On 15 December 2021, NASA released the NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research (R3) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) … or R3-NOFO.

The goals of R3 are to provide a streamlined method to address research issues important to NASA, and to enable NASA EPSCoR researchers to work with NASA to solve research issues impacting the Agency’s programs/missions. The Rapid Response Research (R3) program is an attempt to implement research within NASA and commercial partners to address technical issues. This opportunity will allow EPSCoR researchers to work alongside NASA and commercial partners for up to one year and is intended to strengthen the bonds among EPSCoR jurisdictions, NASA, commercial partners, and other entities.

This is a “bundled” solicitation => the main opportunity announcement has within it a specific set of topic areas (Appendices A – K) and each with a set of narrowly defined Research Topic items.

Proposals are short (2-3 pages), funding is $100K per proposal, period of performance is 1 year, no cost sharing required.

NOTE: Mississippi can only submit 1 proposal for each of the 11 topic areas, and all proposals have to be submitted by the jurisdiction Director (Dr. Nathan Murray) through NSPIRES.

Please find the full solicitation at https://nspires.nasaprs.com/ under opportunity number NNH22ZHA004C.

In order to coordinate a Mississippi-wide response to this opportunity, interested researchers are requested to submit a Notices of Intent using the TypeForm survey available in the link below:

https://nmurray.typeform.com/to/IXZLHqOU

The NOI form asks for contact information, topic area alignment, and a short abstract for the proposal (max 4000 characters).

The deadline for submission of a NOI is 19 January @ 5pm … the form will close to new submissions after that.

The number of submissions in a given topic area will determine if a down-selection review is needed.

Tentative timeline for the R3 NOFO Opportunity:

• NASA Solicitation Released => 15 Dec 2021.
• NOI due to Mississippi NASA EPSCoR Director via TypeForm link => 19 Jan 2022.
• Notification to Proceed => 31 Jan 2022.
• Proposals Due to UM => 25 Feb 2022.
• UM ORSP Review Complete => 11 March 2022.
• UM Submit => 15 March 2022.