Agency restructuring will postpone a major grants program for one year

Image: RSS, JPL, ESA, NASA

Scott Guzewich spent six years as a weather forecaster in the Air Force before switching to his dream career as a planetary scientist. Guzewich now studies the Martian atmosphere as a postdoctoral fellow at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

But Guzewichs dream job may be turning into a nightmare. On 3 December, NASAs planetary science division announced a restructuring of how it funds its various research and analysis programs. And what sounded like a bureaucratic shuffle touched a raw nerve among US planetary scientists, who already feel singled out in an era of shrinking budgets.

In particular, a newly formed research program that will cover roughly half of all planetary science proposals will not be calling for new grant submissions in 2014. Researchers who draw the bulk of their salaries from grants will have no place to apply.

Now I have to basically skip 2014 and submit in 2015, says Guzewich. If nothing gets funded in that call, then I guess its time for me to go to Walmart.

Salary stream Almost all US planetary scientists are funded, at least in part, by NASAs $1.2-billion planetary sciences division. Many older and more established researchers get money from individual missions such as the Mars Curiosity rover or the Cassini Saturn probe. Younger scientists, such as Guzewich, must rely more heavily on the roughly $250-million pot known as the research and analysis budget. This is the money designated to scientists exploring the data streaming back from planetary missions. According to a 2010 survey by the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, nearly half of US planetary scientists depend on this program for more than half of their salaries.

The restructuring, described in a virtual town-hall meeting organized by NASA managers, came as a shock to many. People are afraid that their jobs are going away, says Britney Schmidt, a planetary scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Its terrifying.

Few dispute that the research and analysis program needed fixing. The reshuffle eliminates a large and unwieldy list of funding programs and reorganizes them into five themes: emerging worlds, Solar System workings, habitable worlds, exobiology and Solar System observations.

The biggest and potentially most popular of the new areas is Solar System workings. But at the town-hall meeting, NASAs Jonathan Rall said that funding proposals in this field are not likely to be due until February 2015. That was the last straw for many researchers who live from grant to grant, because most of their existing funding is likely to expire well before money becomes available for the new Solar System workings area.

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NASA Funding Shuffle Alarms Planetary Scientists