• Demographics Committee member: James Buckley
• Contacts: Jonathan Rall

NASA's Planetary Science Division funds research grants generally tied to missions, past, current, or future. A significant fraction of the total Research & Analysis (R&A) funding, ~10-15% is designated for science instrument development with the majority of the funding available for fundamental research, sample analysis, modeling, and data analysis. NASA supports all types of organizations: domestic and foreign (on a no-exchange-of-funds basis), government and private, for-profit and not-for-profit.

NASA Planetary Science Division has basically three types of funding opportunities for planetary science: (1) Programs administered by NASA Headquarters, with proposals solicited annually through the omnibus NASA Research Announcement “Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES)”. Funding for missions in their “extended phase” (beyond planned operational lifetime) is available through the ROSES solicitation. Suborbital (aircraft, balloons, sounding rockets, and reuseable launch vehicles) flight opportunities are also made available through the ROSES solicitation, as are opportunities for CubeSat and International Space Station programs. Planetary Science Division solicits mission-specific programs such as Participating Scientist Programs (PSP), Guest Investigator Programs (GIP) and Guest Scientist Programs (GSP) under the ROSES AO. These sometimes include archival research and mission-relevant theory programs. Depending on the mission and the scope of activities, funding can range from a few thousand dollars for one year up to a few to several hundred thousand dollars over multiple years. ROSES funding can be in the form of a grants, contracts, Inter-Agency Transfers (IAT) or cooperative agreements, depending on deliverables and the nature of the proposing entity. (2) Missions or mission-participation opportunities (Missions of Opportunity (MoO)) solicited through specific Announcements of Opportunity (AO) through the Discovery and the New Frontiers Program. The Discovery program funds small-sized, PI-led mission at levels ~$500M with AO’s currently planned for solicitations every 36 months with a goal of reducing that to every 24 months. The New Frontiers program funds medium-sized, PI-led mission at levels ~$1B with mission frequency desired to be twice per decade but recent budgets have precluded this. (3) Directed science investigations including instruments and complete missions. NASA, on occasion, directs small, medium and large (e.g. Flagship) class missions to be formulated and implemented by NASA Field Centers, Jet Propulsion Lab, JHU Applied Physics Lab and others. Directed missions usually have competed science investigations. The 2014 Planetary Science Research Program funded through ROSES includes the following elements:

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