§60604 Research activities

Summary

The Director of the National Science Foundation, the Administrator of NASA, and the Secretary of Defense must keep doing basic research on heliophysics, geospace science, and space weather. They must fund competitive, peer-reviewed projects that study, model, and monitor space weather, following the science goals in the National Academies’ decadal surveys. Because this work spans many fields, the law says agencies need to coordinate funding and work together. NASA and NSF should fund competitive grants for multidisciplinary science centers that help move research into operations and bring operational needs back to research. NSF, NOAA, and NASA must each support multidisciplinary research that improves the understanding of solar physics, space physics, and space weather. NASA should carry out missions that match the decadal survey goals. An interagency working group must, after getting advice from an advisory group, set up clear ways to move research results, models, and tools from NASA, NSF, USGS, and other agencies to NOAA and the Department of Defense. The group must also improve coordination between research modeling centers and forecasting centers, and make sure NOAA’s and DoD’s forecasters’ operational needs are passed to NASA, NSF, and USGS.