Vision and Voyages for Planetary Science in the - Solar System ...

The study was formally initiated at a meeting of the steering group held in Washington, D.C., on
July 6-8, 2009. Work continued at meetings held in Irvine, California (November 16-18 and February 22-
24) and concluded with additional meetings in Washington, D.C. (July 13-15 and August 3-4). In parallel
with these meetings, the committee’s five supporting panels held their own information-gathering and
deliberative meetings. Each panel met three times:
• Inner Planets Panel—August 26-28, 2009 (Washington, D.C.), October 26-28, 2009 (Irvine,
California), and April 21-23, 2010 (Boulder, Colorado);
• Mars Panel—September 9-11, 2009 (Tempe, Arizona), November 4-6, 2009 (Pasadena,
California), and April 14-16, 2010 (Boulder, Colorado);
• Giant Planets Panel—August 24-26, 2009 (Washington, D.C.), October 26-28, 2009 (Irvine,
California), and May 5-7, 2010 (Boston, Massachusetts);
• Satellites Panel—August 24-26, 2009 (Washington, D.C.), September 21-23, 2009 (Irvine,
California), and April 12-14, 2010 (Boulder, Colorado); and
• Primitive Bodies Panel—September 9-11, 2009 (Washington, D.C.), October 28-30, 2009
(Irvine, California), and April 26-28, 2010 (Knoxville, Tennessee).
The committee made extensive use of teleconferences, e-mail, and password-protected Web sites
to facilitate its work. Moreover to ensure the widest possible community participation in the committee’s
meetings, all were webcast thanks to technical assistance provided by the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
The planetary science community is extremely diverse in its geographical distribution, scientific
interests, research techniques and approaches, and institutional affiliations. Thus, it was clear from the
study’s initiation that the committee must successfully reflect the interests of this community and that, to
achieve a broad consensus of opinion in support of the survey’s recommendations, it would be necessary
to stimulate and consider a wide variety of inputs from the scientific community, from NASA and NSF
and their respective advisory committees, from other government agencies, from major universities and
research institutes, and from the interested public. Such inputs were obtained through oral presentations
made to the committee, through webcasts, and through numerous public forums and town hall sessions at
major national and international community meetings, and by stimulating the drafting of a total of 199
community-authored white papers on a wide range of scientific subjects that covered essentially all topics
within the decadal survey’s purview. 1 To ensure that the white papers would receive appropriate
consideration, the committee requested that they be available no later than September 15, 2009, i.e., prior
to the steering group’s and panels’ second meetings.
The panels were responsible for preparing a broad survey of the current state of knowledge of the
solar system and for identifying the key scientific questions and measurement objectives most appropriate
for being addressed in the period 2013-2023. The panels also assessed current research programs and
infrastructure managed by NASA and NSF. Finally, using information in the white papers and from other
community inputs, the panels identified a total of 24 priority spacecraft missions capable of addressing
key scientific questions for those planetary bodies within their respective purviews.
To ensure that the 24 mission concepts were sufficiently mature for subsequent evaluation and
prioritization, the committee commissioned detailed technical studies from several leading design centers,
including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory. One or more “science champions,” drawn from the ranks of the
panels, was attached to each center’s study team to ensure that the concepts remained true to the scientific
and measurement objectives of their originating panel. In addition, four detailed studies of key
technologies were also conducted at the panels’ request.
Prior decadal surveys have been criticized for not paying appropriate attention to the fiscal and
technical realism of recommended missions. To rectify this shortcoming and to be responsive to the
1 Available at http://www8.nationalacademies.org/ssbsurvey/publicview.aspx.
PREPUBLICATION COPY—SUBJECT TO FURTHER EDITORIAL CORRECTION
x