Keith’s note: The Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG 2018) will be meeting from 14-15 November at USRA and can be followed via the following Adobe Connect website.
https://ac.arc.nasa.gov/leag2018/ Online attendees may enter as a guest. Twitter comments have the hashtag #LEAG2018.

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member...

4 replies on “Lunar Exploration Meetings This Week”

  1. What stands out to a normal, non-Beltway human taking things at face value (a handicap, I realize):

    Provide programmatic insight to the community about the new opportunities offered by the new Science Mission Directorate (SMD)-led Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program (LDEP) and provide a forum for community feedback.

    Can someone translate this, please? Does this mean that the realignment should have yielded beaucoup new ideas so we need to talk about them before they skitter away?

    Facilitate collaborations between commercial lunar service providers and the scientific community to accomplish science objectives and close strategic knowledge gaps.

    This seems more interesting. Is this an opportunity for SX and the rest of the gang to discover just what scraps will be left over for them?

    1. The part about the new Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program is probably about explaining what it actually is. Something similar happened a few years ago when they did a massive reorganization of the planetary science research programs. There are (now) 23 program elements, and, in theory, one and only one is the right place to propose a particular idea.

      No one wants to waste time on writing a proposal which is going to be rejected as irrelevant, just because they submitted it to the wrong place. Or miss out on an opportunity because they didn’t know there was a good place for their idea.

      Now that they’ve added three new elements for lunar research, people will want to know what goes where. If you have an idea for a new instrument or measurement technique, you used to propose to Planetary Instrument Concepts for the Advancement of Solar System Observations (PICASSO) and
      Maturation of Instruments for Solar System Exploration (MatISSE). But now they’ve added Development and Advancement of Lunar Instrumentation (DALI). So, if your instrument is for lunar science, does that mean you propose to DALI? What if it’s something relevant to any airless body? Does that go in PICASSO? As well as instrument development, the new lunar program elements have muddied the waters for data analysis and Apollo sample studies. So this meeting is, among other things, a chance for scientists to ask what goes where, and complain about it if they don’t like the answer.

      By the way: 1: No, I didn’t make up those names, they really did invent acronyms so the instrument development programs are all named after artists. 2: The text of the announcements of opportunity does contain a description of what each program element does and does not cover. So going to a meeting to find out may sound strange. But the AOs are written by the same sort of people who wrote the sentence you were asking about. So going to a meeting and finding a translator can help.

        1. SpaceX: “…hold our coffee…”

          I see Teslarati snapped a photo of a BFS tank dome, and a tank ring segment photo was published 2 months ago. Now SpaceX is talking about flying a Falcon 9 upper stage equipped with subscale BFS dev hardware & TPS in June.

          https://www.teslarati.com/s…

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