geospace Science. AGS is part of the geosciences directorate that encompasses both Earth and Space Science.

NSF AGS supports very little heliospheric research. Solar physics is supported by two AGS programs - the Solar and Terrestrial (ST) 'BASE' program and the SHINE program. Both focus on the Sun's interactions and influence on the Earth. The numbers in our chart are for the ST base program that I got off the NSF awards web site. The problem in interpreting the numbers is one of the 'small number statistics' - something less than 10 new awards are made each year and the money in the program fluctuates from year to year depending on other allocations for specific post-doc programs and a 'new faculty' program. The other program SHINE (Solar Heliospheric INterplanetary Environment) focuses more on smaller grants, post-docs, graduate research, and space weather. The $$ size of SHINE and the BASE program is about the same, but both vary from year to year. We should get better numbers. The problem has been that the NSF AGS leadership has been in flux (a permanent person has just been appointed - the 4th person in the last 12 months!), but I can pursue if necessary.

NOTE - heliospheric means the solar wind and heliosphere that reaches out past Pluto, essentially everything above the corona and not a planet. Heliophysics on the other hand, is all of those things.

aaac/nasa_heliophysics.txt · Last modified: 2015/11/12 05:23 by prisca