NASA ROSES Funding Call: We Need Your Input
C.E. Brasseur
Hey folks,
This year Astropy will be submitting a proposal to be funded further by NASA. This time there’s an opportunity to make it a longer-term grant (a “foundational award” in NASA’s words), which is a great step towards sustainable long term funding for the project. However, due to some misunderstandings on the process we recently realized these proposals are to be submitted during the regular funding call, i.e. the one with deadline June 7th. Two weeks and three days away!
We have a good draft built from prior proposals and the most recent round of funding requests, but we need your help with filling in the details. Particularly if you have been a recipient of a Funding Request either in this round or a previous round we need you. Please look at the list of needed tasks below and lend a hand on the ones matching your expertise/funded project(s). This work is being coordinated in the #nasa-roses-2024 slack channel, so head over there to join in and read back for additional context.
If you want to have input into the overall shape of this agreement between NASA and Astropy, there will be several opportunities for this, starting with discussion at the Astropy Coordination Meeting for those of you attending, as well as future opportunities for wider discussion.
Thanks for your help,
Clara
For the CoCo
Budget: someone needs to collate all the numbers from FRs, both to provide estimates of concrete existing work, and guesses as for what future FRs will be asking for. The finance committee has relevant spreadsheets, but if someone else wants to volunteer, please reach out to Erik T (Astropy slack best) or another CoCo member.
Anyone who has a current FR that was not fully funded (or even if you think you might want to continue it in future years) should fill out a bullet point in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tgj1V81s96BjjJxRqG34xWQS8HaY9zACamAdekN5fNQ/edit?disco=AAABN2nlUlU - it may be just a copy-paste job from your already-submitted FR, but if you can snazz-it-up for NASA please do so!
There are ~10 bite-sized tasks in the project description here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tgj1V81s96BjjJxRqG34xWQS8HaY9zACamAdekN5fNQ/edit?usp=sharing - that link should give you the power to “suggest” changes, which you can use to do any of the necessary tasks. Please take a look ASAP and sign up for any task you think you can do in the comment thread. The CoCo will look through in a few days and start taking tasks no one else has volunteered for, but it will go much smoother if others can take one or two of these tasks each so we can focus on editing and higher-level organization.
In particular, two of the above tasks are well-suited to someone who knows NASA heliophysics and where it uses SunPy and Astropy. We can reach out to some of the SunPy folks, but if one of them is reading this and wants to help, please do!
Additionally, there is currently not much about Planetary Science. It would definitely help our chances if we can describe ways planetary uses Astropy, so anyone with that expertise would be welcome. They can reach out to Erik/the CoCo or just comment in #nasa-roses-2024 if they have some ideas!
Also, if you made Figure 1 from the last proposal, please re-make it! We can’t remember who did it, but it tells a great story so we want to re-use it just with updated numbers.
If you are a current sub-awardee you will need to be a Co-I. We’re pretty sure we’ve reached out to everyone who this is true of, but if you think it’s you and this is news to you, please reach out to Erik T ASAP!
More small tasks will likely show up as we realize they are needed, more info will be in #nasa-roses-2024