NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Grants are one of the primary ways that “individual investigator” astronomy is funded in the United States.  This means that astronomers form their own teams (or go solo) and pitch ideas to the National Science Foundation for future directions of research. 

The NSF then appoints anonymous panels of referees (composed of astronomers from the same field as the proposals)  to evaluate the intellectual merit and broader impact of each idea.  These panels then rank the proposals, and the NSF then allocates money based on those rankings, the needs of the investigators to perform the research, and compliance with NSF rules.  This money is used to pay astronomers’ salaries (and tuition and stipends for graduate students), purchase equipment, travel to telescopes and conferences, pay page charges for publications to journals.  This process is very competitive (that is, the grants are highly oversubscribed).

This year, one of my proposals will be for funds to support my graduate student Jason Curtis on his study of the Galactic Cluster Ruprecht 147.  You can read more about the cluster and its importance to astrophysics here.