2012 Workshop: InFO Strawman ISR Plan
Introduction – 5 minutes A Strawman Plan – 30 minutes Summaries presentations
5-8 short pitches, total time no more than an 90 minutes
Moderated discussion – 60 minutes Action items to revise the Strawman Plan Closing remarks
A plan gives us a way to evaluate opportunities to deploy ISRs in Antarctica, Africa, and South America, to evaluate the advantages and risks of dismantling and relocating PFISR and RISR-N, to assess the consequences of diverting valuable resources into potential collaborations with the Europeans, and a host of other possibilities not yet well articulated. How do we realize a plan appropriate for our purpose without expending unreasonable, and unfunded, resources? We have an embarrassment of plans, all developed to a greater or lesser degree, all building on our unique experiences at the various facilities and user institutions, and almost all developed in isolation and without much opportunity to share ideas with other plans. We can move a long way by merging these plans to discover the underlying, shared, scientific imperatives which underpin them. We also need to take account of related plans developing around us, such as the soon to be published Decadal Survey, which has already integrated many proposals and white papers from our field. Let us take the work that has already been done, including the new Decadal Survey, individual facility plans, the NSF 2008 Upper Atmosphere Facilities report, the new CEDAR Strategic Plan, and a variety of small satellite proposals, and organize a workshop at CEDAR this year to study and discuss it, distilling from all these inputs the science drivers which should shape the broad future of our field. This will in turn give us a baseline plan for the future which can help us choose wisely how and where we should focus our efforts and resources over the coming months and years.