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4 Opportunities to Improve Alignment with Decadal Survey Priorities
Pages 56-64

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From page 56...
... The EOS Payload Panel and Interdisciplinary Science Principal Investigators were the most visible of such groups, and their experience was built on an overall philosophy of engaging the science community and mission and instrument engineers in a coordinated way, and then using their input as a major contribution to difficult operational decisions about missions and instruments. These working groups were outside the formal broad advisory structure of the NASA Advisory Committees and the National Academies but had the benefit that they were intimately familiar with the details and overall goals of the NASA program.
From page 57...
... This cross-mission science and applications coordination effort could, for example, encourage studies and trades across missions 3 where synergies anticipated in the survey report might not be readily realized in the mission concepts as presented, or within available resources. Indeed, the need for further optimization was recognized by the survey authors, who stated, "The selected missions reflect the panels' prioritization of scientific observations but are not the result of an exhaustive examination of the trade-offs across the entire range of potential missions.
From page 58...
... By understanding the source of various requirements, their relative priorities, and the consequences of designing to satisfy the requirements, engineers are better able to push back if incremental science requirements will drive up a mission design's cost or risk, identifying the "knees in the curves," and interacting with the science stakeholder community in a productive and iterative fashion toward development of a truly optimized design.9 By fully sensitizing all involved to the factors associated with implementing and costing a mission, this interaction can help minimize the "sticker shock" associated with individual missions when they are handed off from the broader science community to the mission implementers. Early establishment of cost and schedule constraints would allow an iterative process to emerge that could continuously balance all of the mission constraints within a known and achievable funding envelope, leading to a more robust yet affordable implementation.
From page 59...
... International joint missions, hosted instruments, shared data, and coordinated satellite constellations are all becoming new realities. As such international cooperation spreads into all areas of Earth science it becomes natural and essential to include significant specific international partnerships in the planning and implementation of any Earth science and applications from space decadal survey.
From page 60...
... The mission, which includes six identical microsatellites launched together on a Minotaur vehicle, currently provides thousands of daily radio occultation profiles that yield accurate and precise information on temperature, water vapor, and electron density.14 COSMIC (Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate) has contributed significantly to ionospheric, stratospheric, and tropospheric sciences and to applications for space weather, weather prediction, and climate science.15 The FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 planned joint mission (Appendix D)
From page 61...
... The SWOT satellite mission will expand on previous altimetry flights (e.g., TOPEX/Poseidon) through wide-swath altimetry technology to achieve complete coverage of the world's oceans and freshwater bodies with repeated high-resolution elevation measurements.21 International collaborations are well aligned with the first recommendation of the 2007 decadal survey that "the U.S.
From page 62...
... These include flights on piloted23 and/ or unpiloted aircraft, hosted payloads on commercial satellites,24 small satellites, the International Space Station, and the flight of multiple sensors in formations rather on a single bus.25 These alternative mission concepts can offer considerable implementation flexibility. Suborbital Campaigns Instrument accommodation on balloons, piloted aircraft, and unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs)
From page 63...
... An emphasis on smaller platforms also potentially reduces cost through the use of smaller and cheaper launch vehicles, including opportunities for launching multiple payloads on a single launch vehicle, and "piggyback" launches, using excess capacity on larger launch vehicles. International Space Station In 2007, the Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean (HICO)
From page 64...
... Also important is the role of formation flight in enabling Earth system science by moving away from a single parameter and sensor-centric approach toward a systems approach that ties observations together to study processes important to understanding Earth-system feedbacks.37 Finding: Alternative platforms and flight formations offer programmatic flexibility. In some cases, they may be employed to lower the cost of meeting science objectives and/or maturing remote sensing and in situ observing technologies.


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