NASA's Astrobiology Programs Ignore One Another
NASA Awards Grant for New Life Detection Project, NASA GSFC
“NASA has awarded funding for a new interdisciplinary project called the Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures (LAB). The award, totaling nearly $7 million dollars, will be used to develop new, non-Earth like life detection approaches for use on Mars and on Jupiter and Saturn’s icy moons.”
NASA Making Changes to its Astrobiology Program, earlier post
“To better support the broad, interdisciplinary field of astrobiology – the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe – NASA is announcing a new programmatic infrastructure for the Astrobiology Program.”
New Report Calls For NASA To Expand Astrobiology Research, earlier post
“To advance the search for life in the universe, NASA should support research on a broader range of biosignatures and environments, and incorporate the field of astrobiology into all stages of future exploratory missions, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.”
Keith’s note: The people at the Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures (LAB) just got $7m from NASA – specifically from NASA GSFC. Even though this is overtly Astrobiology-related, the official NASA press release makes *zero* mention of “Astrobiology”. The grantee makes no mention of anything related to NASA Astrobiology on their website. In addition, no mention is made of this Astrobiology-rich grant award at https://astrobiology.nasa.gov, https://nai.nasa.gov, or https://science.nasa.gov
I’m really shaking my head at this one since this entire effort is 200% about Astrobiology – and it resonates with what the recent NAS report and Congress want NASA to be doing with regard to Astrobiology – specifically with regard to Europa. If NASA is going to be re-organizing its Astrobiology research, a good place to start would be on super simple things like this. One hand does not seem to know – or care – what the other is doing in Astrobiology with NASA funding.
I suspect this is partly organizational. In particular, both astrobiology and exoplanets are a little strange in that they don’t have an obvious slot in the existing org chart. For example, are they part of “Cosmic Origins” under the SMD Astrophysics branch (which is where they seem to generally wind up), or are they part of the Planetary division (which usually explicitly means Solar System)?
Forgive this question from the seriously uneducated- what meaning does the “slot location” carry?
Its a box on the organizational chart showing lines of authority and responsibility that bureancrats love to draw. If you are not located in a box, then you basically don’t exist.
I’m not sure if there is a rigorous definition, but this goes beyond NASA’s org. chart and arguments over who funds what. If something falls between two different scientific disciplines, you have can have lots of problems. People can miss things presented at conferences, either because topical ones might not be advertised to everyone or because large ones with multiple sessions may mistakenly put related work in different and simultaneous sessions. People don’t necessarily read or publish in the same journals. At the last OPAG meeting there was a comment that planetary scientists studying habitability and astrobiology don’t communicate as well as the ought with terrestrial biologists, either those studying life in extreme environments or lab techniques which might be relevant to “life detection” experiments. There can even be problems for students. If someone wants to go to grad school and study astrobiology, should he apply to a biology or an astronomy/planetary science department?
NASA is organized with a “Science Mission Directorate” (SMD), which is itself split into four divisions: astrophysics, planetary, heliophysics, and earth science. Each of those then has a number of sub-branches. All the science missions and science programs are organized under that. Part of navigating NASA politics is understanding the org chart and where things go under it, because this is how money gets allocated. 25 years ago astrobiology and exoplanets weren’t really a concrete thing beyond some aspirational notions, hence there isn’t a very obvious funding path for them. They often get lumped under “cosmic origins” because it’s mission statement is written so broadly as to translate to “origin of anything in the cosmos”. There is often pushback to firewall new fields out of the org chart, since the existing fields recognize them as competition. On the other hand, sensing an opportunity to expand funding lines (and power base) you sometimes get the opposite effect, with centers and divisions attempting to “stake a claim” on them. All of this could be easily solved by some top-down direction which NASA is noticeably lacking, in large part (imho) for structural reasons.