Hey everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime. We're back again here, sitting at the desk. Some people might have noticed this week that I haven't been using my normal set. We do actually have a bevy of news stories, by the way. If you wanna skip around, we do have timestamps and all that, so you don't gotta hear this little preamble, but yeah, basically, I haven't been feeling well this week. It's not COVID, so anyone that might be worried that I'm suffering from that, no. There's just been a cold that kind of ravaged my house. My children are dealing with it much better than I am. But yeah, I've been kind of very low energy this week. I know you guys see me on live streams and everything, and I pretend that everything's okay, but it's been a bit of a rough one.  I don't know when I'm gonna get it. Being a father of three kids kind of makes it so you don't really get that much sleep. But you know what, as they say, the show must go on. And if this is the first time you've ever seen a Nintendo Prime video, hey, I would appreciate if you would subscribe to the channel. As we push through and get to you guys, today's bevy of Nintendo news. Also, we do have a giveaway. This is like one of the last days you could enter. Technically you could enter, nope, this is it actually. Today's the last day you could enter to win a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X or a Nintendo Switch OLED. We will be announcing the winner tomorrow night on Livestream. You do not need to be there live to win, so don't worry if you don't have time to be there. You will be emailed and contacted. Just use our glean.island down in the pin comment or the description to enter. And let's get into today's news and we're starting with an interesting thing happening with Pokemon Violet and Scarlet. So these are the generation nine Pokemon games arriving later this year. Late 2022 is the official date. They look to be fully open world, enter villages from any, you know, any direction or whatever as they put out on the official website. And we haven't really heard anything about the game since it was announced, which isn't surprising. It wasn't actually announced that long ago, just back in February. Still, it does look like we're gonna be hearing something from the game soon. This is because the official YouTube playlist on the Pokemon YouTube channel for Scarlet and Violet has been updated. Now I'm air-coding updated because it could mean anything, but typically this means new videos have been added to that playlist that are currently private, hidden, scheduled for the future. That's usually what it means, although you can technically update a playlist by just reorganizing, except there's not really much on the playlist to reorganize in the first place, which tends to lend credit. Creed is through, there's a new trailer, a new something existing on that playlist to be shown in the future. So that's obviously really exciting to get some Pokemon Scarlet and Violet news, hopefully soon, probably sometime in April, I would assume. Maybe it's just an April Fool's joke, which would be really weird since the Pokemon company typically doesn't participate that heavily in those jokes, but you know what, that's also something I wanted to note before we move on is you gotta be very leery or weary of all the stories happening in the next 48 hours over the weekend. I was gonna be a lot of fake news out there. I'm gonna try my best when I make my content tomorrow to avoid as much of it as I can.  I thought I would do some fake news or some fake this. I don't know, I'm probably not gonna be doing anything like that because there's already gonna be so much of it running rampant on the internet as is that I'd rather try to sift through the fake and try to find the real, which is going to be extremely hard. So whatever, let's move into our next story. And this one actually deals with Kirby and the Forgotten Land because obviously we wanna know how well this game is performing. You know this wonderful game right here that I'm having a blast with. I gotta say the amusement park world, mwah. But here's the thing, we now have some data for this game, some sales data out of Japan for launch week and it actually launched at 380,060 units taking the number one spot. This is significantly ahead of the 200,000 units that Kirby Star Allies debuted at. And obviously in the sales data, we get an update on Switch sales and the Switch itself, the entirety of Switch which is the OLED, the base model and the light leads the way with 83,800 total units sold with 49,000 of those units being the Switch OLED model. And what's also interesting is there was about 32,000 PlayStation 5's that sold as well giving PlayStation 5 one of its best weeks in sales yet. However, despite that, you know, on a bit of the, hey, if you actually care how much Nintendo's dominating Japan, well PlayStation 5 has now crossed 1.2 million in sales that's still behind the Switch OLED at 1.4 million in sales and the Switch OLED hasn't been on the market like for an entire year's worth that PlayStation 5 was. So yeah, PlayStation is obviously still not even remotely close to doing as well as Nintendo but they are gaining momentum. So that's good for them. There are a number of PlayStation titles including things like Elden Ring, trending in the top 10. So it's no longer this total domination by Nintendo and hasn't meant for a few weeks but competition is good and that's always going to help push each other forward and hopefully we see, you know, Nintendo pushback with some of their bigger titles they have coming. We all know that Nintendo with sports is probably gonna be a big one. I don't know how big it's gonna be in Japan but it's going to be pretty big worldwide. Next up, this story is, these stories come around often. Nintendo makes an announcement and then their stock prices go up and down. This is just the way of the world. Sometimes the announcements make the stock prices get super inflated when they shouldn't be. Other time announcements make the stock prices go down when they probably shouldn't be. In this case, in the wake of the breath of the wild to delay being announced. Yeah, oh no, it's coming out in spring of 2023. Nintendo's stock prices actually went down 6%, one of the biggest daily dips we have seen in a long time. Now, technically they were already up 25% year over year. So now they're only up 19% year over year. Actually, I think it's maybe balanced back a full percentage point at this point. But the point is that it was an overreaction by investors who said, wait a second, breath of the wild, too is not coming out this year. Sell, sell, sell. Because that's what leads the price dip is some investors overreacting and then selling off their stock. So I obviously find this to be really weird when they make these decisions because there's already so many major games coming out for Switch this year that the lack of breath of the wild two in 2022 shouldn't really slow down momentum given that Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Splatoon 3. Obviously, we got Pokemon coming out. We have so many big games coming out, Nintendo Switch sports, Mario Strikers, Bayonetta 3 at some point. There's so many big games coming that I don't really think, while obviously sales would be a little bit higher with breath of the wild two coming out, especially software sales, I don't think Switch sales are gonna be negatively impacted. And wouldn't this give you confidence in 2023 to hold on to your stock, maintaining its value, heading into next year? I don't know, maybe I'm just being crazy. We could be seeing a lot of stock drops throughout the year as potentially investors think this is the last peak year of Nintendo Switch. But I guess time will tell. All I know is these panic trades, I always find funny. A lot of people get into Nintendo and in various stock markets because they're not really looking to hold on long term. They're looking to turn around and make a quick buck. If they bought their stock, I don't know, at the beginning of the year and then enjoyed the 25% bump on their stock prices, maybe they looked at this as, hey, with this being delayed, we're gonna predict the trending in the stock is not gonna keep going up. So we're just going to sell out. But hey, it is kind of weird seeing one game being delayed leading to a 6% drop. I honestly don't get investors at times, but I guess if you're just looking to make a quick buck, maybe you did. So I guess it worked out. All right, this last story I'm gonna show you guys here is actually kind of a double whammy from Nintendo. So first off, we had a new trailer for Nintendo Switch Sports. And I found this to be quite interesting. We're actually going to go ahead here and look at Nintendo of America's official Twitter account. You can see them also talking about part two about Masahiro Sakurai's Smash Bros. Fighter Reveal trailer and kind of looking back on that. If you're interested in that, I will link to that down in the description as well. This is the new trailer. It's about five minutes for Nintendo Switch Sports. It's just kind of an overview, going over everything we already know about the game. There's nothing new really unveiled in here, but it is fun. It is cool. Nintendo Switch Sports, they're gonna start ramping up the advertising for it. But that's not really the big news. The big news is this because they just dropped this out of nowhere. And what we see here is they dropped three brand new games for Nintendo Switch Online that were completely unannounced. Dig Dug 2, Mappy Land and Earthworm Gym. Two of those being NES games, one being a SNES game. So they've added new games to the base Nintendo Switch online package. This is obviously good news. There's nothing negative about adding these games, but it's interesting that this happened in the wake of Kit and Krista, formerly of Nintendo of America, now running their own podcast show, critiquing Nintendo. That's right, Kit and Krista, you guys remember them from Nintendo Minute. They now run their own YouTube channel, their own podcast. And on one of their more recent episodes, they actually criticized Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch Online service, saying things such as Kit noting, Hey, guess what? Newer gamers, younger gamers, aren't going to care about the NES, the Super Nintendo might not even care about the N64 or Genesis either. So, hey, adding these games means nothing. Also, you kind of blew your load at launch, launching all your good games and haven't really added good games since. Oh, and Nintendo, why aren't you more transparent about how many games we can expect for what platforms and when we're going to get them every single month? Why is there no transparency? Why can't you tell consumers if you're going to be adding more DLC to the expansion pack moving forward? Is it going to be all games? Is it going to be some games? Is there going to be no more added? Why can't we have that transparency? That mostly came from Kit. And then Krista obviously chiming in that, hey, maybe if they add a GameCube it could possibly be better. But otherwise, obviously she agrees that Nintendo Switch Online could be better. And it's obviously nice seeing former Nintendo employees come out and talk like that. And then obviously it's kind of funny because right after that podcast went up, Nintendo dropped these three games. And I would argue Earthworm Gym 2 is actually a pretty solid addition. But it still doesn't really get around the fact that there was no transparency on these games being announced. Obviously, some of these games, like Mappy Land, isn't really that great of a game. I did play it back in the day. DigDug 2 is what it is. If you like DigDug, you'll probably enjoy DigDug too. I'm just saying that, you know, I get it. I get the criticisms. But it is nice to see these games announced for those looking forward to it. I know there were some live streams and stuff happening last night and some channels where they were specifically playing Earthworm Gym 2 because that takes back to a lot of people's childhoods. DigDug is more of my dad's era. But yeah, it's whatever. Hey, those are some updates from Nintendo of America's Twitter account. So anyways, folks, I wanna thank you guys so much for tuning in. I am Nintendo RoboJance from Nintendo Prime. Hopefully gonna start feeling a little better here. I feel like today I've maybe turned a corner. I just need to get some more sleep. I think I'm running on two and a half hours of sleep right now. By the way, this isn't because I couldn't sleep. Kids, you know, my boys sleep in the same room. One woke up, woke up the other, leads to a whole thing.  So dealing with all of that, but whatever, they felt well enough this morning to go off to school. So that's good for them.  Waiting for me to hit that same corner where I wake up feeling refreshed. Right now, I wake up and feel like a zombie. All right, guys, I'll catch you in the next video.


sphenopalatine, ganglionneurologia, it means brain freeze. The one you get when you have cold food, but it also gave me a brain freeze trying to say that. So let's shorten it and call it SG. But if you're a physicist, SG might mean specific gravity. Another scientist might think of cyborgium, a chemical element. But if you are like me, it would actually mean, sounds good. Natural language, it's complex and ambiguous. And the context, it matters a lot. I'm a non-native speaker. And sometimes I find it difficult to understand some words. It's confusing, annoying and at so much burden. And when we read scientific papers, sometimes the language is too technical. What about patients who are given unfamiliar health reports and are asked to make life-authoring decisions? The cost of misunderstanding can be high. And we need expert translators. But human experts are not always available to help. That's when my research comes in. I use artificial intelligence to get computers to help us understand complex and unfamiliar text. But computers can't read text like we do. However, they can read patterns. They read these patterns by converting text into numbers and giving them a location in an imaginary, multi-dimensional space. Like you see on this slide, it's a map of words as computers see them. We call it a vector space. I use language models trained on billions of words. And I write programs to create language models which create these vector spaces. The distance between words in a vector space is extremely important. Words which are together are similar. And words which are far apart are different. For an example, sphinopalatine ganglia neuralgia lies far away from specific gravity or cyborgium. This helps the computer to learn and even differentiate between the possible meanings for SG. Using these are developed methods that can scan text and predict which words will confuse you and provide you with a real-time translator that can help you understand complex and unfamiliar text. Language is evolving rapidly. But with better research, we can help non-native speakers like me. Second language learners, students who want to learn sense and even patients who want to know more about their conditions to better understand language, to avoid any misunderstandings and confusions, and of course, to avoid any brain freezes.


About 13 years ago, I found myself amidst a group of very ambitious young people. We were all dreamers. We wanted to be the greatest in our school. We wanted to get out of school and conquer the world. We wanted to be great entrepreneurs and there's nothing you could tell us. It seemed we were unstoppable. But that's not the reality. The reality of the matter is that statistically 98% of people don't achieve their dreams and the same thing happened to us. More than one decade after we've departed from campus, most of the guys I knew who wanted to conquer the world a decade ago are yet to conquer themselves till date. Why is this so? Why are most people not achieving their dreams? In today's video, I'll be sharing with you the one reason why you don't achieve your dreams. If you're new here, consider subscribing so that you won't miss other interesting videos like this. Now, here's it. One of the reasons why you may never achieve your dreams is if you wait for everything to be perfect before you take actions. Life simply wasn't designed to be perfect and as long as you wait for everything you need before you set out, you'll only procrastinate year after year. The unpredictable world. These days, whenever I want to travel from one place to another, the first thing I'd like to do is check my Google map. The Google map will show me the estimated hours or minutes it might take me to reach my destination and I'll also have the idea about where traffic congestion may be on the road. This is kind of predictable but unfortunately, life's journey is not as predictable as this. You don't just know what will happen tomorrow and the best you can do is to make use of every opportunity you have today. Most people simply complain and make excuses. I don't have enough money. I don't have enough resources. I don't have time. My kids are young. I'll start next year. The primary reason why people procrastinate is to wait till when the weather is perfect and they don't understand that the weather will never be perfect. Do you want to be an entrepreneur? You'll never have everything you need. Do you want to pursue a new career? You'll never be ready for it. Regardless of what you want to do, you won't have a perfect map and that's why you need a lot of faith. The universe needs your faith. I am a Christian and I often hear a lot of things about faith, faith in God. What I don't hear often in the Christian setting is faith in oneself. I pray to God through Jesus this morning but I think that's just the half of the book. The other half is about me. I have to believe in myself as much as I believe in God. God said faith is the evidence of things that are not visible. This means that if I want to achieve anything, I should be courageous enough to get out and pursue it, even if I don't have any resource to do it. When I started in the business world over 11 years ago, the only thing I had was faith in myself. I believed that I could do it and I went for it, though I had no money and because of this I had to suffer a lot of setbacks but eventually I succeeded and I achieved my goals of building a profitable company. You want to achieve your goals if you don't believe in yourself. I don't care who you are or what spiritual orientation you have. God will not do anything for you except you're willing to believe in yourself. Steve Jobs dropped out of school when he was around age 18. He didn't know what the future held for him but he was determined to figure it out anyway. Several decades after, Jobs said and I quote, you cannot connect the dots looking forward, which simply means that you cannot simply have a map of your future. You simply have to believe in the future and stand up to pursue it, even when it's difficult. If you want to connect the dots looking forward, you want to achieve your goals in life. If you want a perfect map, like a Google map, you can achieve your dreams. You must have faith that the dot will somehow connect itself in the future. The big dreamer's dilemmas. I usually come across people who have big dreams. This one will tell me how he wanted to start his own business but he needed $50,000 and that one will talk about his dream of building a gigantic company which needs probably $100,000 to start. There's no problem with building a skyscraper but there's a problem when you focus on the height of the building every minute. The best way to eat an elephant is to cut it bit by bit. One of the reasons why you may never achieve your dream is if you concentrate too much in how big it is. The best way to achieve a big goal is to ask yourself every day, what can I do today? And then focus on that only.  I told him, well you don't have anything to plan, you can start tonight and that's the truth. You don't have to plan anything, you can start pursuing any dream today. Do you want to be a great musician? You can start today. Do you want to be a successful golfer? You can start today. Do you want to be a successful entrepreneur? You don't need to plan for 3 years before planning because planning is an opportunity for procrastination. This is what I recommended for the guy whom I met. When you get home tonight, hold onto Google and search for 10 people who have been very successful in industry you want to build a business in. Get all your books and biographies and start consuming them. If you dedicate 30 minutes of your day every day to studying the life and works of people who have achieved great success in your field, in any field you want, that simple baby step will lead you to another simple step of actions and if you keep taking little actions every day at a point the cumulation of those actions will be a great achievement. When you don't have a specific goal, I can waste 10 minutes of this video talking about how you can achieve your goal and I'll still be foolish because most people don't have any specific goal to start with. Only a few percentage of the world's people know where they are going and these are the people who achieve far more than everyone. If you want to succeed in life, you need to have frequently updated simple and specific goals. Your goals should be frequently updated because things change so fast. Like you may not bother to set a goal for the entire year because a lot of things change within one year. You may set goals for just 90 days. Don't make these goals complex. I only set about 5 goals per time. Make it simple or you won't like to read it often which means you won't let your goal inspire you day by day. If you're just starting in the path of goal setting, I recommend you start by setting only 3 goals for the next 90 days. Focus on those few goals. Wake up each day to do something about them. Don't be afraid of taking baby steps. And this is the summary of my discussion with you so far. If you want to achieve your goals, you have to stop expecting when the weather will be perfect. You have to believe in yourself. So much that you get out without any evidence. Don't focus on the bigness of an elephant. Cut it bit by bit.  Thank you so much for watching our videos. Do you love to start your day with high energy? Then we invite you to join our new channel which was designed to give you daily inspirational videos that will help you to become a high achiever. We call it Inspiration Tube. Click at the description box to join the Inspiration Tube. We love you.


You uh front squatting for honey? I'm here to front squat 400 because someone said my legs were small. It was really rude I think it was Bart. Someone on the Someone on the internet said it and then Bart said it. I'm gonna measure them My legs are for sure bigger than Bart Kwan's go to his latest video both on Bart Geo's channel and on the barber to get channel And say Mike's legs are bigger than yours.  You don't squat that much my best squat in competition is 590 My best set all times about 550 for four and I don't know if I've ever talked about this on YouTube But I have coached an all-time world squat record all time all time all time all time Not your little federation in your county with your bum-fucked nowhere carnival upside down left side right clown-ass referee In all-time world record I've coached two or three of them So I may or may not know a little something about squatted and we'll dig in today in the video Be sure to give this thing a thumbs up talk about increasing your squat I'm a solid Mike 3sb.co for all the good company you want to rep with Powerfest Expo 13th and 14th Santa Clara, California 50% fact the podcast that you need in your life. Let's go Common thing people like talk about is like how everyone deadlifts more than they squat and the truth is the strength for both and most individuals Is probably similar but to display that strength in the squat Although powerlifting isn't that technical of a sport takes a lot of balance a lot of practice and a lot of Time under the bar to find that balance to be able to portray or display that strength So although you may you know have a huge differentiation where you're pulling 500 only squat in 315 Know that the shrinks there. It's just gonna take more practice which leads us right to tip number one Frequency in my opinion is king of powerlifting. We need to practice the lifts like we're playing golf like we're playing basketball I don't know if you guys ever played any sport out there Doesn't mean you're going 100% all the time sometimes we'll do scrimmages where you can only take one dribble in basketball Or maybe we're running through plays and you're going 70% speed you're jogging But it's just to get that repetition. Maybe you're just shooting free throws a hundred of them Obviously the Systemic fatigue isn't going to be as much. We have external load here So getting tired recovery volume all these things matter more than in other sports But the concepts generally speaking of the same you play basketball for five hours on a Monday next Monday You spend another five hours, etc. Etc. Is that player going to get better than someone who's practicing an hour an hour and a half every single day? Obviously not you got to practice every single day get that repetition get that motor skill I'd say for the majority of folks is anywhere between two to four times a week You should be squatting some kind of lift that looks similar to your competition squad number two talking about squatting There's a lot of cues and we've gone over on the 50% of podcasts where people say like best cues worst cues And the truth is the cue is only as good as the person receiving and who you're communicating to a lot of people talk About pushing through your heels and squatting through your heels and leaning back and hips back and all these cues Which is good for a very beginner because often when you tell someone to squat They'll tend to be kind of like this They just don't know how to move their hips and knees at the same time and so their heels tend to raise But for anybody who's been squatting six months to a year They understand that your entire foot needs to be on the ground And I hate to obsess about the foot because I think it's one of the most Overrated things to have spoken about on the internet right now.  You're trying to control your hips in your knees from wobbling around You want to keep that bar over your midfoot? But I also want to keep my body over my midfoot and people always talk about bar path bar path bar path But if your body moves correctly the bar is going to be in the correct path, which is straight up and down Talked about it a bit in the deadlift video People for some reason think that your squat needs an insane amount of volume and crazy intensity But as soon as you deadlift with high volume or high frequency, you're gonna get obliterated just to Reiterate the myth your deadlift is a concentric only movement mean you're only pulling up We're not going down the squat We're doing both and people think the deadlift will tax your CNS and honestly it doesn't it goes back to point one The only reason it does is for most people you're lifting an overall heavier load on your deadlift because you're better at Deadlifting mechanics than you are the skill of squatting so with the squat though because it is more technical again We're talking about Frequency more often focusing in on our form finding our balance handling higher intensities in all lifts is a great tool The specificity if your goals to get stronger something like powerlifting to handle loads above 70% more often if you're squatting 50% all the time yeah You can build muscle and get some reps in when the load gets heavier or closer to your one rep max Often now our technique goes out the window so practicing once or twice a week handling loads 80 85 Maybe even 90% of our one rep max will allow us to mentally and physically get prepared to handle maxes better Ladies and gentlemen a little bit on the squat man leave your questions on the squat below We can go into more detail and more specific stuff talking about squat we go over form We can do whatever you all need appreciate you man We over me be a part of something big in yourself solid my new videos every Tuesday and Thursday catch in the next one


Välkomna till djuren, jag kommer att lämna lite svårigheter och eftersom det är en så viktig video jag kommer att lämna tillbaka. Jag har en bokkommendation. Västnärpris, nätring och fysisk degeneration. Så om du bara vill höra sången av den här speciella videon, jag kommer att lämna dig på att lämna den här bok. Så basically what the book is about is a study by a by dentist who during the last century went around the world to study the effects a modern diet had upon the health and in particular the teeth health of the populations who have gone from a more traditional diet to a modern diet and what he means with a modern diet and what I mean with a modern diet in this context is basically a diet full of refined carbohydrates. So for example sugars and white breads and all sugary things so jams for example and stuff like that. The sweet things which we all have a weakness to at least I have a particular weakness for sugary things but that is for another video. So his starting point was he saw the physical degeneration in the population of North America. So Canada and the United States and his thesis was okay maybe there is something wrong with the diet that causes these various maladies. And for him his starting point was to look at people's teeth and good teeth is an indicator of good health. So it's interesting for us if we're looking at overall health to look at teeth as well especially in younger children. So on to the studies at hand and yeah you can look upon in this book as well if you get it but I'll put some pictures up here on the screen. Basically he took a lot of pictures of the indigenous peoples who had continued to adhere to their traditional diets and took similar pictures of the people of same biocultural stock so to speak who had adapted a modern diet. And what he found among all of these different indigenous tribes so he went around the whole world to the Amazonas to the Inuit population to Australia. A lot of indigenous populations including Europe by the way he went out to the islands around Scotland to have a look there and basically wherever he went he saw the same pattern. The older generation or the people who had still maintained a traditional diet they were healthier and they had better teeth than the individuals who had started to adapt to a modern diet. So for example a traditional diet consisted of a lot of butter, cheeses, fish and that sort of stuff where he has a modern diet then consisted of a lot of sugar, white bread, sweets etc. So that was the distinction and he found that this didn't only lead to a generation in teeth health but also in regards to facial structure and other physical maladies. So yes very interesting book I read it a few weeks back and I have definitely it was good timing since I just have my little cuddle princess now so I have a bit more understanding of how to feed her in a good way. So basically yeah I'm trying to avoid a lot of carbohydrates to begin with and I will make another video on carbohydrates because obviously if we're trying to get juicy in the gym it's another thing entirely. Then you need some carbohydrates to break these stalls in the gym but as for children etc. focusing on more fats, more natural things like that rather than a lot of carbohydrates can be a good idea. Now I will also say that I do have a video planned on veganism so stay tuned for that where I will elaborate upon the health of a vegan diet or the lack of health of a vegan diet. It will be an intense video I am certain. Speaking of veganism and this book he did not find any vegan populations the populations who relied more upon vegetable sources they still went to great length to obtain certain sources rich in animal fats especially when it comes to fertility. So that might be something for any vegan who is struggling to be fertile basically if you had heard his teachings you should eat a lot of animal fats. So basically what we can learn from this book is if you want your children to develop good teeth, good jawlines and overall health adhering to a good diet don't let them eat sugar. I will do my utmost to keep my daughter away from sugar for as long as possible. It will be one hell of a task but I will do my best and my wife will do her best to try to stay clear of those sort of things until she is as old as possible basically. Now obviously sugar is such an integral part of our society it is hard but now it is no the dangers of it and especially for young children. I heads up for all parents I can definitely recommend this book obviously you can read up a lot online on this topic as well there is plenty of videos on it too. Book recommendation of the day I hope you found that informative and I hope my overview of it was reasonable enough but most I just wanted to make a video titled the name of the book so you can research it further. And as I said I will make more videos in the coming weeks talking about veganism, carbohydrates, fats and everything like that. So yeah thanks for watching XOXO BOOM!


My name is Jill Rogan, and I'm a speech-language pathologist. The strategy that I focused on was using peer models. So then they sent me a...do you remember? Wow! The peer model is a child that presents with stronger skills in an identified area than the peer that we're putting them with. Often the peer personality comes into it a little bit. You want somebody who can really make a connection with their peer and who the other peer is going to accept as a peer model. I don't think it's necessarily the child that has the best skills or might be at the top of the class. We often find that it's just the child that's maybe even the closest to the peer. Just that one step above the child that we're looking at supporting. The first step often is the identification of the peer models. And I think what happens is often teachers are looking for what the concerns are that a child presents with. And because there are children in the class that don't have really identifiable concerns at the beginning, they may not see the purpose. And we take a look at evaluations they've done and observations they've done and teachers start realizing that they can use peers in the classroom to help them and to support them in the work that they're doing with children. I think we all have to admit that our peers are important to us and even from an early age, children are interested in other children. And so I think the benefit is you take something that's already there and you just enhance it a little bit. So you're not having to introduce something artificial and you're also creating a connection socially and I think that's a benefit to all children and I think you're introducing a strategy that is sustainable. And so if we introduce this strategy at a young age, children can learn this and use this throughout their life. I think it benefits the model as well because I think there's a part of all of us that likes to be supportive and caring about another individual and I think as a peer model, I see children feeling really happy and good about themselves when they can help appear in the classroom. I think peer modeling is a strategy that's very easy. So it's one of my favorites and I think it's just one that's sometimes overlooked. But I find with my teachers that as soon as we mention it, we identify peers, we talk about how easy it is to do. It's small tweaks to a classroom routine. They look differently at how they set up their snack groupings while they're going to do snack anyway. So now they're thinking, oh, now who's in the snack group at that particular table? So when they're looking at doing a discussion at the carpet time and if they're thinking to themselves, I just need to allow a little bit more peer-led discussion. Some have to always facilitate that if I step back and allow children to start interacting with each other, it's much more fun and engaging. And so I think what happens with the use of peer models is the more you do it, the easier it becomes. I think anytime you give an opportunity to child to be a peer model, then they begin to assume more of a leadership role. I think they feel confident and confident about their abilities because all year we've been saying to them, thank you and highlighting what they do as being a positive thing and emphasizing what support they're offering. And so once I think you hear those kinds of comments as a child you recognize that you have something to offer. And I think that's what leadership really is.


On the line right now, we have Dr. Thomas Sergukin, the Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Dr. Wanda Peters, our Deputy Associate Administrator for Programs, Dr. Michael New, Deputy Associate Administrator for Research, Dr. David Burns, Acting Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration, Dr. Paul Hertz, our Astrophysics Division Director, Greg Robinson, James Webb Telescope Program Director, Dr. Craig Kundrow, Biological and Physical Sciences Division Director, Dr. Karen St. Germain, Earth Science Division Director, Dr. Nikki Fox, Heliophysics Division Director, Dr. Lori Glaze, our Planetary Science Division Director, Jeff Gramling, our Mars Sample Return Program Director, and John Lee, our Joint Agency Satellite Division Director. So we've got a lot of material to cover. Each of those people will give you an update on their area and we look forward to hearing from them. Go ahead, Thomas. Well, thanks so much, Greg. And I really am excited that all of you are spending some time with us. And of course, we're trying to share some important activities and achievements from across the Directorate. And I want to, before I launch into it, and sitting here on the title, which I just want to acknowledge that our country, I just had an election. And I want to tell you, of course, that I grew up in a country where we had elections and vote several times a year. And because of that, and also as a voting U.S. citizen for decades, I recognized the power that comes from allowing people to be actively involved in decisions that affect their well-being and offered a greater perspective or father or other's opinions. And I really want to thank all of you who voted just because I think it's so important as a citizen, engaged citizen, signed us to, in fact, voice that opinion. And I have to admit that I wish that U.S. had elections or votes more often, and here's why. Sometimes I worry, friends, that we risk being, living our lives in our respective places and kind of what amounts to individual bubbles. Sometimes isolated and grossed in our own perceptions, no matter who we are or what we think, we learn from this election about half of America, things different from us. And that's why we must affirm to actively invite all people into the important conversation of science, into a conversation that we're having so often, a conversation, frankly, that gives us hope. If there's anything that we've learned from these, from this year that we're in, is how much hope comes from science. The reason that I'm so sure that in a year, we will, many more of us will be at work, many more of us will be back to their work is because of science, because of the amazing individuals right now that are developing these vaccines and treatments that ultimately will, you know, again, get us back to something that's a lot more familiar to us than we are right now. I do believe that NASA has a unique and valuable perspective, because we really understand the value of great teams and that value of diverse thinkers to kind of achieve in science as a pursuit of valuable goals. And I want to acknowledge that challenge that we have that comes to really getting the public to understand and trust science. And so for many of us, science is about hope. And it's a great way about learning and having positive impact. And I just want to make sure that you understand that as a team, we want as we go and prepare for this transition that's ahead of us, I really want us to kind of really recommit that we, of course, are opening our hearts, showing empathy and really opening our communications to so many of them that currently, I would say, are not in the choir, at a choir in which we kind of generally share these messages. So I just wanted to say that upfront and just kind of tell you how excited I am to kind of get into 2021 with that to the next slide, Andrew. And before I launch into that, I just want to tell you what the three topics are and you can kind of see some of them. Of course, I'm going to talk about 2021 and then kind of really give half our friends, Wanda and Mike, Michael, give updates on the programs, the flight programs and research. And then the vision highlights and what I'm going to ask to do is our, I'm going to ask all of our division directors, people who are on here kind of experts to keep their cameras on just so we can benefit from seeing the team and also encourage them, of course, to engage as we go. Okay, so next slide, Andrew. Well, look at 2021. That's just a year ahead of us. It's just quite stunning. Of course, in February, we're going to land perseverance on Mars.  You know, of course, that this is a risky endeavor but our team is up for it. We have done all the work that we can to prepare for that and much work on the software side and otherwise is still going on. We couldn't be more grateful to be looking forward to this. In March, of course, we have OREX departing from its site where it is near Bennu. Of course, with a sample kind of all packed up and ready to come back to Earth and then come to the best labs we know, you know, here on Earth with us.  And then also goes T and JPSS. So we see astrophysics, you see planetary missions, Earth science missions getting ready. And then you see a peregrine and Nova sea which are these clips missions, you know, kind of in the middle of that experiment and God, then we have web, web kind of two decades in the making. And, you know, just so excited to have Greg at the helm of this 2021 is a year of science, kind of the likes of which we rarely have ever seen. And I look forward to that, that amazing opportunity and I hope you take the opportunity of using any one of those as well as many of the others that are not there, opportunities to talk about the story of science, the story of teams, the story of perseverance, the story of excitement and success and hope that science brings next. Well, so one of the most exciting things that I can do right now is talk to you about the calendar. You know, it's getting an end of November and we're getting ready with the calendar. And you know, this is what the title page is of the calendar and you see, of course, you know, the feeling, you know, immediately how she feels they're on top of that mountaintop, you know, spreading the arms after a long climb and you know, kind of achieving these goals, every one of which that I just showed in a little circle feels a little bit like that. And when we celebrate science, we celebrate those moments and we do so in the presence of our nature that the most beautiful planet we've ever seen, you know, our own and of course the universe around us, everything in between that we're starting here. The next slide is an indication that we're actually this year, we're actually also printing this calendar in Spanish as well, kind of we want to invite all of the United States, we want to invite all of our children to be using this calendar and kind of have it just like, I don't know what yours is, where yours is, mine is right in the kitchen where we eat or in near the dining. I guess we eat in the kitchen in case you wanna, you know, so right there is the calendar. So we see it and we look at it all the times together with its stories. And the next slide is gonna tell you how we're gonna handle that. So of course we have an online request form and I'm just gonna give you a heads up right now for all the 900 or near 1,000 of you are there, it's available right now. We're gonna give you the URL in just a minute and it's available. You can get it, you can sign up, you can get the calendar. We're also gonna, of course, for other conferences, we're gonna make these kind of the calendar available at the HU, for example, through the NASA Science Virtual Exhibit where you can go sign up at the NASA booth, so to say, similar or analog, analogous thing is true at the AAAS. And then other distributions and plans of major conferences aren't work for early in the years such as AMS and so forth. Stay tuned for future downhalls and conference websites for updates on how to get the calendar for those not participating in HU and AAAS. Again, an online request form will be available for the duration of this meeting. So let's just go cycle to it. Next slide. Here it is. Science.nasa.gov slash smd.calendar-request, which is nasa.science.gov slash smd.calendar-request. So this, take a picture with your phone quickly. It's open, you know, use the browser. Yes, you can do two things in parallel.  So I just think calendar is just amazingly beautiful and my gratitude goes out to the team that puts it together. I thought I want to celebrate that with you and just the amazing work that the team always does. I just absolutely love this. Next slide. Yeah, so what are you going to see as we go through is we're going to show you some of the pages of the calendar and our division directors, our experts will be getting one and we're doing it like we always do it, which is they speak about something which is not their job, kind of our hope is and our desire is especially as we go forward and always that we can pitch all of science. Sciences belongs together, whether it's biological and physical sciences, whether it's astrophysics or everything in between, we want to be able to pitch the science and what you're looking at is one of the pictures there of course, which says the night sky, but it also says heliophysics with that beautiful aurora up there from the space station. But it also says human space exploration, our partners who had just an amazing weekend, I don't know what you did during the launch. I sat there for over an hour with my family and you see of course here the SpaceX Dragon resupply vehicle. Of course, what's currently at the space station is an even more beautiful vehicle, which is the one that the four astronauts took up there. We remind ourselves of the 20 year anniversary of the space station with all the work with all the work that is there. I'm just going to say out loud, Mum Dawn colleagues, we hear that the calendar link is denied. So could you please make sure that it's opened up? Please update us later when it's open up and whoever is speaking can basically say to everybody otherwise we're going to keep it up later. So the point I'm trying to make is that of course we have 20 years of active research at the space station both on the inside, especially with biological and physical sciences and others, but also on the outside with multiple disciplines and that's what we're celebrating with this particular calendar image. Next slide. What I'm going to tell you before I turn over here is that you can go to the Twitter account with Dr. underscore Thomas C and there's a calendar links there that work. In the meantime, we're going to figure out how to get that link to you here and with that I'll turn it over to the next slide. Do you want I look forward to hearing your presentation? Go ahead. Okay, good afternoon everyone. You know, I wanted to just let you know that science mission director admissions are proceeding. We are rising to the challenge of working during a global pandemic. All of our civil servants, our contractors, our partners in academia as well as our international partners are all striving to meet our commitments in this environment. But we're doing it in a safe way. Has COVID impacted missions? Yes, we are not as efficient. There is a reduction in efficiency at the work sites. We have to put in protocols. We have to make sure that we distance to guarantee that people remain safe. But with doing that, we are achieving things and we are accomplishing things. One of the accomplishments that's to come is that we have a launch coming up this Saturday, the Centennial Six Microfrolig named after our Dr. Microfrolig that led our Earth Science Division for so many years. Are there some constraints in doing a launch? Yes, people have to be conscious about travel restrictions and we're taking all of that into consideration. We are also looking at how COVID impacts our projects from the standpoint of we have people still teleworking. And so when we're teleworking, sometimes when you are not getting up in the morning and going into the office, you tend to work long hours and not take breaks. So we're encouraging our workforce to take some time doing the workday at the lunchtime to actually step away from the computer get up, do something, rejuvenate yourself, think about something else, take a walk. If nothing else, just move away from the table or the desk or the office that you're in and go somewhere else within your home. We're also encouraging people to take time off because we've seen a reduction in people taking leave. This is the holiday season. Now, one of the things that the country is saying is that don't start gathering together because we want to maintain safety through this global pandemic. But we are encouraging members of the workforce to take some of those times off and to utilize their leave, reconnect with family and do things that will recharge them so they can come back into the workplace ready to continue the awesome work that they're doing. We're doing life cycle reviews and we're still doing key decision points. There are some challenges when it comes to doing those virtual type of activities, but actually as time has gone on where we started off at the beginning of this pandemic and where we are now, we have tools. A lot of you've seen some upgrades in the types of virtual tools that we're using for these meetings. So now we're able to do more sidebars and actually engage members more. Do we still have a way to go? Yes, we still have things that we need to improve on, but I would like to thank all of the feedback that we've received because people have been very innovative, creative as well as vocal and that's what we want you to do. Communicate when you see areas that we can constantly improve. So we're looking for that feedback. Feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions when it comes to these types of reviews and KDPs to improve the process. Welcome your input. We have had, we have missions that are about to go to KDP similar to our Mars sample return. Mars sample return is the next stage when it comes to Mars 2020. Mars 2020 will be landing in February as you saw on the chart in 2021 and gathering up samples. Well, our sample return is the mission that we'll be going to Mars to capture those samples and return them to the earth. We are also looking at missions like planetary mission of lunar trailblazer that is going through the process of being confirmed. So work is actually going and for lunar trailblazer it is looking at assisting us in understanding the form and abundance and the distribution of water on the moon and looking at lunar water cycles. So we're really excited about a lot of the work that we're doing. However, we have had some impacts with COVID. It has impacted both costs and schedule and we're looking at that. We're being very serious about that. We are not trying to place the missions at risk but we are really trying to look at both looking at reserves and adjust launch dates and use headquarters UFE as needed. Next slide, please. Now, talking about financial impacts, many of our missions will likely stay within the ABC and that's our agency baseline commitment. And as you can see on this list, we have several missions that will stay in place will stay in there and then we have some missions that we're seeing some challenges that will have some costs and schedule adjustments. And we're looking at that on a case by case basis and going through the proper means to address that. From an astrophysics perspective, a lot of the missions are largely being mitigated within their current reserve levels. And this may result in some increase in programmatic risk for our earth science divisions that we are seeing some challenges and most of those challenges will occur within our fiscal year 2022. So fiscal year 22 will be our challenging years for a lot of those activities. For heliophysics, we have a lot of our missions that are either in formulation or operation. So they were able to adapt to a lot of the COVID related disruptions. And but we are monitoring all of those. And planetary from a planetary perspective, it's very, very important for us to monitor what's going on because planetary missions have windows. They cannot just shift their schedule and alter it for a couple of weeks or a month or so. They have specific windows that they have to be able to launch within. So we have two planetary missions coming up for launch in 2022. That's dark and lucy. And we're doing everything to ensure that those missions stay on track as well as keep our people safe. Next. Okay, so I believe. Yeah, thank you, Wanda. This is Michael Nduse. That was my cue. Good afternoon, everyone. So last time we spoke, I talked about how SMD does not want the COVID-19 epidemic to derail the careers of future leaders. And we continue to focus on mitigating those impacts. We had spoken last time about a three-pronged strategy, and no strategy really survives contact with the real world. So given our funding constraint, SMD is going to prioritize augmentations and funded extensions, and we've set aside 15% of funding available for new awards for that purpose. I didn't come up with that number. That number was worked out with all the division directors talking to all of their own people. So the awards have the highest priority to be extended or augmented. Our awards that are either in the last year of their prime or last year of their first no-cost extension. These are awards that we will check to see that they've costed their funds in a timely manner. And we are explicitly aiming these funds at support of near-finition grad students and postdocs, including third-year NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellows, as well as non-tenured and soft-money early career researchers. Given our current funding constraints, NASA will continue to offer 124 NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellowships. And unfortunately, we are not planning right now on expanding that number to support new fellows or new term hires at centers. Of course, should supplementary funding you made available to SMD, we will go back and we consider all of these decisions. Next slide, please. So, you know, we used to go to virtual panels for all of our peer reviews. And by all accounts, I've heard they're doing quite well. These panels, virtual panels will continue right now. We've projected until June 1st of next year. And actually, we're thinking of continuing this practice, at least in part, even after in-person meetings cease to pose a health hazard. So we've found that it is sometimes easier to recruit evaluators for these panels when they don't actually have to travel. And it has, of course, reduced the carbon footprint of our evaluation processes. We've also done something brand new. It's part of our evaluation of concept study reports in our announcements of opportunity. We've now done six virtual site visits. In the previous years, when we did physical site visits, we would show up at a place. We'd spend seven hours or eight hours with the team and then disappear into the ether. What we've now done is we've allotted 10 hours for presentations over two days, which has slowed down the pace. We've gotten a very, very positive reaction from both our evaluators and the teams that we're evaluating. And we've started a... Try it if virtual sites should become the new standard once we can go back to doing physical visits. So I'll stay tuned for that information. Next slide, please. And I'll turn it back over to Thomas. Yeah, I think what we're gonna do next slide is immediately kick off the division highlights. And all these individuals are introduced. Dave, take it away. Thank you, Thomas. Next slide, please. This is the November image from the calendar. And so the way this worked is some of the presenters today were allowed to request images. And I requested this image. It's my first choice. This is really neat. It's a star formation region, about 160,000 light years away. And this is a composite image. So it was formed from both Chandra and Hubble data. The hot gas was detected by Chandra. And that's shown in purple and pink on the chart. And Hubble detected the gas and dust, which is kind of orange and light blue. And what's exciting in part about this is that this is part of what is referred to as multi-messenger astronomy, where you're taking multiple messages and putting together a more complete image. And to me, it's really exciting that after two decades, we're still learning how to use Chandra imagery as well as Hubble imagery in new ways. And it's fascinating to me to see how these incredible observatories still push the boundaries of science. Next chart, please. Wanted to give you an update on some of the things that we're doing in the Exploration Science Strategy and Integration Office. The first is we've recently released a solicitation, which is a payloads and research investigations on the surface of the moon, our prism. And the image in the upper right-hand side is Reiner Gamma, which is located on the near side. We're planning to go there in late 23. And then Schrodinger Basin, which is not shown. That's on the far side. And we plan to go there in 24. Prism is the call that we're gonna use to collect the instruments for those two deliveries. Step one proposals are due on the 11th of December. And step two proposals are actually due on the 3rd of February. So we've extended it 15 days. So it's no longer the 19th of January. We've extended that out to the 3rd of February. And we used a two-step process just to try to reduce the amount of writing that people do on the proposals early on. The middle part of this chart is basically our instruments, which are on track and they're progressing well. We have two deliveries planned for next year again. I did wanna highlight the middle image on the right-hand side, which is Task Order Two Astrobotic. That's an instrument that's going on that, which is a neutron spectrometer system or NSS. The image that you see are scientists at Ames Research Center, and they're using the payload interface mobile system, or PEMS, to check out the interface of the instrument. That way they don't have to ship it to the lander provider until they're sure that it passes the interface check. This was excited to see the work progressing, their social distancing, they're using personal protection equipment, but the work has been progressing and we're still on track. Then finally, the last bullet, which is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has updated their lunar quick map, and that's the image on the right-hand side at the bottom is an image of a basin on the moon, and you can see an impact basin, and you can see how slight changes in elevation can be very easily represented with different colors, and that makes it easier for people to get access to the data, as well as run experiments and be able to analyze it. So next chart, please. And thank you. Me, Dave. Right, so this is Paul Hertz, Director of Astrophysics, and my calendar image is the May image, and unlike Dave, who chose his favorite image, I volunteered to take whichever image was left over after everybody had chosen theirs. I locked out, I got this beautiful image of flames on the space station. So when you light a candle on the earth, the shape of the flame is driven a lot by the presence of gravity. That creates buoyancy, gives you that teardrop shape, whereas hotter at the top and cooler at the bottom, lets the air come in at the bottom, and the combustion products go out of the top. No gravity on the space station, you get spherical flames, and they look like this, this particular experience with ethylene, so the investigators wanted to create soot and see how the soot formed. One of the interesting things, of course, is that the flame will grow due to convection and radiation pressure, and the oxygen is coming in from the outside and being consumed, and when the surface of the flame gets to be just the right size, it gets to be kind of steady state, which I found really interesting, a balance of different kinds of physics. Okay, next chart, please. All right, a couple of highlights from Astrophysics. Top picture is a picture of the primary mirror for the Roman space telescope. The Roman is our next great observatory to follow the web space telescope. It's in full fabrication now. Hundreds and hundreds of places are developing the parts that will be assembled to make the Roman space telescope, and we're building up to our critical design review late summer, early fall of next year. The bottom picture there is a graphic from a recent science result where the Sophia Airborne Observatory used its farm for Ed camera to detect the sixth micron band of water on the sunlit surface of the moon. So this is a new place to find water on the moon. There's not very much of it, and it's apparently trapped in small glass beads that form from the impact of micrometeorites, but nevertheless, that's helping us get a better handle on the resources on the surface of the moon. And then finally, I'll point out the image on the right, which is the three telescopes for the Imaging X-ray Polarimeter Experiment, or XB, which we just approved to go into phase D. It's launch date got slipped a little bit because of slowdowns due to COVID. It's now on track for a launch next November. It's our next small explorer. We'll be the first telescope capable of detecting polarization in X-rays from multiple objects in our Milky Way galaxy. All right, let me pass the baton on to Greg Robinson. Thank you, Paul. And regardless of what my colleagues say, this is by far the best image in the calendar. So when you get your copy, just take my word for it and go through and validate what I'm telling you. So I'm gonna take about 30 seconds to tell you about an amazing mission before I tell you about another amazing mission. And so this is Solo Orbiter as a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA. It was launched just a few weeks before the direct effects of COVID kicked in. Launched in February of 2020. I still debate whether like night launches or day launches, but all of them are great. And this was launched from the Cape on an Atlas V. All the rockets look good and this one was certainly a perfect launch. Solo Orbiter carries 10 instruments and it actually studies something that I really love and that's our star without it, we wouldn't be here. So it gives us an up close and personal view and we contributed two of those 10 instruments and it also studies the poles of the sun. And the poles are pretty extreme whether they're on this planet or another planetary body. And of course, those extreme magnetic electric fields have an impact on our lives here on earth and certainly the rest of the solar system. So, and we're already getting really nice up close images from Solo Orbiter. So make sure you validate Sentom as a note and tell them you love this one most. Next slide. And this is the other amazing one. I would say the most amazing. So Solo Orbiter is my number two. So this is James Webb. It's just completed environments in this photo and it's back in the integration and test hobby. And in a couple of weeks or so, we will actually do the final deployment of the sun shield that tennis courts have sun shield. And over a two or three month period after that we will start folding up the sun shield for its final time and do all of the functional testing and getting ready to put it back into this configuration to pack it up for shipment next summer. So I'm looking forward to a launch just under 12 months from now. Next slide. And- Good afternoon, this is Craig Kunrat. This gorgeous picture from September comes to us courtesy of the Earth Sciences Division. This is the Great Bahama Bank. An image is about 25 kilometers across and 15 kilometers top to bottom. The water depth in the lower right is only a few tens of meters. And in the upper right it's headed towards, not at that depth yet, but it's headed towards the tongue of the ocean, which is about 2000 meters deep. The Great Bahama Bank is composed of white carbonate sand and limestone made up largely of coral fragments that started accumulating around 100 million years ago. Much more recently, this was dry land during past ice ages. So it weathered and features, therefore, caves and sinkholes and the like. The wave shape ripples are sand on the sea floor and the curves are following the shapes of underwater dunes. The blues and greens are sand and seagrass in different quantities and depths.  And this is a great way of assessing their health over time. This particular image was taken in February this year by the operational land imager on Landsat 8. Next slide, please. In BPS, so we're expecting our next decadal survey to be formally underway next month. In the meantime, the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research, also known as ASGSR, has started a series of six town halls to help the research community organized input to this decadal survey. And a link is provided here on the chart. So you can view past meetings or register for future meetings. And these town halls will be followed up by more detailed focused groups in January. Some of the highlights on the right, the cold atom lab continues to generate those Einstein condensates and novel configurations like this bubble geometry. We're starting the growth of rashes on space station and while you're watching them grow or waiting for them to grow, you can read the latest space biology solicitation which has just been issued this afternoon as part of Roses 2020. So with that, let's go to Karen St. Germain and see what image the provider of the Great Bahama Bank is going to tell us about. Thanks, Craig. It's great to be with you all today. And this is my favorite image from the calendar in addition to being just a really gorgeous image, all there's also some really cool stuff going on here and by really cool, what I mean is really hot. See what I did there? So this is an image taken by the high resolution normal imager, it's affectionately known as high C. And one of the interesting things about this is this is an image that was made from a sounding rocket out of white sands. So these sounding rockets, they go a lot for a few minutes and then they come back to earth. This is the highest resolution image ever captured of the sun's outer atmosphere, what we know as the corona. And what we see this structure, we can't normally see from the telescope so you look at the sun, these fine strands that you see they're in the neighborhood of 125 miles across and this structure was revealed for the first time in this image. And those strands are in the neighborhood of a million degrees, which is much, much hotter than the surface. Let's see, oh, and the other cool thing about this image is that the principal investigator, the program scientist and the instrument scientist on this project were all women. And in fact, the principal investigator Amy Weimbarter is now in detail in our own NASA core skill unit. So that's my favorite image. And also, even though we weren't supposed to talk about an image that was related to our own technical turf, the truth is that the sun actually drives nearly nearly everything we see in earth science. I'm often fond of saying the earth is a really fantastic system for taking the sun's energy and converting it into two things, food and weather. Anyway, all right, let's get back onto earth science. Next chart, please. So a few highlights for us, Wanda mentioned that we have the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich launch coming up this coming Saturday. Successfully completed its key decision point me on October 13th. I cannot say enough about the team. So I mean, Thomas opens talking about teamwork and science and this was an extraordinary accomplishment for this team. And it's a team that consists of NASA, JPL, ESA, UMETSAT, NOAA doing the execution, support from the European Commission. And the work it took to integrate the spacecraft during the pandemic meant incredible creativity in terms of remote observation and remote participation in integration activities. So extraordinary work. In parallel, we have put together a sea level rise campaign. So as many of you know, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich is primarily an altimeter mission, although it's got supporting instruments on board that measure attributes of the atmosphere and so forth. So in parallel with that launch, we launched a sea level rise campaign and you see the website there. You can go learn all about sea level rise, what we know about how it's happening, why it's happening, what the impacts are, and so forth. We also just recently completed in October our first all-virtual International Space Apps Challenge. The numbers we hit there were extraordinary. 26,000 plus registered participants from all over the world participating in this set of challenges based on NASA and partner data. You see the partners listed there. And so that was an extraordinary success for us. And we are in the process of judging the winners of the Space Apps Challenge. NASA also took over leadership of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites. This is an international organization that strives to coordinate Earth observation around the world, but also really make the information available to decision makers worldwide. And so as NASA took on the leadership role for one year term, that means I'll be chairing SEAS this year and we've got a fantastic NASA team that supports that activity. And then a couple of other things that are notable, we are well into the integration of the NASA ISROS Synthetic Aperture Radar. This is another partnership mission where we are integrating two different synthetic aperture radars. And again, muscling our way through some challenges in dealing with the pandemic as we integrate components that are built in again in the US and India. And then the other client I'll wrap up by noting the Satellite Need Working Group. This is an inter-agency activity. It's a whole of government approach to making NASA observations most impactful to meet many of our national challenges that are tackled by the other agencies around the US government. So we're in our third round of soliciting the needs from the other agencies and looking for ways for NASA to support them. And with that, I will hand off to my friend, Nikki Fox. You can take it away. Thank you so much, Karen. So I have the February image and I'm excited about this one. It is, of course, I think everybody knows it is Aracoff. But it was taken by the new Horizon Science team. He's in data from Hubble Space Telescope and it's a very small Kuipe Belt object at the edge of our solar system. It was named, it's the Native American term for sky and it became the most distant and most primitive object ever explored by a spacecraft when new horizons flew past it in January of last year. I find it particularly exciting because in video physics, of course, we study everything all the way out to the very edge of our heliosphere and even beyond into solar space. And so to actually be able to see an object that is so far away, but yet still in the heliosphere to me is amazing. It's about 44 times further away from the sun than the Earth is. And it's about 22 miles in length.  And so I just find it amazing that we're seeing something that's so far out. And it's also a mission that's very close to my heart as I was actually on the original proposal team. And so I love to see a planetary and heavenly earth in so closely together. I'll go to the next chart, please, Andrew. And then continuing with the cross-division theme, Parker Solar Probe, of course, just completed her sixth perihelion in September. But what I'm really excited about is perihelion number seven, which is coming up in January. It is totally visible from the Earth. And so we are very much looking forward to having yet another great ground-based campaign when all of our solar observatories, and in fact, all of our ground-based observatories, if you can, turn on and capture those, it's about 11 days as she goes across the front face of the sun. As we come out of that perihelion, it is our busiest orbit. We are looking to our astrophysics colleagues to help us again as we do a Venus flyby. And we love Keck to come on again and support that. So I just love this because it's Helio working really closely with Astro to benefit planetary. And so, you know, it's just wonderful. And in fact, using a ground-based observatory, so I got all four of the divisions in there. Solar Orbiter released their first data, showing absolutely amazing, amazing details of the sun. We bought a launch vehicle for IMAP. Pleased to say that Hermes is starting to go through the instruments there have gone through their single design reviews. Icon Happy Birthday for last month. And my favorite bullet on here, on October 31st, we actually heard back from Voyager 2. So even further out than Arakoth is Voyager 2 out in interstellar space. Thank you so much to our wonderful DSM team for getting all those upgrades done and getting our spacecraft back online. And with that, I'm delighted to hand over to Laurie to tell us about her image. Great. Thanks so much, Nikki. This is actually an image from the December part of the calendar. And I was so excited when I saw this image of Mount St. Helens in the calendar for 2021. I know you've heard that we were all supposed to select an image from a discipline that's not our own, but I have to admit that I kind of cheated on this one because I have a personal connection with Mount St. Helens. I actually experienced the eruption of Mount St. Helens on the morning of May 18th, 1980 firsthand when I heard the eruption while I was living in Bellevue, Washington. And looking back on that eruption and that activity at that time, it turned out to be a key event that actually led me to pursue a career in volcanology, first earth, terrestrial volcanology and ultimately planetary volcanology and planetary science. So very impactful for me personally. So observing Mount St. Helens over those years now, the 40 years since that eruption has really informed how we think about the resiliency of nature following a disaster like a volcanic eruption. This particular image was captured by the operational land imager on Landsat 8. And the image was taken just earlier this year in April, nearly 40 years after the blast. And these landsite satellites have been acquiring images of Mount St. Helens for almost five decades from before the eruption, following the eruption and up to the current time. And over time, the researchers are being able to watch as the plants and the trees have started to repopulate the area and are inching closer and closer to the volcano as the land begins to recover. So an incredible opportunity to really watch in detail how nature recovers after one of these events. So with that, I'll go on to my next slide, which has a couple of highlights from Planetary Science. And I'll just hit some of the highlights on this one. Osiris-Rex is really our big highlight over the last month. On October 20th, Osiris-Rex successfully collected a sample from the surface of the asteroid Bennu. It was just an amazingly incredible event by the, an accomplishment by the Osiris-Rex team navigating a spacecraft 200 million miles away and hitting a target within a meter of the specified destination where they wanted to collect that sample. The afterwards, after the sample was collected, the spacecraft retreated from Bennu and they were able to take images of the sampling head and it appeared that we had collected so much sample that we were actually leaking some of the material out of the sample head. And so decision was made to promptly stow the sample head away in the sample return capsule, which is shown in the lower right. And that was all sealed up. And now Osiris-Rex, as Thomas mentioned at the top of this briefing is now awaiting for the planets to align in the spring so that it can begin its journey back to Earth. I also wanted to note that March 2020 Perseverance is now over halfway to Mars. Of course it is set to arrive in February, on February 18th for that entry descent and landing down to the surface of Mars. So we're anxiously awaiting that as our next big event in planetary science. We've had a variety of really exciting things going on. You can read through the slide. The one thing I really wanted to mention to this community is that our New Frontiers 5 community announcement was released on November 5th. Please take a look through that announcement. It includes many of the basic parameters, including estimated cost caps and the allowable target destinations. This is an initial community announcement intended specifically to engender conversation and dialogue with the planetary science community. We intend to engage in dialogue with the community over the next several months that will help inform a final community announcement that will come out later next spring with more specific details that will guide what we expect will be in the announcement of opportunity when it comes out. We expect the draft announcement of opportunity be released next fall in 2021 with the final release in the fall of 2022. And with that, I am going to hand it over to Jeff Gramling to talk about Mars sample return. All right, thanks, Lori. So January's image is a Hubble image and of course they continue to be spectacular even for a non-scientist for me who it's more like art. But so this colorful image resembles a cosmic version of an undersea world teaming with stars. This was released to commemorate Hubble's 30th anniversary this past April, I believe, of viewing the wonders of space. And this Hubble portrait, the red giant nebula, NGC 2014 in its smaller blue neighbor, NGC 2020 are part of a vast star-forming region in the large Magellanic cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located 163,000 light years away. This image is nicknamed the cosmic reef because it resembles part of a coral reef floating in a vast sea of stars. It's just spectacular. All right, next page, please. So it's been a busy three months on Mars sample return and in that time, we've gotten quite a bit done. I'm really proud of the team. We started off, we commissioned an independent review board and we finished up that activity. The report was released last week. And in parallel with that, towards the tail end, we also completed a five or six day. We spread it out because of the COVID impacts and everybody being spread out all over the country. We completed our mission concept review. So we're on our way to start phase A in January and we're pretty excited about that. So next I'm gonna hand it over to John Lee to talk about Joint Agency Satellite Division. Hi, I'm John Lee. I'm the director of Joint Agency Satellite Division where we do reimbursable work on behalf of NOAA, which NASA builds. And so the image that you see here is a composite image taken from, the data taken from VIRS instruments, which are actually on the SUMI NPP satellite as well as NOAA 20. And just noting that there's blue bodies of water except for the one right in the middle, which is the Black Sea. And the Aquamarine Q, they believe is caused by phytoplankton called cocalithophores. And that's it for this image. And so I'll turn it back to Thomas. Well, thanks so much, John. I already mentioned that two launches that are on your calendar for next year. And of course, we're getting back to the calendar URL that now works. Many of you have noticed, we've told it on social media, here it is. It's gonna be open till five o'clock. Gray, I'll turn it to you for Q and A. Okay, thanks, Thomas. So the first question, I think you touched on a little bit at the top, is how does a change in the US administration generally affect NASA policies about budget, future mission planning, private sector funding, et cetera? That's probably for you, Thomas. Well, first of all, I appreciate the question. The one thing that I've really come to appreciate at the deep level, working here at NASA, and remember like so many of our people are colleagues who are calling in. I also wasn't at NASA until like four and a half years ago or so, what I've come to appreciate is how bipartisan the support really is of NASA. And so even though I'm sure there's gonna be some changes that are there, I just wanna tell you that we're convinced that, especially as it comes to the science program, as we're half it here and that we're talking about, is we've really benefited and we've enjoyed kind of bipartisan support of that. So what exactly the changes will be, we don't know, of course, we have not really gone through the process that we're now is ahead of us. But I just wanna tell you that there's a lot of things that are gonna be the same, our dependency, our reliance on the decadals, our focus on competitive research, our commitment to the values that we've talked about, including the values that relate to teams, to our behaviors and so forth. That's really all I'd like to say, right? Okay, thanks, Thomas. And I know Michael New had talked a little bit about this, but there is a question about the funding for planetary RNA programs being reduced 15% to cover expenses for COVID augmentation awards. How was the size of the program calculated? What institutions were determined to be in most need of this support and on what basis? Michael, do you wanna take a stab at that or is that someone else? Well, I can take a stab at that. Oh, yeah, Lori, go ahead. Yeah, just to provide some clarification because I think there's some misunderstanding. As Michael indicated when he was speaking and he can clarify or amplify, is that the 15% is not of the entire RNA budget. It's actually a 15% of the new awards, the funding that's available for new awards. So I think that there's a bit of a miscalculation in the question there. But yes, the 15% is from the new awards. And I don't know, Michael, if you wanna address some of the other aspects of the question about, you already discussed the importance of trying to support the at-risk members of our science communities. Yeah, happy to jump in. So we didn't determine institutions that would be supported. There will be, unfortunately, it's been delayed. There will be a solicitation coming out in Roses, hopefully next week, but I can't promise that. That will call for proposals for funded extensions and augmentations. It will evaluate those proposals based on the priorities we assigned earlier on in SPD 36 and the ones I enumerated earlier in this talk. So it's gonna be on a grant basis, not on an institution by institution basis. As Lori said, it's 15% of the funds available for new awards, not the whole RNA program. And I didn't make this up. This number came from discussions with Lori and Stephen Reinhart and their opposite numbers in the other science divisions of SMD. And that was the number they felt they could provide. We attempted to bound that number through a call for expressions of interest. We received like a hundred or more expressions of interest as I've said in other venues, totaled way more than we could afford, which is why we've had to reduce the eligibility for this program, this program element that's coming out. Okay, thanks you guys. There's a related question. Why have planetary RNA selection rates decline from 20% to 10%? Yeah, and this is a question that is of as much concern to me as it is to everyone else. And the specific program that I'm sure is being referred to there is the Solar System Workings, which of course is one of our biggest core program within planetary science. And it did have significantly lower selection rates this year. We've talked about this, both Stephen Reinhart and I have talked about this several times in public through our PAC meetings and other venues. The challenge has been that over the last couple of years, there were some cuts that were made to the overall RNA budget that impacted the awards that were made. There were some awards that were made that didn't have sufficient funding and were relying on some funding from the subsequent year to cover the awards that were made. We are making an adjustment in this year to correct that so that we are funding out of the year that the awards are intended. And so we are, and we're also working to try and increase the amount of funding that's available for the SSW. So we're very hopeful to try and see increased selection rates in the coming years. I will note that the numbers of proposals that continue to come in continues to increase substantially and the individual cost, the average cost of each of those proposals also continues to increase. And so even with flat budgets, we're going to see decreasing selection rates with these types of increases in both the numbers of proposals and the requested funding for each of those proposals. We recognize it's a challenge. We know it's one of our biggest challenges in the coming years is to address that and find a way to make improvements. Thank you for the question. Thanks, Lori, and we are running a little short on time, but we're going to stick with Planetary for just one more question for the moment. It's about the operation of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, asking or noting that USRA has been granted another extension for the operation of that and wondering if there is a CAN or RFP forthcoming about that. Right, yes. And so, yes, there was an extension that was granted the Planetary Science Division determined in consultation with an approval by the grants policy division at NASA headquarters that the most appropriate course of action was to begin the competition for LPI in early to mid 2022 with a nominal start date and summer of 2023. So, yes, you can expect to see a solicitation at some point for that next competition for the Lunar and Planetary Institute. The decision to delay followed a clear train of logic that resulted in need for that three-year extension to the current cooperative agreement. That was due to, in large part, the 35-day government shutdown in early 2019, followed by some leadership changes at NASA headquarters that made it impossible to complete the competition in the full way that we would want to have run that before that current agreement expired. So that was primary motivation for putting that extension in place. But again, in answer to the specific question, yes, there will be a call coming up, as I said, in 2022. Thanks, Lori. Okay, Paul and probably Lori, what is NASA doing to prepare for the recommendations from the Astro and Planetary Decadals, especially if they are bold? Well, I'll start off. In astrophysics, we certainly are hoping that the decadal survey will be, will give recommend ambitious program of astrophysics the next decade. That program might include a flagship, a medium-class probe mission, and RNA and technology development, as well as small missions. We have in place the structure for the smaller ones. We have the studies in place that we can leverage off of for the next flagship. And we are putting in place the management structures we will need to manage what we assume will be an extensive pre-formulation period of trade studies, architectural trades, and technology maturation, before we'll be ready to begin formulation of our next flagship, the one that will follow the Roman Space Telescope. We're also looking forward to a recommendation for a medium-sized probe mission. And we are preparing for a potential AO if the decadal survey recommends a competitive probe program. And from the planetary side, we are of course just kicking off our decadal survey. They've really begun in earnest over the last month or two. And we are really looking forward to and excited about whatever they may come back with. As you know, we are currently, we just launched Mars 2020. We're working on Europa Clipper as the next flagship mission and then following that Mars sample return. We're really hoping that the next, the decadal survey will provide guidance on what's the next flagship after Mars sample return. They've got a lot of great options in front of them. We've provided them with several mission concept studies for consideration that are in that flagship class. And so we're looking for guidance there. We're also providing them with mission concept studies related to new frontiers targets and hoping for recommendations in that area as well of the new directions that new frontiers should follow in the coming decade. And we're, you know, as I said, looking forward to those next recommendations and starting to put the planning in place to be able to support whatever they recommend. Okay, thanks, Lori. And we are over time. So this is going to be the last question. I apologize. There are so many good questions in the list. So just send them to us, keep sending them to us and keep coming to our town halls. We'll answer as many as possible. We've touched on this, but I don't know if we've answered this exact question. Are there any updates about when the SMD call for COVID augmentations and funded extensions will be released? Very, very soon. Okay. There's literally one approval standing between it and release. Okay, thank you, Michael. Thomas, do you have any closing words for our town hall today?  I really appreciate that you did. I thank the team for doing the work to support this community. And I really want to encourage everybody to keep communications open. I need to say we're still learning a lot working in this environment, but also, frankly, are benefiting from your feedback as you give it to us, whether it's in this through questions or directly to any one of the colleagues who will stare. So I want to thank the team for this, everybody on the staff that helped prepare it. And I will remind everybody for another 50 minutes the calendar link remains active that you've looked at here for several minutes. So thanks everybody, thanks, Craig, back to you. All right, thank you, everybody. This is going to conclude our town hall meeting for now and look for another one in a few weeks. Thank you very much.


The world will not accept any longer this bigotry and prejudice that exists on this world. Hi, my name is Deborah Mandela. I am the chairman of the Africa Rising Foundation, an organization geared towards empowering the youth of Africa to become the next generation of leaders, to empower themselves to be at the forefront of Africa's development. Do you think race relations, racial equality in the US is getting better or worse, and why? Well, I think it is quite clear that race relations in America are getting worse. And it is not doing us any better that we have the current president that we have, who seems to be hell-bent on creating more division amongst our people. And it's going to be very difficult to work through these race relations with the current administration at the helm. And so it is up to us as normal citizens, organizations, NGOs, civil society to do as much as we can and make sure that we unite so that when we do decide to create whatever action that we create that we send a serious message to the current administration that we as the people of the world will not accept any longer this bigotry and prejudice that exists on this world. So I call for unity.  Those who believe in civil rights. Those who believe in a united world. I urge you to come together, forget about your differences, and let us send a message of hope, of unity, of prosperity.