Requesting A Letter

You are writing a proposal for NASA (or other agencies) and you need a letter from the PDS about archiving (some of) your data into the PDS. Where will you even start? Who do you contact? What PDS Node your data will go into?! Relax, it is not that hard, but please don’t wait until your proposal’s due date to request a letter.

Big Picture

This article is just to get you started. The PDS has an official page with all of the details and helpful information needed for data proposers, Information for Data Proposers. This is where you can get all of the most up to date information needed for your NSPIRES proposals.

How do I get a letter from PDS for my proposal?

Guess what? There is an url (links), which will get you to a page where you can download the form, fill it out, and send it back to the appropriate PDS Node. There is a list at the back of the form which will help you to send it to the right one. But don’t stress too much. People at different PDS Nodes do talk to each other. If we receives a form that is more appropriate for another Node, it will be forwarded to that Node.

Again, this will add a little bit of extra time, so you have to submit the form at least one week before the proposal due date. We get a lot of requests for letters for proposals of big NASA programs and for some like PDART, letters are mandatory, and we also work on other things than just sending out letters. And guess what, sometimes we need more information from you, hence, the one week deadline, so that we can iterate if necessary. And please make sure that the information in the form is the same as in your Data Management Plan (DMP). It does not look great to the reviewers if the letter from PDS contradicts what is in your DMP.

Let’s look at the Form

Oh no! The form is a .docx and I don’t have the right software. Dont worry, you can just send us a plain text file with all the information requested.

Now to the form:

• Lines 1-6 are really easy to fill in and should be self-explanatory.
• Line 7 is a little bit more involved. You should know what kind of data products you are proposing to submit to the PDS. If you are not sure if a data type is accepted in PDS4, check out links which is rather technical or contact your Node (see, that is why we need at least one week.)
• Line 8 is a rough estimate of the total data size. We really do not need an exact number, but we will need to know if it is a few MB or more like in the 10TB range.

And that is it!

Good luck with your proposal and you will hear from us once you habe been funded.