Background
Decadal survey and Earth Venture: The NASA Science Mission Directorate/Earth Science Division's (SMD/ESD) Earth Venture is a Program element within the Earth System Science Pathfinder Program (ESSP) consisting of a series of new science-driven, competitively selected, low cost missions that will provide opportunity for investment in innovative Earth science to enhance our capability to better understand the current state of the Earth system and to enable continual improvement in the prediction of future changes. Earth Venture has been established, in part, in response to recommendations from the Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond (The National Academies Press, 2007) to initiate a series of missions deemed "venture class". The Venture-class mission formulation activities has resulted in a scientifically broad-reaching Program element that will solicit, through a series of frequent openly-competed solicitations, innovative research and application missions that might address any area of Earth science. Add link to NRC document, indicate page?.

The solicitation
ROSES-09 Amendment 9: New proposal opportunity in Appendix A.39 entitled "ESSP Venture-class Science Investigations: Earth Venture-1."

This amendment establishes a new program element in Appendix A.39 entitled "ESSP Venture-class Science Investigations: Earth Venture-1." The NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Earth Science Division's Earth Venture (EV) is a new element within the Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) Program. Earth Venture consists of a series of regularly solicited, competitively selected Earth Science investigations as recommended by the recent National Research Council's decadal survey in Earth science, Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond. This Earth Venture-1 program element within the ROSES-09 NASA Research Announcement solicits proposals for complete suborbital science investigations to conduct innovative, integrated, hypothesis or scientific question-driven approaches to Earth system science, involving temporally sustained data acquisition. For the purpose of this solicitation, a suborbital investigation is one that uses airborne data acquisition systems that may be augmented by surface and/or subsurface facilities. Each suborbital Venture-class investigation must have a life cycle of less than or equal to 5 years and total investigation cost not to exceed $30 million. NASA intends that funds provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 will be utilized to partially fund contracts for selected proposals.

Notices of Intent to propose are due September 2, 2009, and proposals are due November 6, 2009. A preproposal workshop for the Earth Venture-1 proposal opportunity will be held in the Washington, DC, area on August 26, 2009. Further details on the EV-1 preproposal workshop will be made available on the index page for this EV-1 program element at http://nspires.nasaprs.com/.

On or about July 10, 2009, this Amendment to the NASA Research Announcement "Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) 2009" (NNH09ZDA001N) will be posted on the NASA research opportunity homepage at http://nspires.nasaprs.com/ (select "Solicitations" then "Open Solicitations" then "NNH09ZDA001N").

Further information about the Earth Venture-1 program element is available from Dr. Hal Maring, Earth Science Division, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC 20546; Telephone: (202) 358-1679; E-mail: hal.maring@nasa.gov.

ASP Support
The purpose of this website is to provide potential Earth Venture investigators a portal highlighting NASA’s Airborne Science Program (ASP) support available to the Earth Science Research and Applications communities.

Below you will find details on aircraft and facility instruments that the program will make available, a brief description of the flight request process, and other information benefiting proposers to the new Earth Venture solicitation. We encourage you to make early contact with listed aircraft and sensor managers for help matching measurement requirements with available sensors and platforms. Support can be provided through all phases of the project (project scoping and cost estimating, requirements definition, sensor and platform selection, operational support, deployment and mission planning, data archiving, etc…)

ASP Resources

• Aircraft Catalog http://airbornescience.nasa.gov/platforms/platforms.html
• Flight Request System, http://airbornescience.nasa.gov/sofrs/
• Sensors, http://airbornescience.nasa.gov/instrument/instrumentation.html
• Available facility sensors, http://airbornescience.nasa.gov/instrument/instruments.html

Reference

• Earth Venture solicitation http://nspires.nasaprs.com/
  (select "Solicitations" then "Open Solicitations" then "NNH09ZDA001N").
• ASP website http://airbornescience.nasa.gov/
• Non-nasa aircraft safety policy http://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm?t=NPD&c=7900&s=4C

EV Milestones / Schedule

• Pre-bid conference currently planned for August 26, DC area
• Notice of Intent due     2 September 2009
  
• Proposals Due     6 November 2009