Hi Everyone,

I didn't expect to have news about PUMA from Christchurch, where I
am attending the IGAC meeting until tomorrow, but last night I spoke
with Bruce Doddridge, who will likely be handling this proposal at
NSF, and he raised some concerns that somehow stayed under the
radar when Chris Cantrell and I exchanged emails in July/August,
even though Bruce was cc:ed on those messages. In any case, the
plan for the flights in 2004 is going to have to change a bit to
allow for uncertainties in the NSF FY 2005 budget process.

Apparently, getting funding in less than 6 months from
a $700 K proposal "is impossible" (Bruce's words) because the federal
budget isn't known well enough in advance, and this being an election
year means that it will be even tougher to get a full proposal through
until Spring 2005. So there is no way for NSF to use the proposal
process to support the flights in February/March. For summer 2005 a
proposal is probably ok, and since we didn't expect to have the fastest
measurements until summer 2005, it makes sense to ask for seed money
for February/March (back to the SGER idea) and have the proposal in the
pipeline for summer '05 and beyond.

The upshot is that I will need to redo these budgets, pulling out the
Feb/March series of flights, and submit the request for Feb/march as a
reduced (under $200 K for all of us) as an SGER that can be turned around
by NSF in a few months. Meanwhile, the full proposal can be modified to
incorporate the rest of the schedule, with a budget that is smaller to
reflect the ~$200 K that goes into the SGER, with a start date of April
2005 or thereabouts.

What does this mean? For Bob, it means that he can relax a bit on the JPL
approval - the full proposal can wait a bit. However, it also means that
we may need to ask NASA again for a bit of support for Bob's contribution
in Feb/March as NSF can't support NASA people using an SGER (the same issue
that we had in May '04). It also means that we have to be careful with
the budget for Feb/March flights, because $200 K is the limit for SGER.
I think with the current budgets, we exceed this by a lot. Perhaps there is
a way to try to leverage some additional funds from NASA if we have SGER funds.
It's an avenue I haven't explored yet, but may want to when I get back from
New Zealand.

Bruce Doddridge wants to move fast on this when we both get back to the US,
so it would be a great help for me if you could estimate what it will cost to
support the Feb/March '05 flights only. I won't need those estimates until
next week.

Let me know if you have any questions. I will check my email later today
(after most of you have gone home) and get back to you tomorrow.

Darin