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Suggested Citation:"3 Plans for the Final Report." National Research Council. 2008. Science Opportunities Enabled by NASA's Constellation System: Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12201.
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Page 48
Suggested Citation:"3 Plans for the Final Report." National Research Council. 2008. Science Opportunities Enabled by NASA's Constellation System: Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12201.
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Page 49
Suggested Citation:"3 Plans for the Final Report." National Research Council. 2008. Science Opportunities Enabled by NASA's Constellation System: Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12201.
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Page 50

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3 Plans for the Final Report In March 2008 the committee issued a request for information to the scientific community seeking concepts for additional science missions that might utilize the Constellation System (see Appendix A). The due-date for these proposals is early May, and the committee intends to review the concepts and ask a select number of the proposers to present them at the committee’s third meeting in June 2008. The committee will analyze these concepts using the criteria discussed above in Chapter 1 and meld the results of the committee’s analysis with the analyses presented in this report, arriving at a consolidated list of concepts recommended for future studies. The mission concepts expected to be submitted in response to the request for information will likely add to the number of technological issues the committee has already noted in Chapter 1. The committee expects to expand its discussion of technological issues and trade-off options in its final report. The committee learned from the Vision Mission proposers that many of these missions assume upgrades to the Deep Space Network (DSN). The committee had insufficient time to address this issue in the interim report and intends to collect more data from NASA on the agency’s plans for the DSN. The committee will address this issue in its final report. Furthermore, because the issue of human servicing was mentioned by several presenters of the Vision Mission studies, the committee expects that more of the concepts it is asked to evaluate for the second part of its study will require human servicing or human activities. The committee will therefore devote more of its final report to the subject of human involvement in Constellation-enabled science missions. The committee intends to hold two more meetings, one in June and the other in August, and to produce a final report by November 2008. 48

Appendixes

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To begin implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration (recently renamed "United States Space Exploration Policy"), NASA has begun development of new launch vehicles and a human-carrying spacecraft that are collectively called the Constellation System. In November 2007, NASA asked the NRC to evaluate the potential for the Constellation System to enable new space science opportunities. For this interim report, 11 existing "Vision Mission" studies of advanced space science mission concepts inspired by earlier NASA forward-looking studies were evaluated. The focus was to assess the concepts and group them into two categories: more-deserving or less deserving of future study. This report presents a description of the Constellation System and its opportunities for enabling new space science opportunities, and a systematic analysis of the 11 Vision Mission studies. For the final report, the NRC issued a request for information to the relevant communities to obtain ideas for other mission concepts that will be assessed by the study committee, and several issues addressed only briefly in the interim report will be explored more fully.

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