FY 1998 ITM SR&T Program

Letters announcing results of the competition for new Fiscal Year (FY) 1998 awards from
the Supporting Research and Technology Program (SR&T) in Ionospheric,
Thermospheric, and Mesospheric (ITM) Physics were mailed to Principal Investigators
onJanuary 23, 1998.

These awards were made on the basis of proposals submitted in response to NASA
Research Announcement (NRA)-97-OSS-08. Proposals describing 76 investigations were
reviewed in the competition for FY 1998 funding from the ITM SR&T program. Twenty-
four of these were rated Excellent or Excellent/Very Good in a peer review of their
scientific merit, 31 were rated Very Good or Very Good/Good, and the remainder were
rated Good or less. The funding available for the support of new programs in FY 1997
allowed the selection of 18 of these proposals for funding; the selected proposals included
all of the Excellent proposals and the highest priority Excellent/Very Good proposals.

The assignment of ratings was based on requirements set out in the NRA and followed
carefully the NASA definitions of Excellent, Very Good, Good, and Poor which were
provided to proposers. Specifically, in order for a proposal to be have been rated Very
Good or Excellent it had to have (1) presented a clear scientific question to be answered,
(2) outlined an appropriate and feasible method of approaching this question and (3)
provided confidence that if the proposed effort were carried out, then definitive progress
in understanding the phenomenon in question would likely result. A proposal was
classified as Excellent if and only if, having met these necessary but not sufficient
conditions, it also targeted a compelling question whose timely solution was important to
advancement of the field.

The next opportunity to propose for ITM SR&T funding will be in response to the 1998
Research Opportunities in Space Science (ROSS) NRA, which we expect to release on or
about February 5, 1998. Following its release, the this NRA will be available at
<http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/oss/research/open.htm>. The ROSS NRA will solicit
proposals for a wide variety ofOffice of Space Science program elements, including all of
the traditional Sun-Earth Connection Supporting Research and Technology Programs. It
is expected that proposals to the ITM SR&T program will be due early in August.

A full list of the ITM SR&T investigations which are being supported in FY 1998,
including the new starts, follows.