NASA Earth Venture Missions
From idea to liftoff — Navigating the NASA mission proposal system.
Our team submitted a 190M proposal for a new science-driven satellite mission to a NASA competition. So did ~10 other teams. How can you be part of a mission proposal? When do these competitions happen?
Most scientists learn how to do science as an undergraduate student and then in graduate school work on a specific problem with funding provided by their Ph.D. advisor. After graduating, a postdoc researcher deepens their expertise and broadens their experience. They also begin to seek funding, usually from federal agencies that put out calls for research on specific topics. Where do these topics come from?
One method is the U.S. National Academies ‘Decadal Surveys’, written by the scientific community and published every 10 years, which guides research priorities for the next decade. Decadal Surveys use a community-based consensus-building process for determining research priorities. The first survey was in 1964 for ground-based astronomy and astrophysics. More recently, the Academy has produced Decadal Surveys in planetary science, solar and space physics, and Earth science.
Decadal Surveys are valued by NASA and other agencies because they represent a consensus of the scientific community’s research priorities. The identified priorities are usually strictly followed, budget permitting. The survey also includes guidance on the implementation of the decadal plan.
This organized science-driven approach wasn’t always the case. NASA began producing Earth science data in the 1960s, with the launch of the NIMBUS series of satellites. Many of the missions were experimental instruments designed for weather applications. As the program grew and matured, it made sense to formally involve the scientific community to set research priorities — to identify important questions and the data needed to answer them.
The inaugural Decadal Survey for Earth science and applications from space was published in 2007. In addition to recommending missions to address the highest priority scientific objectives, this survey recommended a new class of Earth science missions called ‘Earth Venture’ that would provide a more agile response to evolving scientific priorities through the decade.
There are three classes of Earth Venture missions: Sub-orbital (~$15–30M field campaigns), Instrument (~$60M to build an instrument; NASA will figure out how to put it in space), and Mission (end-to-end ~$190M proposals to build an instrument, spacecraft, and launch it into space).
Earth Ventures are about “fostering revolutionary innovative” science. There are many interesting science questions; some can be answered with existing data, some with a targeted field campaign, some with model simulations. To design a NASA Earth Venture mission around a science question, a balance is required between taking risks with innovative, cutting-edge science and realistic and feasible implementation. There must be a sufficiently innovative and impactful question to be interesting to a broad audience, that can also be communicated clearly and advance NASA’s goals and only be answered by a space-based mission.
Earth Venture class missions are cost-capped — additional money is not available later when something unanticipated drives up costs. This cost-cap requirement is designed to allow NASA to budget for these missions and their life cycles without incurring risk to the larger (higher-priority) decadal missions.
When we wrote an EVM proposal there was no time to dwell on failures, everyone had to solve problems to their best ability, communicate with each other, and move on to the next issue. It is at the same time exciting and terrifying.
Our EVM proposal, Butterfly, started at the Fall American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in 2016 when Shannon Brown, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) instrument engineer and scientist, cold-emailed me, an oceanographer and remote sensing scientist:
I’d be interested in discussing with you what the big picture science questions are within the SST/air-sea interaction community. I was wondering if you’re attending AGU and if so, if you would be interested in a short discussion there.
Getting this email was super exciting because I’d been thinking about ideas for new missions and hoping for an opportunity like this. I had been preparing for this moment for years. I knew that I would need to partner with an experienced, larger institution, and JPL fit the bill perfectly. I was already familiar with how JPL worked (each institution has a certain style) and I trusted that JPL knew enough about me to understand what support I would need. I didn’t quite understand until the last month of the proposal process how important this last part would be.
At that first meeting, Shannon and I came up with a rough idea to try and measure air-sea fluxes from space using a single instrument, something that had not yet been done, and this eventually grew into the Butterfly mission.
In April 2017, Shannon and I began iterating on an instrument concept. We shared a document that outlined the rough concept, key technology advances, general science questions, notes from talking to the lead for a selected EVM mission, and reviewed the science team of an EVM mission to understand how they were structured. The next Earth Venture due date would be for a ~$60M EV-Instrument and JPL internally announced that they would start reviewing concepts in November 2017. We decided to try and submit a concept.
We created a 2-page document that described our concept and asked another senior JPL scientist, Tony Lee, for comments. Shannon and I developed a science and implementation section and we passed the initial JPL review. To expand our team we added several new members: Peter Minnett, Tom Farrar, Carol-Anne Clayson, and Rhys Parfitt.
Choosing who to include was difficult. We wanted to keep the team small and focused at this early stage. We compiled a spreadsheet of people, their area of expertise, career stage, links to their CVs, and what role we felt they would fill on the team. With a small core team, everyone has to bring something unique and complementary and have the time and energy to participate. We discussed the mission concept with these people and tried to be very realistic about the time commitment. I was especially excited when Carol-Anne Clayson joined our team — I had always wanted to work with her and she became our Deputy lead scientist. Tom Farrar offered a deep understanding of small-scale air-sea interactions and is the lead on an Earth Venture field campaign, S-MODE. Peter Minnett provided years of expertise working on NASA instruments and Rhys Parfitt was an Early Career scientist working at the cutting edge of science in this area. This group helped us fine-tune our science ideas and prepare for the JPL review.
In March 2019 we were told that we had failed the JPL review process to develop a $60M EV-Instrument proposal because JPL thought (1) it would not be possible to build the instrument and do our science for $60M and (2) our instrument design would result in a high risk for NASA to procure a spacecraft and launch vehicle. We were encouraged to continue developing our idea and try again when JPL began reviewing concepts for the next EV-Mission (~$190M) proposals. These larger-budget proposals include both the spacecraft and launch, addressing both weaknesses.
Failure is hard, but our team re-grouped and continued refining our concept. Honestly, we weren’t ready to develop a full proposal during the $60M competition. Our concept needed more development. The JPL review process helped push our concept forward and identified the strengths and weaknesses of our proposal. Now we knew where to focus our efforts.
JPL provided us with a lot of help throughout the next phase when we further developed our concept for a full mission. We worked with a JPL manager and ‘capture’ lead, Victor Zlotnicki, who acted as our guide through the entire process. We partnered with a senior JPL scientist, Tony Lee, as our project scientist, who acted as both a mentor and team member and helped us refine our ideas and advance our concept. Both of these people proved critical to eventually writing an EVM proposal.
In future posts, we will detail how we put together a $190M mission proposal to NASA.
Forming teams, collaborating, and writing proposals require many skills that aren’t taught as part of general science education. This knowledge is often passed down within institutions or from an advisor to a student — and maybe that is part of the reason why some groups are so successful at getting funding. The Butterfly team believes that openly sharing knowledge will broaden participation in science. We hope that by writing about our process and documenting our experiences, we can help other scientists propose their ideas to NASA. A lot of what we have learned applies to all types of science proposals, science writing, and team development.
Learn more about our team or contact us with questions at https://nasa-butterfly.github.io/. We would love to hear from you!
Article Credits:
Original text: Chelle Gentemann
Editing and Review: Tony Lee, Art Charo, Lucas Sterzinger, Tom Farrar, Victor Zlotnicki, Sarah Ann Thompson, Shannon Brown, Tom Farrar
