Our speaker tonight was Tony Rice who is a NASA Ambassador.  Tony’s topic was “Visions and Voyages for Planetary Science 2013-2022.”  In the title, Tony was talking about NASA’s decadal survey & the plan for the next 10 years.  Tony pointed out that NASA depends on the science community to identify and prioritize projects.

The classes of missions are Discovery missions with a budget of $500 million per project, New Frontiers with a budget of $1 billion per project, and Flagship with a budget of up to $2.5 billion per project.  In this era of tight budgets, projects are evaluated for the science return per dollar spent.  Tony gave a few examples of current and planned missions in each of the three categories.

A few of the challenges Tony described are the cost of the missions, having third party objective reviews, how to make the spacecraft fit onto the launch vehicles, and even the available trajectories when planetary gravity assists are needed.

Tony was interested in getting feedback from the group on what we thought of the missions and he would report this back to NASA.

In the business part of the meeting, annual elections were held.  The three co-chairmen – Mike Keefe, Doug Lively, and Ian Hewitt were re-elected.  Treasurer Jim DellaPenna was also re-elected.  Current secretary Mark Lang is retiring from the job so Ann Murphy was the only new candidate and was elected.  Since all candidates ran unopposed, secret ballots were not needed and a show of hands was given.

Doug Lively made a plea for more Astronomy Days volunteers.  It is only a week before the big event and many more volunteers are desperately needed.

There is a tentative plan for a special pre-Astronomy Days meeting in the usual meeting room.  Kevin Hussey from JPL will present “Eyes on the Solar System.”  The time has not yet been determined.

As usual, many members went out to eat after the meeting concluded.