. "Appendix A: Statement of Task." An Enabling Foundation for NASA's Space and Earth Science Missions. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2010.
The following HTML text is provided to enhance online
readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML.
Please use the page image
as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.
An Enabling Foundation for NASA’s Earth and Space Science Missions
A
Statement of Task
An ad-hoc committee will be organized under the auspices of the Space Studies Board to conduct a study of mission-enabling activities in NASA’s space and Earth sciences program. The study will identify the appropriate roles for mission-enabling activities and metrics for assessing their effectiveness. It also will evaluate how, from a strategic perspective, decisions should be made about balance between mission-related and mission-enabling elements of the overall program as well as balance between various elements within the mission-enabling component. Among the topics to be considered are the following:
Roles and objectives of mission-enabling activities in NASA as a mission-oriented agency;
Necessary characteristics of an effective program of mission-enabling activities, including metrics by which effectiveness can be evaluated;
Principles and metrics for determining the appropriate balance of investments between mission-enabling activities and space flight missions so as to best support the agency’s overall strategic objectives;
Principles and metrics for determining the appropriate allocation of effort and resources among various mission-enabling program components, including scientific infrastructure (e.g., airplanes, computing) that enables R&A activity;
The role and proper fraction of support that should be devoted to “innovative” (high-risk, high-payoff) research, and whether this might vary among science areas;
The extent to which current R&A programs support cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary science, especially across the divisions within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate;
The role of R&A programs in training the next generation of Earth and space scientists who will contribute to NASA’s programs in the future; and
Relevant benchmarks from industry or other public or private institutions where similar mission versus mission-enabling portfolio allocation assessments are made.
Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole. Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 51
An Enabling Foundation for NASA’s Earth and Space Science Missions
A
Statement of Task
An ad-hoc committee will be organized under the auspices of the Space Studies Board to conduct a study of mission-enabling activities in NASA’s space and Earth sciences program. The study will identify the appropriate roles for mission-enabling activities and metrics for assessing their effectiveness. It also will evaluate how, from a strategic perspective, decisions should be made about balance between mission-related and mission-enabling elements of the overall program as well as balance between various elements within the mission-enabling component. Among the topics to be considered are the following:
Roles and objectives of mission-enabling activities in NASA as a mission-oriented agency;
Necessary characteristics of an effective program of mission-enabling activities, including metrics by which effectiveness can be evaluated;
Principles and metrics for determining the appropriate balance of investments between mission-enabling activities and space flight missions so as to best support the agency’s overall strategic objectives;
Principles and metrics for determining the appropriate allocation of effort and resources among various mission-enabling program components, including scientific infrastructure (e.g., airplanes, computing) that enables R&A activity;
The role and proper fraction of support that should be devoted to “innovative” (high-risk, high-payoff) research, and whether this might vary among science areas;
The extent to which current R&A programs support cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary science, especially across the divisions within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate;
The role of R&A programs in training the next generation of Earth and space scientists who will contribute to NASA’s programs in the future; and
Relevant benchmarks from industry or other public or private institutions where similar mission versus mission-enabling portfolio allocation assessments are made.
