A new science readiness level standard for space science investigations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents a new Science Readiness Level (SRL) Standard that has been developed at the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) for universal application to all space science investigations. Other authors have recognised that the traditional mission management process that relies on Technology Readiness Levels as the main tool to track mission maturity is missing important elements when it comes to science missions, and this is discussed. The motivation for developing a useable new science readiness assessment tool for missions of scale from CubeSats to flagships, in configurations as diverse as satellite constellations and ground-based instrument networks, with operations that can be robotic or crew-enabled, and with investigations that can range from traditional remote sensing to rover wet chemistry laboratories, is described. Universality of the derived SRL standard is achieved by assessing the quality and maturity of three independent elements of success that don’t depend on the type of science, the project management structure, or the scale of the project: (1) the baseline investigation (2) the science success strategy, and (3) the science plan. Using language from NASA’s Standard Principal Investigation-led Mission Announcement of Opportunity Template and in deliberate alignment with the European Space Agency (ESA) Earth Observation SRL scale, the final level of Science Readiness assesses Science Impact, underlining that the scale does not assess readiness simply to operate in the space environment, but readiness to deliver advances in knowledge associated with specific science objectives. Two examples are provided to illustrate the application of the Standard to investigations from different science disciplines and of widely different scope: a notional “FireSat” Cubesat mission, and a notional future “Mars life detection investigation at a methane seep”. It is expected that the CSA SRL Standard will evolve using lessons learned from users, and to align with evolving science practice and policy. The discussion addresses the international nature of science missions and science instrument contributions, suggesting value in convergence towards an international SRL standard.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it