Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

NASA Colloquium: Writing Mission Proposals

Wednesday June 5 2019 @ 2:00 pm
to 4:00 pm

June

5

Wed

2019

2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

NATIONAL COLLOQUIUM
Presented by
 
Dr. Thomas H. Zurbuchen
Associate Administrator
for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate
 
Writing Successful Mission Proposals: Observations From NASA
 
NASA’s Science missions support the U.S. science community and its partners to discover the secrets of the universe, to find life elsewhere, and to protect and improve life on Earth. In this pursuit, NASA relies heavily on the innovation and excellence of the science community to develop new mission concepts that expand our capabilities and grow our portfolio. Based on guidance from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and given the demonstrated successes of this approach, most NASA missions are initiated in response to proposals from teams led by principal investigators (PIs). For such proposing teams, this is a challenging and highly competitive process, composed of multiple phases.
Dr. Thomas H. Zurbuchen will first describe this process and relevant stakeholders along the way. He will then examine the characteristics of proposals submitted during the past 20 years—both the ones that were selected for flight and the ones that were not—to share lessons learned about what makes a proposal successful, common mistakes, and experiences from the point of view of both proposers and the NASA selection official. Dr. Zurbuchen will also provide a brief update on how the mission review process has changed over the past 2-3 years and how it may evolve in the near future. The target audience for this talk are researchers who are thinking about being a PI or joining a proposal team.
Study done by T. H. Zurbuchen, M. H. New, P. Hertz, E. Gertsen
 
Wednesday, June 5 at 2:00 PM MDT
 
In Person Attendance:
Old Main Chapel
University of Colorado Boulder Heritage Center
1600 Pleasant St.
Boulder, CO 80303
 
RSVP: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/8050d4fa9ae2fa1f85-colloquium
 
RECEPTION to follow: CIRES Atrium, 216 UCB, University of Colorado Boulder
 
Virtual Attendance:
LiveStream: https://cires.colorado.edu/zurbuchen2019
 
Instructions on how to ask a question during the livestream: 
https://help.livestream.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002051088-Chat-Comment…
 
The event will be recorded and made available online after the talk.