Hello and welcome to today's NASA Science Town Hall with Thomas Urbuchen, the Associate Administrator for Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. We have members of the science leadership team with us today as well to share updates and highlights and to answer your questions. In addition to Thomas, we have Mark Clampen, the Astrophysics Division Director, Craig Kundrugt, the Biological and Physical Sciences Division Director, Nicky Fox, the Heliophysics Division Director, Laurie Glaze, the Planetary Sciences Division Director, Julie Robinson, the Deputy Division Director for Earth Sciences. Today's Town Hall is being recorded and the recording and slides will be made available later today at science.nasa.gov. If you have a question that you haven't already asked in the IO system, we will share the link in the chat and you can find out information about how to submit a question or to vote one up. With that, I think I'm ready to hand it off to Thomas Urbuchen. Well, thanks so much, Karen. I'm just so excited to be here. I want to just recognize that this is very likely my last such town hall. That, of course, is on the one hand fills me with joy. On the other hand, mostly actually right now as I'm sitting in the middle of the team, it, you know, makes me sad. And as always, when we make big changes, whether it's when we graduate from grad school or make changes later on, I think both elements are there. So what I'd like to do is go to the next slide and just tell you what's waiting for you. What's waiting for you is kind of news and updates and then division highlights and questions and answers as we go forward. The news and updates to next slide. Frankly, what I asked the team and is just that I quickly just spend 10, 15 minutes because it's my last time kind of focused on the work here. So basically, as we said, mostly have added kind of division directors to talk about their updates and kind of do less of the front office updates than we normally do. So what I wanted to say first, and I already mentioned it earlier, is that everything we do here and certainly everything I've been involved in personally in the last six years, six plus years here at NASA has and certainly all the successes have everything to do with the team. And just for this presentation, I wanted to just put the team members up. Some of them are in the room here. Some of them are not. All of them together are really what make us successful. So I just really want to be sure to thank all of you who are in the room and those are up here for your leadership on this important activity, both under your partnership in the last many years for me personally, but also for the science community as a whole. And so I just really want to express my appreciation to each and every one of them. What I want to mention, of course, is that you saw that last week the job announcement regarding my job became public. So all of you who are on there, I ask you to do one of two things. Either you apply yourself if you're so inclined and this chair, as I said, is going to become free or you twist somebody else's arm was really, really excellent and apply themselves. I already twisted some arms here in the room and I'll continue to do that. Kind of and I really hope you do the same again. As a community, we do need amazing leaders that are part of this organization. So the next slide is just kind of in a kind of survey sense. And I thought it's it's worth it's less about me, as I said, it's about the team. But I wanted to just tell you some of the things that have happened in the last six years. Sometimes it helps looking at it. The first one is and again, this is because of the team here, but also other stakeholders that are really important, and some that work in the White House, some that work on Capitol Hill, the community overall that is up there on Capitol Hill supporting that with their own elected officials. The budget in science is up and frankly, it's the largest increase of a budget kind of forward that time period we've ever had in science. I want I want you to know the number two such increases my mentor Len Fisk, and we've had this friendly competition, which of course, none of us cost ourselves, but it's always fun to pander. Anyway, so we we're at 7.6 billion this year. And you saw the markups on the hill, which are there, which a little bit higher even. We have since I'm here, launch 33 missions. And you know, some of your favorite missions that are there, you know, missions that are landing on the landing on the surface of Mars twice. You know, if you added the helicopter, it's kind of its own thing three times, right? A mission that passes kind of set all record relative to speed and distance to the sun, you know, the park is all a probe amongst and many other things. You look at dozen or so Earth science missions that are there, kind of giving us insight of our most beautiful planet. And then of course, in astrophysics, the the telescope that is sitting a million miles from Earth and kind of looking at the sky in absolutely in absolutely new ways. And so so for me, of course, also on the space station and instruments that are doing fundamental science, both on the inside, but on the outside and biology or also kind of the missions are there. I wanted to tell you we hired quite a number of people. I want to explain why we did that. First of all, when I came in and frankly, by independent reviews as before, I actually believed that we were understaffed. What's really important is I believe authority and accountability. We want to make sure that our division directors actually have the tools to people to do run their missions. But I already showed you the budget is way up. We have many more missions. And so as and which is the next number, which is 47 new missions that we're doing. And in addition to that seven clips mission, so it's north of 50. So these missions need to be managed. And you know, and so do the research programs, which also have gone up during that time. So so those are the reasons I just want to tell you, just so excited to meet many of these new hires as they come in, because they really add so much to this team that's already here. Next. So just to give you a visual. So this is the chart that was in the calendar early in 2017. It's actually the 2016 chart. I remember Channy Modder, our artist did that. You see all these missions there. So I want you to go to the next slide. Next. This is the mission there. So Andrew, if you could go back and forth every five seconds or so. I want you to just look at this. So first and foremost, there are some missions that are no longer with us. And I just want to thank all these missions that have completely successfully completed their missions. Go back and forth, Andrew, every five seconds or so. You also see that, of course, there is this kind of stripe across the earth, which is much of it is biological and physical sciences that joined. And then you see that we also have quite a number of new earth science missions. But look at how populated the moon has become from missions before. So for me, just again, this is kind of another indication of a portfolio that is growing, but a portfolio where every one of those names really matter. As I always said, I'm really excited. Wind is there still because every time I talk to students, I said it's the most important mission for me because it's the first time I've ever built hardware that is still in space. So so so missions that are also have extended life. So at the next slide, it kind of talks about some of the things we care about. And next, I have no intent of talking about all of this because I want to stop in less than five minutes. I really, I really want to point out that I believe that all the successes that many people are giving me credit for kind of in messages and kind of reach out. By the way, I appreciate those very much. But I want to just make sure that you understand as I do that the successes really are the ones of the team. And we put a lot of effort building the team already showed you kind of the top leaders of that team. But of course, that also is kind of pick people that do not fit on this particular chart that people who are elsewhere in other organizations that have led these missions, managers, system engineers, kind of people all over that have supported these missions. And the leadership team here at SMD is second to none. You know, again, our focus has been to build the best teams. And that's why we're so passionate about kind of looking at diverse workforce and then really making those teams inclusive. So we actually benefit from the voices that are in the room. Innovation, frankly, one of the things I did, friends, those of you are journalists, I started reading your articles you wrote since 2016. Just kind of to say, and I was this article that said, we're going to focus on innovation. I just hope you understand and see that we did. And I'm going to very strongly believe that this is part of the DNA of this team. We already talked about the helicopter on Mars. There's many other examples we could give technology demonstrations that are up there and a whole slew of small missions that are out there, kind of at the level that we have not seen. I want to tell you that I'm particularly proud of the partnership we have across the agency with space tech, but especially with human exploration, kind of a partnership that I surely hope and believe needs to persist as we go forward, as well as partnerships with commercial entities and international partners. Over 100 new agreements in the last six years that have been done there, but also the commercial partnerships where we really have new opportunities that can go forward. So the accomplishments here are many. If you just look, I think of this like it's one team with a capital T with many elements. The next slide kind of tells you some things that are there. I really appreciate the work that Michael New and Dan Evans and their team are doing across all of SMD with each one of the divisions by focusing on high-risk, high-impact science and technology demonstration, which of course are also in Manda Peter's shop. Again, we talked a lot about small sets. These capabilities are there now, frankly. If there's anything I would like to say is it surprised me how fast that happened. I probably surprised me by a factor of two. So in other words, I was wrong, which happens often when it comes to innovation. Again, the earth science and as we go forward, the earth system observatory as the next generation and integrated capability is something I'm particularly proud of because I live on this planet and I really deeply care about its health and its well-being as my kids grow up and I think of what we leave here also. I already talked about Parker Solar Probe, but it's also the other heliophysics missions that focus on the physics of the corona with multiple missions, including some under development, but also to focus on that interface, the upper atmosphere, ionosphere of the earth, which we have multiple missions are looking at this. An interface that's, of course, very, very important as we go forward, because the lower Thorbit is such a populated area and that is where orbital debris interacts with nature, so to say, and of course becomes the loss. All the work at Mars, including the work that Jeff Grammling is doing and their team on Mars sample return, I'm immensely proud of. I just want to know, this is going to be really hard, just like when it was really hard. And by the way, that's why we're NASA. Like if it was easy, I don't know why we would do it. And I mean, I have full trust in a team that is there and I just want everybody to know that's what it is. The James Webb Space Telescope in operation gives me joy every day just thinking of that but also seeing some of the new data and Mark and Paul, both of you at various times in a position of astrophysics director, keeping Roman on track and really demonstrating kind of bringing that telescope forward, creating, of course, technical success, but also really focus on that programmatic success, which is something we really want to learn as we lean forward. And of course, surely in the next five years, kind of really focus on the next big telescope that we go forward. Planetary defense is a thing, you know, and there's a body that is sore in the head, somewhere in the solar system because it got hit with dark, just really, really excited about the work and hopefully kind of learning soon from the ground-based analysis what really happened there, neosurvey or kind of getting through confirmation in the next few months. And then, of course, your favorite planet, Lori, if there's such a thing for you now, but one that you have done a lot of work with, you know, Venus back kind of on the radar for all of us now. So there's many, many more things I could say. The most important thing I already said at the beginning, thanks to the team. One person I want to just quickly point out is Sandra Conley, who has been my deputy for most of the time here. And Sandra, of course, largely runs half the program here and has done just amazing work. And she will once I step off, depending on when the next person can run the whole program. And I just want to thank her for both her friendship, her partnership and everything that she has done for the broad community. Everybody should be really grateful to you as I am.  Thanks so much, Thomas, for your thoughts. We will now move on to the various leads for around the science mission directorate, who we have here today, to provide highlights from their division and their offices. First up, Mark Lampin. Hi, good morning, everybody. So here are the astrophysics division highlights. We just recently selected four explorer program missions for step one studies. Two of those are the mid-ex class mission called ultraviolet explorer and a second mission called survey and time domain astrophysical research explorer. I wanted just to mention that these two missions and the two I mentioned in second all tie closely back to the Decadal Survey recommendation for time domain and multi-messenger astronomy. We also selected two missions of opportunity, moonburst energetics or sky monitor, also known as moon beam and the large area burst polarimeter leap and we'll be making selections from those in due course. We also just recently selected a new astrophysics pioneer mission and that's called trans ion galactic element recorder for the International Space Station. And that's why we have acronyms. This one's called Tiger ISS. And as I said, that's the new most recent pioneer selection. We just last week completed the Sophia science mission the last flight was on September 30th after more than 12 years in operation. Just a reminder, the first flight was May 26th, 2010. And I just wanted to thank the whole Sophia science team for their really hard work bringing this to the close on September 30th and great work they did making that happen. We've also been operating a very successful balloon campaign this fall for Sumner. We had two engineering test flights at the beginning of the season. We flew a student experiment platform flight known as Haas. We had a heliophysics flight known as Balboa and we had two astrophysics flights, picture C and a hand launched balloon flight in man. The next astrophysics advisory committee APAC meeting is October 17th and 18th. And I just wanted to finish up. As Thomas said, I also look at the new data that we're taking with James Webb every week with joy. And on the right, you can see one of the recent near infrared images that Webb took of Mars. And this is also coupled with a set of spectra which are giving us new information on the atmosphere of Mars. I also wanted just to mention that we are putting up every week now on the blog notifications when we have things coming and we will have something new from Webb every week this coming month. So look out for those. And finally, I just wanted to finish up by thanking Thomas on behalf of the astrophysics community for his exemplary leadership of the science mission directorate. So thank you, Thomas. Good morning, everyone. Highlights from biological and physical sciences include a busy period coming up in the next month or so. With launches, we have three spanning a broad range across the portfolio. But of particular interest is Artemis I, where we have a suite of four investigations headed to the moon. So the first space biology experiments in the lunar vicinity for BPS, we're very excited about that. Some important public events coming up are Academy's Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space is meeting this month. And next month, we have the annual meeting of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research that will be in Houston. And we'll have our first meeting of the Biological and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee or BPAC. We have several solicitations and selections out or being announced and there's a link to those. I'll just call out one. And that is the request for information for commercial capability for in situ analysis or in situ experiment preparation in low-earth orbit. We're getting good input on that and that's still open. So we're looking forward to more. And in conclusion, I would also like to thank Thomas for his leadership bringing BPS into the mission directorate and giving us a warm welcome and a thriving environment. So thank you for your leadership. With that, we can go over to Niki Fox and the latest in Helio. Thanks so much, Craig. I have to say I love looking at those flames in space. It's such a cool image. Anyway, so just to tell you a few things that are going on in the Helio Physics Division. So we actually had our very first sounding rocket symposium that was held in August at Wallops. And we actually timed that with a visit of the Helio Physics team to go down and meet with the sounding rocket folks. And also we got to tour their facilities there. And you can see us looking at some of the great stuff that they do there. We also got to see a couple of rockets being integrated. And we even got to see one on the rail. So it was a really exciting visit for us. We can see a new image there at the bottom taken by Solar Orbiter by the extreme ultraviolet imager. And it's really amazing. The new images stay tuned for many, many, many more being released over the next few weeks. They debuted a lot of them at the IAC meeting two weeks ago. And it's really fabulous to see those incredible images and looking forward to seeing what Solar Orbiter sees. Well, Parker Solar Probe is really close up too. So as Thomas said, just the opportunities we have with these multi-platforms looking at the same type of phenomena. We did release our SMEX announcements of opportunity. And in fact, we have the kickoff meeting for the SMEX proposal or pre-proposal conference is going on today. And I'll do a quick thanks to the organizers for that, for taking an hour break so that everyone could join this SMD town hall today. The GDC, we had our Geospace Dynamics Constellation mission. We had an independent, that should say independent, review board. And they met. It was co-chaired by Orlando Figueroa and Mary Hagen. Thank you to both of them for their great job as co-chairs. And that we are actually ready to release those review board findings and our responses. So that will be coming out imminently. And then just to raise your awareness, we are having a heliophysics town hall, which is a virtual town hall on October 24th. So watch out for more information on that, including how to submit questions and how to join. And of course, I would also like to join my other division directors in thanking Thomas for his amazing leadership at SMD I actually said on the pre-proposal conference, this is going to be a very sad town hall today for all of us. And we were going to try not to cry, but it's very sad to see Thomas going. So thank you for your leadership. And with that, I am delighted to hand over to Laurie with the words, congratulations, go Dart. Thank you, Nikki. Yes, let's start with Dart on the next slide, please. Hopefully everyone has been paying attention and saw that just, I guess, a little over a week ago, maybe two weeks now, I guess, on the 24th of September. On the 26th of September, we successfully impacted the asteroid dimorphous with the Dart spacecraft. You can see on the top right there, dimorphous moments before that impact, where we were starting to see the full shape of dimorphous coming into view. You can actually see the texture on the surface. It was an incredible image. And then down on the bottom right, you can see us literally two seconds before hitting the surface, the last complete image. It was an amazing event, very, very successfully completed by the Dart team up at APL. Now the investigation team begins the work or have been doing the work with the ground-based observations, trying to look at the dimorphous system and assess just how effective our impact was. So stay tuned for more information on that. Talk for a moment about insight, an amazing mission. Thomas mentioned there were two landings on Mars in his tenure here, the first one being insight, which happened in November of 2018. This mission has done an amazing job of collecting seismic data on the surface of Mars. But as a solar-powered mission, it's been accumulating dust on the solar panels and the available power is continuing to drop. We are trying to run it full steam to get as much seismic data as we can before we completely lose power. I encourage people to follow along on the blog to get the most current information on how the insight spacecraft is doing, but we fully expect to lose power or be able to have to cease the operation sometime this fall. As early as perhaps sometime in October or as late as maybe into January of next year. But stay tuned. Psyche mission, as most are probably aware, did not launch in August as was originally planned, nor in the contingency window in September. We being Thomas and the director for JPL, Laurie Lushin, have established an independent review board to make sure that we understand the reasons why Psyche was unable to meet its launch and to assess any potential plans for possible launch at a later date. We are holding a continuation termination review. It's actually taking place, I believe, later this month. And so that will determine whether or not Psyche will continue and if so, when it would launch. So stay tuned for more information. We'll try to communicate the results of that review as soon as we can. The Exploitation Science and Strategy Integration Office has been doing great things. They wanted us to mention here that the next prism call, Prism 3, is open with Step 1 proposals due October 24th and Step 2s due December 20th. And then on our sample return, just a quick note that it's really, really exciting. We now have 13 confirmed rock samples as well as one atmospheric sample and two witness tubes. There was a big workshop held last week to assess those samples, the scientific worthiness of those samples, and are we ready to establish our first cash depot on the surface of Mars at a potential landing site for the sample retrieval lander? And so that's going very well and we expect a decision on that very, very soon. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Julie Robinson to talk about Earth Science. I'd also like to just say thank you to Thomas for allowing me to be a part of this team. It's a fantastic group to work with and appreciate all that you have done for Planetary Science. Thank you. Thanks and Thomas for Earth Science in our entire team. We also want to thank you for your leadership and today we're going to show one very concrete and short video in lieu of our regular highlights that kind of illustrates this shift because we've been collecting data and measurements of the Earth's land, water, ice and atmosphere for more than 50 years, but we're recognizing that understanding your system isn't enough, as you said, in your opening remarks. And so as we are envisioning a time when Earth Science at NASA also helps our nation and the world to take action, we wanted to share this video that was shown at the recent Space Council. For more than 50 years, NASA has been collecting and providing data on Earth's land, water, ice and atmosphere. Now a new era of Earth Science has begun. Together with international partners, NASA will launch the SWAT mission to provide the first ever global survey of Earth's surface water, the oceans, lakes and rivers that affect all of us. But we also need to understand our planet as a complex whole. That's why NASA will launch a fleet of state-of-the-art satellites forming the Earth System Observatory, which will create a comprehensive 4D view of Earth from bedrock to atmosphere like never before. The Earth System Observatory will arm us with crucial data to help us address climate change and protect our communities. But how do we get this critical information to the people who need it? Introducing the Earth Information Center. NASA, working with our federal partners, will equip decision makers with the information they need to mitigate, adapt and respond to climate change. We will create a greenhouse gas monitoring system and make data about our changing planet accessible to those who need it most. New satellites observing in the sky and an information center here on Earth, protecting our planet for the next generation. So the Earth System Observatory is our plan to implement the Decadal Survey and the Earth Information Center is the way that we plan to deliver that information, data and science applications to decision makers at every level. Last Tuesday, or this Tuesday, just two days ago, we did issue a community announcement for Earth System Observatory. That includes the opportunity for a two-step selection process to address the seven themes that are not in direct admissions in our Decadal and in particular greenhouse gases is a likely emphasis for one of these competed selections. The first mission there would be 2029 and a second mission in 2031. And last week, we announced our first commercial data buy through greenhouse gas sat and that also provides significant new information on greenhouse gases through and shows our support at NASA for commercial procurement approaches and having that broad suite of commercial, academic and industry partners helping us make this observatory work. So thank you and I'll hand it back to Thomas. Do you mind if I just quickly say that a couple of you have let us know that the audience did not work for you? I just want you to know within minutes on my Twitter account, the audience being tweeted with the, with their movie is tweeted with the audience so you can listen to it and watch it as many times as you want to. I really love it. Thanks so much, Joy. Great. Thank you so much to all of our presenters. We have about half an hour to move on to questions. I know that some people are having a hard time seeing the questions. If you put them on, they are going in and we are trying to see if we can adjust our, our, our settings. But in the meantime, I will be going through them and reading them and making sure that people know, know what, what there is available. There are quite a number of questions about the independent study on UAPs. And so we wanted to just have Dan Evans, who is helping run that study, just kick off with a description of the study and, and we'll check a box on those questions. And then we'll move on to the next set. Thanks, Karen. I appreciate the invite to be here today and spend a few minutes discussing the, the plethora of questions that we received over the past week or so about UAP. It looks like the UFO Twitter community has been very busy. You'll be pleased to know that we are in the final stages of standing up our independent study team. And this is a full federal advisory committee act type of activity. Federal advisory committees are the gold standard.  We require them to, to disclose all their financial details. Those details get vetted by our Office of the General Counsel. And we do this because we take the commitment to ensuring the panel's independence and objectivity extremely seriously. We are planning to release the names of the committee members this month. And the team is going to have a series of preparatory meetings. And in late spring, roughly 2023, there will be a full and open and public fee broadcast meeting. And we expect the study to be finished in the June-ish timeframe. There are a number of questions that have been submitted about when NASA will release data and sightings, things like that. But remember that this study is only primarily to advise NASA about what data we could use to shed light on UAP. But the actual analysis that would ensue from those recommendations, from that roadmap, that would be a future step. And finally, I want to speak about classified data because there are a few questions about who has clearances, who doesn't special access programs. All of this stuff got submitted. But I do want to underscore that the real value of our independent study is that we are trying to bring a scientific perspective and to tell us how to potentially examine NASA-owned and commercial data. So we're primarily focusing on those two data avenues, recognizing that other aspects, other parts of the government have the classified thing well under hand. So this is an unclassified study, which NASA personnel do and don't have clearances is moot because the work is going to be done by an independent body. And again, that is the true value of what we're trying to bring to shed light on UAP. Karen, I'll hand it back to you. Do you mind if I just add a comment? There's a lot of people who have contacted me directly and I just want to assert and state again, on the record, I have talked to my entire leadership chain and I just want you to know that this study will go forward even after I leave. By the way, I fully expect that there are certain things that this team will correct mistakes I may have made or things like this. But I just want you to know, generally speaking, kind of decisions we make in this room, we make together. So kind of whether it's this or others, the way we don't generally run things is that the one person just dictates from the top how we do things. And that's certainly not the case here also. We put a lot of thought into this. We're convinced that this study is important. And the reason we're doing all the checks on financials is that there's a full expectation that we're going to spend more money on this. So we want to make sure that from the beginning, the checks are there, so we don't preclude such recommendations going forward. So I just wanted to say that in addition, Dan has found his new calling here, kind of at the interface, kind of is the most red email box it seems with some of the requests that are coming and thanks everybody for their interest. Back to you, Karen. Great. Thank you so much, Dan, very much appreciated. Moving on to one of the first questions that we have after those. How would the transition to a new Associate Administrator for Science look like? Specifically, what role will the science community play and will it be involved in the decision-making process? So I think that's to you, Thomas. So I really appreciate the question and need to say what I'm describing as the process that also got me here from the science community. And what happened? I just wanted to know the only reason I applied and you could say that was a good or a bad thing. I'll leave that up to you. But the only reason I applied is because multiple members of the science community reached out to me and encouraged me. And actually, in some cases, actually kept calling me. And basically said, you should really apply, which is why I'm so vocal about you need to call people you think would make good leaders. Some that are on NASA already, some that are not on NASA. All of them encouraged them. What then happens is there's a process and the process is outlined. If you are interested yourself, process is outlined. You can buy NASA kind of communications at various places. It basically says how do you get to USA jobs?  And when you apply to it, you'll know that if you cannot handle doing an application, you probably shouldn't have my job. So basically, it took me to apply. It took me off the order 10 days or so on and off. Now, we have tried very hard to actually create an interface. So Paul Hertz, who is not directly involved in the search otherwise, is really helping to make sure that multiple people get on the inside. We really create kind of energy behind this search. And basically, what you could do if you needed, wanted some help, just like, hey, you have not done this. Paul, get in touch with Paul Hertz and he can direct you to the right kind of HR people. Once you're through that, there's two kind of processes that are happening. And frankly, I'm not in that room, but let me just tell you how it was from my end. There was quite an eclectic view, at least two, if not three of the people were in the room who interviewed me, were scientists that as part of a group and then a recommendation goes to a decision authority. And in my case, that was Robert Lightfoot, who was in the job that Bob Cabana has right now. But it was really important that Charlie Bolden and David Newman, they were actually involved in the decision as well, ultimately. And of course, the jobs there, they're held right now by Senator Nelson and Colonel Melroy. So those are the steps. So again, the way you can engage yourself is to recommend. I just gave you the names of the people who are really involved. Should you have a direct channel with them, use them, tell them that science is important. And by the way, I have no doubt that they believe that no matter what, there'd be nothing but supportive during every day of our work together. I'm very close to them. I consider them my friends, each of them. So I have no worries there whatsoever. And my point is that kind of connection. I mean, they told me when I was hired, individuals told me how important it was that they actually also really felt support behind some of the candidates that were there. So that's the process a little bit longer, perhaps, than you wanted to hear. But most importantly, USA Jobs. All right. Thank you so much, Thomas. Moving on to a research question. This is about no due date programs. And I'm combining two questions here. The questions are, how are the R&D programs handling proposals submitted at the end of one Roses year, while more proposals are coming in for the new Roses year? And the selections funds come from the same pot of funds or are they separate? Additionally, in the early 1980s, all proposals were handled without due dates. It came to pass. There was a sweet spot in the calendar for favorable action on proposals. Those submitted too early would be set aside and forgotten while those submitted too late would not get funded because the money was gone. What will be done to avoid this feature? Passing the Lori Glace. Yes. And both of those are good questions. We continue to get these questions. I just want to remind folks that there is an FAQ out there on Nod. Nod, of course, the no due date program that's being implemented on a trial basis in Planetary Science Division. We are committed to a three-year trial of this pilot program of Nod. And I believe we're kind of in the middle of our second year of Nod. So first, let me just say that when we say no due date, and I'm going to say this a couple of times, when we say no due date, there is no due date. And what that means is that there is no barrier between one fiscal year to the next or even one program year to the next. We just roll right from one through to the next. So whenever your proposals come in here, we run a panel and we assess the proposals and then we make a decision on whether or not it's selected and which program year we're going to fund it out of. But there is no boundary there between the two program years. We just encourage people, when your proposal is ready, send it in. And to the second question, there is no sweet spot. The program is specifically designed to, number one, hold these micro panels continuously throughout the year so that proposals don't sit around and get forgotten. They are actually actively being assessed continuously. We run these micro panels. And we also have designed the program such that the funding is kind of distributed through the year so that we don't run out of funding at the end of the year. We always make sure that we are kind of metering that across and making selections on a prorated basis according to the funding that we have available in that program. So honest to goodness, when we say there's no due date, there is no due date. There is no sweet spot. There is no boundary. So please submit your proposal when it's ready. Thank you so much, Lori. Moving on to our next question, which is about the NASA postdoctoral fellows. The question is about how the numbers were recently reduced to 10% because of the budget. Is the postdoc program really the first and best place to make reductions? And what is NASA's commitment to raising and grooming the next generation of scientists and engineers? Really engineers. So we've got a couple of people in the room. Thomas is going to address it first. We have Michael New and Paul Hertz who can also weigh in. Yeah. I think I'll just start and then go to Michael first and then Paul because both of them have really important roles. I want to state first that we actually went and communicated the details, both the rationale of why certain adjustments had to be made and also the reasons why we think it's the right thing to do because of the enhanced services and in the transition for a small number of years, why that is very much defendable, frankly, almost noticeable, I would argue, on a broader time scale. We did that, put it in a blog post, and it was posted on my blog, which is easily found with my search, Sirbook and NASA blog, one of the last areas. The full details are there with all the numbers. I just want to tell you, we've been very transparent about this. I, of course, appreciate the question and you should know that this team is really proud that we have supported across the board, not just at NASA, but across the board, early career scientists also said salaries higher more than once and have really taken a leadership position. With that though, what I'd like to do is just kick it over to Michael before Paul speaks about the review that he's leading later. Go ahead, Michael. Thanks, Thomas. So the question to there was a budget snafu, and I'd like to correct that. It wasn't a budget snafu. It was an unexpected increase in the cost of running the program. That's not a snafu. That's just something that surprised us. I also point out that we've not really run the program under the new contract for a full year yet. So we don't actually know what the real cost of running the program is going to be. It might very well be about the same as it used to be, in which case nothing will in the end have changed. We'll go back to more normal numbers. I think one of the points Thomas made though is I think important is that the current MPP program offers a tremendous number of new services to the fellows. This includes a participant, a PAP participant action program that provides legal services, immigration services, and mental health services to people. The stipends are now baselined at 70K per year, but there are locality adjustments across the board. So people who are at NASA Ames in Bay Area, for example, make a lot more than 70K a year. We are continually trying to improve the program, make it more exciting and more valuable to the participants. And hopefully within a year or two, we will be able to go back to the past numbers once we have a really good idea of how much it actually costs to run the program. This is Paul. Yeah, I've got it, Michael. Thank you. This is Paul Hertz. As Thomas mentioned, we are going to be doing a review of the NASA Postdoctoral Program. This review will help us answer the question of is this the right place to solve budget problems when they arise within the Postdoctoral Program? We're going to be looking at the role the Postdoctoral Program plays in the NASA Science Mission Directorate, at the goals and objectives that we want the program to accomplish and how meaningful it is to the various stakeholders in the program. And this will allow us to both improve the way we're running the program, but also to set it in context with the entire science program. We will be putting together later on this year an independent review panel who will serve as the review board. And they will reach out to the community and the participants in the program to carry out this review. Thank you so much for those answers. Moving on to the next question. Does the Science Mission Directorate have a rough timeline regarding release of a community announcement for the next Simplex AO cycle? Is that a Lori question too? That's a Lori question also. Thank you, Karen. So let me give the short answer first, and the short answer is no. We don't have a timeline for that. Let me give the more complex answer, which is we really do love the Simplex Program. I really do want to have another call for Simplex ideas. But we do need to make sure that we have the funding and the budget secured in order to be confident that we can make selections in the next Simplex AO and carry those forward. And so instead of giving a date and then having to pull that back and change it later, we are at this time waiting until we have more confidence and when we think we can offer that. You can perhaps differ with my approach there, but that's the rationale behind why we haven't put one out at this time. What I've said to others openly is that as soon as we do have a sense that we will be able to offer one, we will make sure there's a community announcement so everyone knows as soon as possible and can begin their planning. Thank you. All right. I'm afraid the next one I think is for you as well. There's a series of questions. The Decadal Survey is recognizing the preeminent size of Enceladus in the search for accident life, placed it a flagship Enceladus lander as a number two priority for 2022-2032. What is S&D's plan to ensure that the budget of the next decade will be adequate? Well, that is a big, big question. And as noted by the questioner there, it is the number two recommended flagship to be executed. And the number one is Uranus Orbiter Probe. And so that is our highest priority is to make sure that we can get the Uranus Orbiter Probe underway in this decade. And what I've said to the community is that we expect to get studies underway no later than 2024 to kick out that Uranus Orbiter Probe activity so that we can assure we can execute on that recommendation. As for the Enceladus Orbi lander, that's recommended as the number two. If you take a close look at the budget that was assumed in the decade and what we have currently, this is necessarily going to have to move to the right until we can secure additional budget funding to support it. And what we have said in our official response, which is posted online, is that the community can expect studies to start looking into the Enceladus mission to happen no earlier than 2026. Do you mind if I add one comment to this? I think what's really interesting in planetary sciences is how many people miss. Of course, we are all still living with COVID at various levels, but what really people miss is because of the fact that there's planetary windows that dominate planetary science. There's all the other missions as well, such as Parker Solar Probe, which had a planetary window. But adjusting the missions for these kind of unexpected inputs and that costs more money really creates fewer variables. And so what happened is frankly, just during the last two, three years, there have been a wave of extra costs that in some cases, if it was in earth science, for example, or in many of the other missions, you could just move a couple of weeks to the right and make up for that. You cannot do that if you have a planetary window. So you have to spend the money and it's kind of clear which year you have to spend it in. And so as a result of that, even though there's tremendous support kind of that I'm hearing about up and down the whole way of simplex and similar missions, it just kind of it ended up in some of the cases just not being able to get funded because of course we are funding limitations. So it just I think it's what's also really important is to give the planetary community time. You know, Laurie already talked about psyche kind of being in that discussion as well. I really have give the planet community time to kind of kind of come to a more normal kind of less kind of delayed type of reaction type of situation that was imposed on them. And so so I just kind of the closure with the farther faster we get there, the easier it is to do that. I just want to also point out that I would say we were more successful on simplex than any one of us expected. There are three missions. One in planetary, one in the exploration side of Laurie's budget and one on your side of the budget that are out there coming to completion and kind of being developed. We did not expect that kind of initially that we would do as many. And the good news is we're getting experience with simplex. That's all I'm saying. And if we're getting experience right now that surely will help us also as you go forward to a call kind of including that experience. So there's a lot of energy, a lot of excitement that some of the delays are obvious and really easy to explain. But the good news is there are three kind of initial simplexes that are moving forward at various speeds. I'd like to point out the ones in Helio. I misstated. One of the simplexes is actually in the Helio physics. Absolutely, the one at Mars. Yes, exactly. Thanks. Well, that goes very nicely into the next question which is about Mars and Helio physics. One of the primary root causes of Mars' hostility, Mars' hostile environment, is solar wind and the fact that solar wind strips atmosphere from the planet. This exposes Mars to both significant solar and cosmic radiation. Is there any research by NASA underway for creating a shield between Mars and the Sun or as a surface planetary solution? That's a great question. So I guess I'm going to go to the simplex and say that we do have our simplex, our escapade mission, that we'll be going out to Mars and certainly starting to do that kind of thing of studying the upstream and the downstream solar wind with the two spacecraft, the two small sats, as Thomas said. We've really brought those into our main goal. I will comment that we have our decadal survey underway, kicked off in August and thanks to the community for a tremendous response with 492 white papers. And I'm really excited to see what's in all of those white papers and see what we actually have asked for recommendations from the decadal for our support of the agency's Moon to Mars program. And so that fits very squarely into that program. And so we're excited to see what is coming out of there, what recommendations we get and how we can move forward to continue to support that. But as for creating a sort of dynamic field, we don't have anything in the plans right now, but really excited to see what people want to propose for that. And I'll just note the smex kickoff is going on now if you want to propose something there. All right, thank you. We are coming up on time. We'll probably just get one or possibly two more questions in. But thank you so much for all your submissions. I'm going next to a question on diversity. What action is the science mission director at taking in response to recommendations from the recent National Academies Report, increasing diversity and inclusion in the leadership of competed space missions? They're also noting specifically for earth sciences. And I know we have Thomas who might be able to respond and Michael new I believe is also has been involved with that. So I will pass to you all. I will start and then kick it over to Michael. I just want to say that one of the things I'm really excited about is that as we look at proposals that are submitted today, that pool of principal investigators and team members looks substantially different from the pool we had before. By the way, we're not doing a celebratory loop yet because we're not there that I'm not suggesting that. I just suggesting we're on the path to kind of being more inclusive to be kind of really be more of a reflection of the U.S. as a whole and this. And we're so excited about this report that we got from the academies. And of course, the reason we asked for this report but we're fully intending of continually improving and actually implementing some of these recommendations in all dimensions, especially also in our science where kind of principal investigator mission class missions are more new than in other communities and kind of therefore deserve the attention to really make sure that it's part of the DNA of the whole community in our science and beyond. Michael, I'll let you answer the specific question. So yeah, we are in the process of sorting out what we want to do. Fortunately, some of the recommendations are things that we were already doing. So we are already collecting a wealth of demographic information about our proposers as well as our reviewers. We are providing analyses of these as well. As Thomas has said, we are seeing an improvement in general in the diversity of our science mission teams. Of course, we're nowhere near where we'd like to be. We're not anywhere near reflective of the population of the United States or even the demographics of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics PhD recipients. We, as part of our broader diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts, we are looking into what are the various barriers that are preventing people from institutions that service the historically marginalized communities from proposing to us. That will also extend to how our mission teams get put together. We are trying to formulate a effective and legal way to ask mission teams to provide us with inclusion and diversity plans, and we're working on that right now. We had one idea about six, eight months ago. We put out an RFI about that. Hopefully you've seen it. That closed a while ago, and we come up with a new idea. When we finish coming up with a new idea, we'll probably also put an RFI to get community response on that. Julie, I know I wanted to comment on the Earth Science Division and specific parts of this. Julie? Yeah, thanks, Michael. I just wanted to add a couple of notes. We have been looking across a variety of our programs, and especially in Earth Venture, we asked the academies to do a look at that, and that is our smaller, more entry level. And it has several different levels and had gotten very complicated. So we've had discussions both with our advisory committee, as well as with the academies, and we're expecting to be making some changes and adjustments that help there be better on ramps. At the same time, we're also thinking about an earlier stage, and our inclusion of those investigators that are not maybe ready to do a full instrument proposal, but are ready to start bringing students in and using Earth Remote Sensing data. So for example, our environmental justice initiatives are partnering with HBCUs in collecting ground data that links to Earth Remote Sensing data, and that is bringing in a much larger community, both with gender diversity, but also with other aspects of diversity and underserved communities participating. So we're thinking holistically, we think we have work to do, and we're expecting to have some clearer plans emerging in the coming year. So thank you for that. That is the end of our session today, though Thomas, I'll give you a moment to wrap up if you would like to. I'll just remind everybody that there will be a recording of this at science.nasa.gov. Thomas also mentioned that on his social media, they've put out where you can listen to this and hear the recording again. Again, apologies about the questions. There are some settings we will figure out for the future. Just know that I did read them in order of what had been voted up. The only thing I skipped was a question that didn't have to do with the science mission directorate. So I was faithful to what was on there, and thank you for your questions there. And Thomas, any last words before we go? Oh, I just only have a couple, and that is go team, go science, go NASA. Really appreciate everybody's work and help during this. And the best is yet to come. This is, you know, we all are just here for a certain time. Some of us for longer times, but the best is yet to come. I seek to continually improve it, make it better, and make it more ambitious and exciting as we go forward. So thanks, everybody.


My former president, Goodluck Jonathan, has visited victims of flooding in some communities in Bios' state. In a caption accompanied by photos he shared on Facebook, he sympathized with the victims and called for a reaction to action in collaboration by all stakeholders to tackle the flood crisis currently plaguing the nation. Jonathan said that the worsening humanitarian crisis in the affected states calls for real reaction to action in collaboration by stakeholders.


Thanks for coming to the Postgres conference. So the first speaker we have today is gonna talk about using Puppet to manage your Postgres deployments. This is very near to me, so I wish I knew about this beforehand so I can cause all the pain, but I'm looking forward to it. So Chris will talk about Puppet and Postgres. Thank you. Thank you. As Sai mentioned, my name's Chris Everest, and I'm here to talk about managing Postgres QOL with Puppet. I'm really excited to be here. We selfishly put this Puppet module together to help us with our jobs, and it's kind of like our one-click way of deploying Postgres, and we're fortunate enough that we were able to kind of release this open source and give this tool to everyone else. So just to kind of get started and give me a little bit of a gauge of the audience, can I get a show of hands of who uses Puppet at all? Okay, so we've got a few people. Anyone else using Chef or Ansible or anything like that? Okay, all right, great. So like everyone kind of knows what we're gonna be talking about here as far as configuration management. So, as I said, I'm from, well, I didn't say this yet, but I'm from Cover My Mads. I'm a systems engineer, and I work with all kinds of OS level stuff, application stuff, and I'm more of a CIS admin than I am a DBA, but I have very smart DBAs that work with me that help us put the requirements together for this tool and this presentation. So some resources here. We are hiring right now for a DBA. If you find yourself in the Columbus, Ohio area we would love to have a PostgreSQL professional. Another one on our staff. Scrippscribe.org is a blog that our company maintains for technical blogs and things like that. So if you're interested in any of the stuff I have to say, come and visit us. And also, you can find all of our GitHub resources at the Cover My Mads organization. So, and down here at the bottom left of the screen, if you wanna follow along on the presentation, we have some code snippets and things like that so that you can sort of browse around yourself on the presentation. So, Cover My Mads, we are a very unique organization that in short provides ease of use for patients to get prescriptions authorized. Most people don't know about this, but there's this, if you've ever had any sort of complicated health problems or a very expensive drug, sometimes it's really hard to get your prescription. So, our company enables electronic submission for prior authorizations. And my goal is not necessarily to give you the spiel about my company, but we have a really cool company and everything we do, we try to open source. So, not only are we helping open source community, but we're also helping people with their health and that makes us all very happy. So, just wanted to make sure I mentioned that. So, just an overview of what we're gonna go through here. I'm gonna give you an idea of why we needed this puppet management for Postgres, give you an idea of what our environments look like and then step through kind of our puppet module. So, as of right now, it's funny I wrote this presentation about a little over a month ago and I've been working on it over the past month, just fine tuning it, but a month ago we considered ourselves a service-oriented architecture and then somehow in the past month we've started talking about micro services architecture. So, that's a little scary, but if you don't know what this is, I mean it's kind of a big buzzword now, but it basically means lots of services that do very specific things and are all sort of separate and work together to make one entire service or platform, if you will. And what that means for us is tons of applications. I'll go through those counts and give you a little bit of idea of our environment a little bit later. The other thing that we're doing right now is we're migrating from SQL Server to Postgres. So, are there any SQL Server users in here? One, all right, good. Hopefully next year there will be zero SQL Server users in here. We'll be off of it and you'll be off of it. The, just one more point about the SQL Server, we have one gigantic SQL Server which is sort of a legacy institution from when the company started about, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago and the organization as far as how we have everything laid out, the service oriented architecture or now we're gonna be the microservices architecture is causing us to go from this one big giant SQL Server database to tons and tons of little tiny Postgres databases. So that's scary to us. We have two DBAs and four or five CIS admins. So we have way more databases than we have people to even figure out how to do it. And then finally, take all that, we have, take all that, lots of databases, lots of apps and we also have lots and lots of environments. So we have a development environment for every developer. We have test environments for test engineers and we have integration environments for customers that they can go to and get their own environment and do integration testing with their own applications. And finally, these things all have to change at a moment's notice when code changes, when scheme is changed, excuse me, all kinds of stuff like that. So production, we have about 50 applications. I wrote this a month ago, we probably have 55 applications this month. We constantly are deploying brand new applications. We have eight production databases. I would say we probably have 10 production databases since I wrote this. So we're moving quickly. Our integration environment, we currently have three. Multiply that by the number of apps, by the number of databases and you can see how things grow very, very quickly. And then finally, testing and development, it just gets way out of control. Does anybody here use Vagrant? Okay, so we also use our Puppet, we use the same Puppet configuration in production and all these other environments and we also use that in Vagrant. So we get to sort of test this path to production through all of our apps, all of our databases and everything.  Every developer gets their own Vagrant. Some of them have multiples depending on feature branches that they might be working on, excuse me, in their code. Which this is our battle cry on the sysadmin side. It's like the Oprah B's meme. Everybody gets a database. So I'm not much of a comedian, but I had to put that up there to honor the team. So the folks who are using Puppet are using the Puppet Postgres module. Anyone? No, okay. All right, well that's cool. Then I'm not gonna like, I can say whatever I want and no one will even know what I'm talking about. I can lie while I want to. I'm not gonna do that, I promise. So Puppet Labs, for those of you who don't know Puppet, is the vendor that basically maintains Puppet. They have the best Puppet modules on GitHub. They open source everything they do. And their Postgres module is one that they consume themselves because Puppet itself uses Postgres as a data backend. So they have a really great Postgres module. And so you don't really have to be afraid of the Puppet module that Puppet Labs releases because it's as easy as this one line to create a Puppet server. So, barring all the complexity behind setting up Puppet, as Valentine said, there is almost a one click way to deploy Postgres. So this will install all the official PGDG Postgres repos if you have a Debian-based system or a Red Hat-based system. It installs a PGDG directory for the version of Postgres you're running. It supports multiple versions of Postgres running on the same machine. It starts up the database server with a Postgres database kind of like you would if you were just installing it yourself, but you just need that one line. And another couple of lines and you can have a custom database with the user and grant all on your databases. So what's wrong with that?  So I can't complain though because this is pretty awesome, super easy to do. If you're developing, yeah, you probably do want grant all on your databases. You can go one step further, create specific roles, Postgres roles, and apply very granular grants. Again, this details grant all for the role of app user to the database cover my meds. And yeah, great, it's totally easy. But what happens when you have to have 50 more application roles and you don't wanna give grant all to all the users that you create in your database? There's lots of work to do. And this is exactly where we started making this puppet module. We spent probably a good month just figuring out what we needed to do. And then we spent probably two months not doing anything and just saying, yeah, I think we could do it this way, but that won't work. And we noodled over a long period of time and then finally we spent another month sitting down and hacking through all this stuff and getting it working for us. And it's definitely a success story. Otherwise we wouldn't have presented to come and talk to you. So the cool thing about the puppet labs module is that those 10, 15 lines that I showed you earlier are super awesome, but there's way more stuff in the module that make it very, very flexible. You have to break down all the things you need to do like create app users, create databases, figure out what kind of grants you wanna give your users or roles in PostgreSQL speak and have extreme patience and understand how the puppet architecture works so that you can make PostgreSQL work for you. And the secret to all that, everyone knows the PSQL command. There is a PostgreSQL underscore PSQL resource in Puppet that allows you to do anything that the PSQL command can do on the command line. So you have to give it a unique name to identify it because in Puppet, by the way, if anyone has any questions, I'm gonna glaze over a lot of Puppet specific stuff, but feel free if I've glazed over something that didn't make sense to raise your hand, I'll be more than happy to dive in deeper. Give it a unique name, give it the command that you wanna run, the database you wanna run it on and a unless statement, which is very important, that says don't do this unless this already satisfies a condition. And that's to make sure that your Puppet things don't act over and over and over again. Once you have a user, for example, you don't need to recreate that user five minutes later, 10 minutes later, 10 years later. And then finally, you require the PostgreSQL server which we built in the very first step. So HiaraData is another very, very important concept of what we're doing here. So I'm gonna talk quickly about HiaraData. It's a YAML-based configuration file format that allows hierarchical organization of your data. So you can have a very baseline set of data configuration in which case, and I'll explain some examples as we go forward, but in which case your baseline config goes to everything. Or you can override at a per environment level, so maybe you have specific production configs that only go on production servers or host specific configs that only go on hosts. And HiaraData will allow you to organize that hierarchy and then pick and choose, Puppet will pick and choose which configs, which environments or servers or all servers get. So we have a really strong, well, I shouldn't say we have a dependence on it, but it makes what we're doing a lot easier with this Puppet module. So I'm gonna talk through the HiaraData portion of it as we go through here. And there's two important HiaraData structures that we use. One is a database server to application mapping. So this is, in human speak is which applications are gonna talk to which database servers or which databases. And then the second layer of HiaraData that we use is an application to DB role mapping. So in human speak, this is which Postgres role is the application gonna use to connect to a database. The reason we split these up, hopefully we'll become a little bit more clear, but we wanted to be able to detach these two configuration aspects from one another and we wanted to have the database server only really know about the databases on it and then we wanted to have the application roles only know about the applications and the databases. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. I kind of went through this, but the first one defined this at the host level. So our list of apps that are talking to a database or a database server will be defined at the host level. So in this case, using HiaraData, we have a database cluster named cluster one and in that host level of hierarchy for our config we define the number or not the number, we define all the applications that are gonna talk to it. And this is an example of that data structure. So at the top here is a YAML format. So CMMPG SQL is the name of our public module and DB list is signifying that this is our list of databases and they belong to cluster one. My database is a database and these are all the apps that are gonna connect to it. So at that point, all that host needs to know is what apps do I need to worry about. The second stanza down here is the equivalent data structure that is yielded inside a puppet. So if you sort of were debugging and looked at that data structure, that's what it would look like. It's a hash. It's a hash of arrays. And then the second day structure I talked about was the list of roles. So these are the list of Postgres roles, i.e. users that are going to connect to your database. And these are at the baseline config. So across anything in your environment. So everything in production, the user application user and password and the database that it connects to is gonna be available to anything in our app, any application, any database, anything at all. And then here's an example of what that data structure looks like. And this is probably chicken scratch to a lot of you but we have a very detailed readme that kind of ties all this together on our GitHub repo. So if anybody wants to go out and reference that later, it's pretty good. So this is our second application to role mapping. Now this is an app specific variable. So the namespace is application and we're saying that this is a DB config portion of the app config and then the application name. So we know which application it belongs to. And then it gets a list of databases and it gets a right handle in this case which gets a default right role which we'll talk about that later. That's not a postgres role. This is an abstract data structure here. This is a what kind of permissions role do you get on the database? This is the host that it's talking to, the database adapter, username, password. I mean that stuff's pretty straightforward. And again what this data structure looks like translated into Puppet, it's a hash of hashes three levels deep. And the advantage to both of these data structures is that you can expand them infinitely. So you could have 100 databases on a cluster, you could have 100 users talking to a specific database. And then a really important part of this, the right handle, notice this, we put this third layer in here so that we could define different types of application handles for all of our apps. So we can point an application at a right database, in this case like a master, or a read-only database where we wanted to do really quick read operations. That's a whole another topic on the application side but it's something that we wanted to make sure that we could support going forward. And now we're gonna go through, I kind of gave you the high level, we're gonna go through the Puppet module as we built it.  And I noticed this morning that we should have probably named this puppet-cmmpgsql to comply with puppet stuff but we'll do that some other time and we'll break everyone's Git repose when they check it out. So now I'm gonna get really deep into the puppet of what's going on. So again, if you have any questions, please let me know. So initpp is like the base manifest. Manifestor considered your source files for Puppet. Initpp would be like the index that HTML of a web page. It's the first thing that Puppet looks for when it's gonna operate on something. Our initpp kind of does like a quick little setup. It calls out a few other manifests and we're gonna go through those and then it also checks to see if the database host is a master or if it's a slave or if it's in the middle of a failover. So if it's in the middle of a failover, it does absolutely nothing. It exits and says something bad's going on. I'm not screwing, screwing with the database. If it's a slave, it does nothing because replication's gonna handle everything on the slave. And the advantage there is you can create one cluster, spin up your slaves, run a quick script to initialize replication. You can scale out numbers of hosts in your cluster very easily. So the next thing that's sort of still on the baseline, we do the initpp call setuppp and setuppp does some very, again, baseline things, sets up PG Top, PG Repack utilities that we wanna have on every database. It installs some monitors for that database which get exported to our shinkan slash Nagio system. So every database we spin up automatically gets monitored. And like I said earlier, it manages, it does things for masters or doesn't do things for slaves. Whoops. Oh, that's not a whoops. We are gonna talk about hierarchy there again. So in setuppp, we leverage hierarchy data a little bit more and we manage all of our Postgres config. So your Postgresql.conf file. And then we can, again, use our hierarchies based on host level, cluster level, environment level or baseline level or if it's even a developer machine running Postgres, we can apply this config. So this is another hierarchy data yaml structure. Again, it's referencing cmmpgsql and this key we're doing config so we know how to get to it. And anything that is valid in a Postgresql.conf file is valid in here. This is a array of key values or array of hashes, actually. So anything you can think of, this is kind of just like a one-for-one. Stick it in there in your Postgres. Well, one of the pitfalls of this, yeah, go ahead. What would you put in besides value? Value, actually. So you bring up a good point. I probably should have showed the other end of this that calls the config, but value is a parameter in one of the puppet labs resources. So there's a puppet labs resource called Postgresql colon, colon config and the parameter is value. So the name of the resource, it would be hot standby and then the parameter is actually called value and then you have to give a value to it. So that's actually a built-in but if it probably would be better to show that part of it, it would make more sense. So next, if we're a master, we set up some very important things like basically everything that our cluster is going to do. We create an administrative user for our sysadmins to use so that we don't operate on the database as the Postgres user. We use that for taking backups and handling schema change deployments, things like that. We create default permissions on the public schema and then we revoke create by default so that any app Postgres rules that we put in there don't get dangerous access to our database cluster. And then at this point, we look up the CMM PGSQL DB list config that I talked about earlier, which is our database server to app list mapping. And once we have that app list mapping, we invoke that entire data structure, which is a database and a list of apps that connect to it. And it will create a database for each one of those applications. Now, at this point, all we're doing is creating a database. And in the step earlier, we did some safe things to the default schema, the default public schema so that bad things don't happen. This is actually a little bit hard to read now that I'm seeing it up here, but the app DB right here, this is basically what gets called. So app DB, this is the name of our database, and then these are all the apps that will be connecting to that database. And next, we create a DB handle, which is utilizing our list of apps and mapping it to the handles that we talked about in the second data structure. So we basically created all of our databases and then Puppet says, okay, I got my database, what apps need to connect to it? We go through our list of apps and we create all of our database handles. Oh, let's see if I can get back over to that. Yeah, so in this case, this is the structure that's creating the database handle. And then finally, the app user is created after the handle was created, which allows us to manage very granular grants based on templating. So we have, I mean, I think we have three or four templates right now because for the most part, an application gets pretty standard access. We have a default write template and we have a default read template and we have a DB owner template. But the cool thing about this is we're going back and using the PSQL resource I talked about earlier, which is kind of like running PSQL on the command line, but you're not running it on the command line and you don't have to care about remembering what command you run or ran. So this is, I want to stop and talk about this because we've kind of went through all this data, which I'm sure everyone's kind of like swimming in their heads, not really sure what's going on. But in essence, what we're doing is we're running PSQL and we're generating a list of grants based on a template. We'll look at the template in a second. We're acting on the database that was initially in our list of databases running on the Postgres server. We're running as our Postgres user and group at this point. The path is not a big deal, but it makes sure that you don't run it on the wrong instance of your Postgres server and then this on less statement. So we'll go look at the template, but this on less statement is kind of the bread and butter and we probably spent, I don't even know how many hours discussing how we were going to manage this on less statement because there's two ways of doing it. We chose the easy way and hopefully one day we'll go back and do it the hard way and the right way. But the on less statement says if this user has a default ACL of read only access on this database, here's the username and here's the database. If this user has read only default ACL, read only access on this database, don't do anything. We assume what we've done, our template has already been initiated. Now we'll talk about the pitfall of that a little bit later, but it works really awesome because you run your grants once and only once and you don't have to worry about it ever again. Yeah, what's that? It does a select, so if you go look at the PSQL resource type, if you look at PuppetLab source code, they're running a select one on that subquery. Yeah, yeah. Well, if it returns anything that's like, I mean kind of like thinking like if it returns true in this case it returns a record something and it says, okay, this happened. I'm, yeah, yeah, exactly. You wanna make sure that what you're checking though is somewhat indicative of what you're trying to do. Cause if you do it. It's also where it falls down. Exactly, exactly. And then I talked about that. So at the top here, you can see that in the command parameter, there's a template and then here's how we design our templates. I did some line breaks on here. I don't think that would necessarily work in real life. But it's gonna run all of these grants with that username on that database. So this right here is our default right grant template. So pretty much every application that connects to one of our app databases gets at least one user that has a default right permission. So they can pretty much do anything except create tables. They can't delete tables. They can't alter tables because they're not owners of the database. In this case, the Postgres user is owner of the database. But then we have another template that is read only so we can restrict the grants a little bit. And then like I said, we have a DB owner which would create that user as an owner and give it owner access to the database. And so like we were talking about with the unless statement, the way we're doing it, and we'll go back up here, we're only checking if the user got default ACO access of read, which is kind of dangerous because a sysadmin could go in there or anyone with administrative access and change grants. And we don't really have a way to protect against that. But at the same time, we figured we're restricting all the other access to the database and we have to trust our team to like do the right thing. And if say you're giving a grant to a specific role then and you know it needs it, the proper way to do it would be to record that in a template and make sure that the next time that user gets created, it gets created the proper way. So that's kind of the pitfall of the way we did it and we went back and forth because the other way you could do it would be to create an unless statement for every single grant that you're allowing a role to have. And we kind of started down that path and we thought this is a really hard thing to do, not that we don't want to do it, but if we try to solve this right now we're never gonna get our databases built. But if you could imagine what we would really like to do one day is generate a grant template and then a corresponding unless template so that you could verify all the grants that were in the template and then maybe you would have like our super tight audit control of all the grants and all your roles. Maybe in like version 0.1, I don't know, we'll see. This is the output of the unless statement that we were using. And like you asked, as long as your where clause returns something, in this case, I'm running this query on the Postgres user and you can see what it returns actually, it's kind of, it's not cut off too badly. But it returned something because in this case, in our list of permissions, we do have an R in there. And then sort of to wrap it all up as far as how this data flow works, this is how the puppet module fans out. So we start with our two data structures, our server to list of databases and then our second data structure which is our database and list of application rules. And we start here in MasterPP, we're only looking at setting up masters because like I said earlier, slaves get anything that the master gets within Postgres reason, obviously. But we get into master, say in this case, we had three app DBs. For each one of those app DBs, we're gonna create our list of DB handles in which case we'll fan out to three application users and all the template grants that go along with those app users. And again here, we would do the same thing for app four, five and six on DB two. Look, I kind of messed that up, but for like DB three, you'd have app seven, eight and nine and those would also fan out. So you can see this can pretty much go forever. Obviously you're gonna have a point where you don't want 100 databases running on a single cluster, but one of the reasons that we really like the two data structures is one of the approaches we take is we get these new apps in our environment that our developers, we run a really fast development cycle. So developers will say, hey, I got this new app. It needs to be in production like tomorrow. Okay, well we're gonna give you, we're gonna put you on like the catch all database server because we have no idea what this app's gonna do and it could never even really make it in real life production. So the flip side of that is we get an app in production that like blows up and it's like super popular and for whatever reason gets into traffic, we can pair that off of a cluster, move it onto a new cluster on its own, excuse me, spin up a brand new database cluster with this database. We could spin up a slave in a cluster, promote it to master, rename the cluster and then bring up three more slaves that will all replicate it and we don't really have to do much but build servers and assign the data structures to that server.  We had a, we do these code reviews like lunch and learn code reviews for developers and one of the developers used this and I thought it was pretty clever because everyone who writes something knows all of the bad stuff that it does. So one of the things that's really frustrating about Puppet is that you can't loop yet. There's versions coming out. Well, I think in the last year, we're using Puppet Enterprise but the open source version of Puppet, the latest version has a way to do mapping functions on hashes or arrays but we don't have that yet. So we use a custom function called prefix keys and let me see if I can go back here. Well, I can't find the slide but basically prefix keys allows you to create a unique resource name for anything that you're doing. So if you get down and dirty into this puppet running, you'll see that by the end of a user's grants being generated, it has this really long resource name which is a concatenation of spit balling but a concatenation of the cluster plus the database name plus the app that's connecting to it plus the user which is really just a way for Puppet to know that it's unique in only doing one specific thing. Once we can use looping, we can do that a lot easier without hacking in this prefix keys function and then competed.com is a, I don't really know much about the company but they have this really awesome function so we stole it and we put it in our stuff. I figured they should get credit for that. And I talked about the other pitfall of the SQL grant templates and permissions and how we're really only checking that default ACL read access is granted. So I mean, if you're not really maintaining your systems right, you could have people doing bad things behind the scenes and your Puppet's not really managing it. And then finally, this module is highly custom but that doesn't mean that we don't want other people to use it or get other people's feedback. Like I said, when we started, we didn't really anticipate even releasing this open source but once we started using it and realized how powerful it was for us, we were like, we should go tell people about this. So we released it on GitHub earlier this week. It's got a MIT license. It probably won't work for you if you go use it today but we respond to our GitHub accounts very quickly and if anyone has any questions, put an issue in there, send us an email, submit pull requests, whatever you like. We have a few things that we know we can pull out of there that get rid of the customizations and we'll probably be doing that over the next coming months. I mean, obviously we're gonna have to maintain it for ourselves so you're gonna see pull requests on it from our team. And it does more than that. We also use it to manage our backups. That's like another customization that we have in there. We use it to manage our SSL keys because all of our client connections run over SSL. We use it to stand up our slaves so we deploy our slave creation scripts with this puppet module. So if you go check it out, you can even see some of the other utilities that we have in there. And then finally, we're using it to trigger off schema, a schema deployment tool that we're building in-house. So I'm hoping we can probably come talk about that. Probably not me, but one of us can come talk about that next year because we're working on a way to deploy schemas and track version control of schemas within our Postgres databases. So it's our Swiss Army knife and it's been working really awesome. In fact, I think it was Monday or Tuesday, we loaded an old backup onto a test server and completely broke our replication on one of our slaves and this puppet module saved our butts because we basically just blew the slave away, rebuilt it and it came back up and had everything it needed. It was great. So that is our little world of Postgres and puppet. Does anybody have any questions? Yes. It's all virtualized. So we're running everything in VMware right now and we have one single data center right now and we're building a second one and a third one within the next year. So we'll have a puppet master in each data center but we'll have the same puppet config in every data center and then servers will know which data center they're in. So the database server itself, we literally like we have another, there's another project actually on our GitHub account called MakeVM that uses some Ruby APIs to create VMs from kickstarts. So basically we go into our hire data config, we update the data structures to list out what apps that we want to go on a cluster or say we just create a new cluster and move it in there. So basically all we're writing is a YAML hash and then we basically run our script to create a new VM and it boots up, runs puppet and it gets Postgres. No, we have one cluster per VM and then we'll have like three VMs in a cluster. I mean I guess we call them clusters, it's probably not the real sense of the word cluster, it's basically we'll have, yeah we have a master and a couple slaves and some of them if we have databases that aren't important we don't even have slaves. Yes, I have no idea. I've never used AWS. So we don't use any cloud servers at all, mainly because we deal with personal health information so we're really gun shy about that. So I don't know if you'd like to, after this if you'd like to talk a little bit more about it I could and give me a little bit more information about how Amazon RDS works, I might be able to help you. I'd be happy to talk more about that. In puppet you mean? No, we don't. And for no other reason than I vaguely recall someone on the team saying if you're using run stages you might have something else wrong with your manifest but I would say that was probably a year ago and we've just never revisited it. I've seen other things use that and need it for certain things. For example, I know we've had problems when we were writing this, setting SSL to true and then not having the SSL keys there in time so I think there's some things that might have benefited from that. Is that what you're talking about? Like doing specific things in different stages? Oh, okay, no. I would say we use the Hiara data hierarchy instead of that. Did you have a question? For SSL keys? We don't manage SSL keys. We don't manage SSL key creation through puppet so it doesn't fit in there at all. We provide a few parameters, if I can remember correctly, we just define a few parameters that let you use whatever key you want. So it's not really managing expiration but that would be pretty cool. There's an open SSL puppet module that someone just showed me the other week that looked really sweet and I bet you could use that and use the resources generated from it and pass them into your, yes? Sure. So we have the same exact problem and we don't have a solution for it yet. Right now, as I mentioned, we manually edit our Hiara data file which I don't know how far we can go with the concept of not doing anything like manual but we're trying it. Instead of using Hiara data to manage the configuration, we're starting to refactor a lot of our puppet to use custom facts. So these data structures, in this case, again, I'm just using a blue sky example but in this case, maybe our data structures would be in a custom fact which is on the host and a little more dynamic. That way you're not having some script commit to get. You know what I mean? That kind of gets funky. But the short answer to your question is I don't really know. We're trying to crack that same problem and this DB schema deployer is one of the things we've been trying to write as sort of like a middleware that our applications can utilize to get the stuff that the apps need over to the database. So again, I'd love to talk more about that because we're trying to crack the Docker nut as well. Everyone loves Docker but we can't figure it out. Anyone else have any questions? All right, well, thank you. If anyone has any questions offline, feel free to hit me up. I appreciate everyone's attention. Have a good time.


As we climbed new heights, in our healing and in our recovery from narcissistic abuse, not everyone can go with us. Not everyone is willing to change and develop themselves. Not everyone is willing to do that. Not everyone can climb to the top. That's what I mean when I say leave in these knocks where you found them. They try to pull you down to their level. They want you to play their game. They want you to identify with the things that they're saying or doing. They want it to resonate with you so that they can establish some level of significance or importance in your life. But you cannot let it become a part of you. You have to realise that you are so much greater than that. Don't allow yourself to even relate to anything that they try and put on you. And that's what this is about. Leaving these knocks where they belong. Climbing to new heights. As you're climbing, you may start to notice things looking more and more beautiful. Even though you're not even at the top yet, things just keep getting better. Life just keeps getting easier. You should take that as a sign that you need to keep moving. You need to keep going. They might try and come back. They might try and hoover you by entertaining that.  You have to keep going forward. They might get quite steep. They might be a bit of incline. They might feel like giving up. But you just got to keep going. You just got to make it to the top. Just got to leave these knocks where they belong. Because they're only going to hold you back. You can't be yourself around these knocks because they cannot survive as long as you are being yourself. So you have to be someone else every time that you're around them. But when you make it to the top, when you make it up here, you're going to realise why it never worked out with these narcissists. But you're not going to be looking back anymore because there's such a great view up here. Leave the knocks where they belong. Don't identify with what they say about you. Anything the knock says is not going to help you in any way. It's only going to make your life more difficult. It's only going to hold you back. So don't listen to what they have to say. Most of the time they're just projecting in any way. They want to tell you that you can't make it to the top. They want to tell you you can't climb that high. Don't listen to them. That's the reason why they didn't get to go where they wanted to go. It's a great view up here. But you can't see it from down there. If you're standing down there, you're not going to see any of this. But you're not going to make it up here while you're listening to these knocks. I hope that this video provides some inspiration to you. Don't let these knocks weigh you down. Don't let them hold you back. You are capable of so much more than what they have led you to believe. And I'm speaking from experience. I never thought that I could accomplish what I did, helping so many people. I didn't think that I was capable of that. But it's not just about me. I've seen so many of my clients come out of this and do so well. So don't ever listen to these knocks. Don't ever let them tell you that you can't be something.


Welcome to The Anxious Morning. Every weekday morning, we'll take a few minutes to go over some important lessons that you can use in your anxiety recovery journey. Away from the endless noisy scroll of social media, The Anxious Morning brings you support, education, inspiration, encouragement, and empowerment. For more, visit us at TheAnxiousMorning.com. We're not changing anxiety. We're changing ourselves. True story. Recovery is not about changing your anxiety. Your symptoms are your thoughts. They will generally stay as they are. Recovery is really about changing you. Before you get all worked up thinking that you have to become a totally new version of you, don't worry about that. Recovery is not about totally reinventing yourself. Recovery is about changing how you react to your anxious thoughts and sensations. Recovery is about changing you, but only insofar as how you relate to anxiety and fear. This may seem like a WTF moment for you when I say this. Most people would assume that the recovery process is about making anxiety go away, or at least quiet down. They would hope that the process of recovery means finding ways to make all those nasty symptoms and thoughts disappear. That is the result that we're after, but that's really a happy side effect of engaging in this process. That's not the primary goal. When we spend our time trying to make the anxiety itself change or go away, things get frustrating. If we're just starting out on this journey, reading this now is going to give you a head start. You can now point your efforts at the proper target. If you've been working the recovery process for some time now and feel like you're not making real progress, or that you're continually sliding backward, this might explain why that's happening. When I tell people that I am fully recovered from my anxiety disorders, they usually ask if I ever get anxiety, or if I still have panic attacks. The answer is yes. I can experience anxious days. I might even experience a panic attack or two in a given year or so. How can I call myself recovered if this is the case? Because I simply don't care. I experience anxiety like a normal person does now. When I get anxious, I recognize it for what it is. I do not see it as cause to sound an alarm and take special evasive action to get rid of it. Even panic is a mostly non-issue for me as a recovered person. A panic attack starts, peaks, subsides, then ends. And when it's over, it's over. The event does not ruin the rest of my day or cause me to retreat and declare setback. Did I get this way by wrestling my anxiety into some new smaller form? No, I did not change my anxiety at all. My heart can still race. I can still feel edgy and agitated. I still experience a shortness of breath. I can still experience depersonalization and or derealization. Those things didn't change. I changed. The anxiety just kept on rolling like biology will do. I formed new habits and reactions. I practiced them. I accepted the exposures and challenges as lessons. I took the lessons in and adjusted accordingly. Over time, I built a new relationship with all the nasty stuff. It's the same as it always has been. It's just not so nasty anymore. This is the process of recovery. Take a few minutes and let this sink in. When we accept that we are the variable that must be changed in the equation, we find tremendous power in the process. You can control you. You can make choices. When you stop trying to change the anxiety and start trying to change you, good things happen. Tomorrow, we'll look at what a bad day playbook should look like and what you can do when you find yourself struggling. If you're enjoying the podcast and you'd like to get a copy of it delivered every morning into your email inbox, including a full text transcription, head on over to theanxiousmorning.email and sign up for the newsletter. If you're listening on iTunes or Spotify or someplace where you can leave us a rating or a review, take a moment and rate the podcast and maybe write a small review. It really helps us out. Or just tell a friend about us. Thanks a lot.


The Lateness Penalty for an Assigned Assessment can be customized for particular students by navigating to the Students tab and searching for the student whom you'd like to waive the penalty or perhaps adjust the penalty. So in this case, I look at Emmy. I can see that she's submitted a couple of minutes late, so if I click on this, submit it at time and scroll down to the bottom. Here I can customize the Lateness Penalty for this student.  By close this modal, I can see this gear icon that's telling me that Emmy has a customized penalty.