The big NASA individual PI grants are being announced in time for the holiday shopping season...
Most of NASA's university PI based research and analysis is awarded through the ROSES annual omnibus Request for Proposals - the RfP typically comes out just after the State of the Union speech, with first deadline usually 90 days later, and a main "proposal season" in early summer, though some programs straggle through to the beginning of the following calendar year.
The Requests for Proposals for individual lines are often heavily amended, postponed or cancelled as the actual budget takes shape through the year.
This RfP does not include "great observatory" mission support, including guest observation on Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer etc, but typically does include guest observer support for smaller space based observatories like GALEX or Swift.
Announcements of results usually come 3-6 months after the deadline, again depending on budgets.
There are a lot of programs, but two of my personal favourites recently announced the awarded proposals: the Astrophysics Data Program made, I believe, 40 awards out of 99 proposals received - an astonishing 40% success rate.
The Astrophysics Theory and Fundamental Physics program, which merged the old ATP with the Foundation Science programs, without doubling the budget of course, awarded a respectable 37 proposals out of 184 submitted (20% success rate, which is high by recent standards).
The ATFP winning abstracts are already online - all the winning proposal abstracts are posted online, if you know where to look, eventually, ATFP just did it early this year.
Congratulations all!
Perceptive readers will note my name is missing, though several of my lucky current and past collaborators are on there... which is a bummer, since my current ATP is about to expire.
I have other grants, but I really actually wanted to do this particular project (electromagnetic signature of merging supermassive black hole binaries), the code is developed, we have preliminary results, got an almost perfect review grade, and the killer referee comment: "...not clear from proposal that it will in fact lead to an observable signature."
Proposal was, of course, to actually do the modeling to see IF there is an observable signature. And what it is.
Aargh.
Ah well, I've been on enough panels and submitted enough proposals, I know how it works, can't take it personally, nil illegitimi carborundum, etc and so forth.
But, dammit, I really wanted to do that project.
Maybe it is time to take Harvard's advice - one of the edges that the Ivy+ places have is that they can use fellowship and internal funding to start projects, and then leverage proposals by essentially showing that they have "done the research" and then get the funding... well, not literally, that would be illegal.
Or not.
At least there will be an extra couple-dozen postdocs hired in Austin next month.
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My deep condolences ... what you were proposing would have complemented my group's stuff very nicely.
But where are the GALEX results?!?
Yeesh, NASA needs to quit doing this silly "we notify by snail mail only" nonsense. The ponies are taking a long time to get to Case....
Actually, the Harvard-internal-funding trick I found most useful was to offer to match agency grant funding with internal money. That was just catnip to the funding agencies.
Why not do it anyways?
Because in my estimate to do the work properly really required a full time postdoc who knows what they are doing for three full years, plus some additional resources.
Which requires around about half a million dollars, gross.
We'll do somethings, the easy incremental stuff, but not the serious stuff.
And there is the issue of other funding committments, when I have a grant to do something I have a committment to see it done, and that is generally a priority over unfunded projects.
The whole "mission oriented" concept of funding is a two-edged sword.