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The term decadal survey is sometimes used for a survey of ideas regarding valuable scientific effort over roughly the upcoming decade. The product of such efforts is typically white papers (papers explaining some method or proposal) proposing major research areas, efforts and missions, with the notion of providing input into future efforts, and the relevant funding decisions. Such efforts may be initiated and/or sponsored by funding agencies, basically soliciting ideas and concepts, and NASA has occasionally organized the collection of such ideas (particularly those anticipated to involve NASA) and has come to used the term decadal survey for them. During the effort, interested groups of scientists share white papers they produced inclusion, and the decadal survey effort completes by officially selecting and publishing a set of them. Over the following years, it is considered an advantage to show the relevance a funding proposal to the stated priorities in the decadal survey. Some results of such NASA-efforts regarding astrophysical research:
NASA's science efforts also includes Earth science, for which NASA has organized another series of such decadal surveys, as well as separate such efforts for planetary science.