These awards were made on the basis of proposals submitted in response to NASA Research Announcement NRA-96-OSS-09. Proposals describing 20 investigations were reviewed in the competition for FY 1997 funding from the MITM program. Two of these were rated Excellent or Excellent/Very Good in a peer review of their scientific merit, 13 were rated Very Good or Very Good/Good, and the reminder were rated Good or less. The total FY 1997 funding requested was $5.2 M and the funding available for competition was $550 K. The funding available in the competition for FY 1997 new starts was relatively low because an unusually high portion of the full budget was committed to ongoing programs. We were thus able to select only 2 efforts for initiation in FY 1997. The selection was based on a combination of scientific and programmatic grounds and included one of the Excellent proposals and the highest priority Very Good proposal.

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 MITM funding will be in response to the 1997 NRA for the Sun-Earth Connection Supporting Research and Technology programs, which we expect to release on or about May 1, 1997.

A full list of the MITM investigations which are being supported in FY 1997, including the two new starts, follows.

Suborbital Program in Magnetospheric, Ionospheric, Thermospheric, and Mesospheric (MITM) Physics: Programs Active in FY 1997

Arnoldy/New Hampshire
Study of wave-particle interactions on auroral field lines with the PHAZE 2 sounding rocket

Bering/Houston
Ground and balloon-borne observations of sprites and jets*

Earle/UTD
Rocket i
nvestigation of descending plasma layers in the lower ionosphere

Kane/Penn State Coordinated rocket and ground-based studies of high-latitude fine-scale structure in ion-sodium sporadic layering events

Kelley/Cornell
An experiment to study sporadic atom layers in the Earth's mesosphere and lower thermosphere

Kelley/Cornell
Langmuir turbulence rocket

Kintner/Cornell
Cleft Accelerated Plasmas Experiments Rocket (CAPER)

Larsen/Clemson
Sounding rocket investigations of eddy and molecular diffusivities in the mesosphere/lower thermosphere

Lynch/New Hampshire
Enstrophy - Filamentation of auroral currents*

Maynard/Mission Research
Coordinated rocket and ground based investigation of the spatial and temporal structure of the open/closed boundary and the dayside cusp

Mlynczak/Langley
Mesosphere-thermosphere Emissions for Ozone Remote Sensing (METEORS)

Parks/Washington
A rocket experiment to study pulsating aurora

Pfaff/Goddard
Rocket/radar investigation of lower ionosphere electrodynamics associated with intense mid-latitude sporadic-E layers

Pfaff/Goddard
A sounding rocket investigation of transient features in the cusp

Torbert/New Hampshire
Auroral Turbulence II

Woods/Colorado
Solar irradiance and thermospheric airglow rocket experiments

*Programs initiated in FY 1997