NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has an Announcement of Opportunity for anExplorers Mission in the Fall/Winter of 2010. The AO is expected in the lateSummer/early Fall of 2010. NASA GSFC is seeking a partner to provide a spacecraft withrelated spacecraft subsystems for a potential proposal. The potential GSFC Explorermission is designed to meet the science goals of the Explorer Program, as currentlyunderstood. GSFC mission teams will be submitting proposals to the Explorers AO currently scheduledfor release in Fall 2010. The AO is a two-step process, with the first proposal responsebeing primarily focused on the merit and feasibility of the science objectives of theproposed mission. The initial submissions will then be down-selected, and the resultantsubset of proposals will be funded to perform Phase A concept studies. During Phase A,proposals will be expanded and refined to detail the entire end-to-end mission life cycleconcept, with greater attention to engineering implementation. While the AO schedulecannot be specified at this time, the following is estimated based on earlier AOs andrelated missions:AO release Fall 2010Proposals due Three months after AOPhase A selection Nine months after AO releasePhase A concept study report Twelve months after selectionMission selection Sixteen months after selectionLaunch Readiness Date NLT 31 December 2018There will be no exchange of funds between the teaming partners for the AO proposalcycle. If the proposed mission is selected for a Phase A Concept Study, limited fundingwill be available according to the budget developed during proposal preparation. If theproposed mission is selected for flight, partner(s) will be funded according to thebudget developed during AO proposal phase.For the portion of this partnership opportunity dealing with the preparation of theinitial submission to the Explorer AO there will be no exchange of funds between theteaming partners. Funding will be available for Phase A and subsequent phases should themission be competitively selected for those additional phases.Notice of Interest shall be sent to [email protected] via email with Notice ofInterest in the subject line, a simple sentence or two expressing interest and an emailand address to send further information. For purposes of this partnership opportunity,the GSFC Explorer Team contact is [email protected], 301-286-7255, and backup [email protected], 301-286-8340.The requested information through this POD is for preliminary planning purposes only anddoes not constitute a commitment, implied or otherwise, that NASA will solicit thesubmitter for a procurement of any related effort in the future. NASA will not beresponsible for any costs incurred by submitters in furnishing this information. This solicitation/synopsis is not to be construed as a commitment by the Government norwill the Government pay for the information solicited. An ombudsman has been appointed.See Internet Note B. The documents for this partnership opportunity will be inMicrosoft Office Suite (Word 6.0, Excel 5.0, or PowerPoint 4.0) format and will reside ona World Wide Web (WWW) server, which may be accessed using a WWW browser application. The WWW address, or URL, of the NASA/GSFC Business Opportunities home page ishttp://procurement.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/EPS/bizops.cgi?gr=C&pin=51. It is the offerors responsibility to monitor this cite for the release of thePartnership Opportunity Document and amendments (if any). Potential offerors will beresponsible for downloading their own copy of the Partnership Opportunity Document andamendments, if any. Any referenced notes can be viewed at the following URL:http://genesis.gsfc.nasa.gov/nasanote.html.

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