Planning for SMEX Site Visits

SMEX Phase A Study Teams -

Now that the baseball schedules have been released for 2004, I have sufficient information to schedule site visits.

The SMEX downselect site visits will take place on the following dates:

• Tuesday August 31 (Fax questions on Wednesday August 25)
• Thursday September 2 (Fax questions on Friday August 27)
• Tuesday September 14 (Fax questions on Wednesday September 8)
• Thursday September 16 (Fax questions on Friday September 10)
• Tuesday September 21 (Fax questions on Wednesday September 15)
• Thursday September 23 (Fax questions on Friday September 17)

Please provide me with the following information by February 2:
- Location of site visit (host institution, city, nearest baseball stadium)
- For each of the six candidate dates, let me know if they are green (acceptable), yellow (possible, but less than ideal), or red (unacceptable). As a rule of thumb, you should give me at least ~4 green dates.
If, for some reason, you cannot provide this information by February 2, let me know what the problem is and when you expect to be able to provide your location and date constraints.

I will use the following rules-of-thumb when scheduling site visits:
- I will group site visits geographically to minimize travel by the NASA review team. For instance, if there are multiple site visits in the same city, then I will schedule them for the same week.
- I will try very hard to schedule only green dates, but that might not be possible. Please let me know the seriousness of your yellow date(s), if you have any. I will try not to schedule red dates (but don't abuse my kindness).

I will accept an answer for each study team only from the PI.

Paul Hertz
Explorer Program Scientist

p.s. The baseball comments are just for fun -- everything else is serious.

SMEX Downselect Page

NASA Headquarters Responsible Office: Code SZ
Last Updated: 15 January 2004
Author: Paul Hertz (Code SZ)