Forwarding an email that was sent out today by Dmitri Titov, Venus Express PI. Cross reference with http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=3597.
QUOTEDear Colleagues,
the General Assembly of the European Geophysical Union (EGU) will be held on April 15-20, 2007 in Vienna, Austria. The Symposium PS 2.1 "Venus Express: one year in orbit", included in the science Programme, will be focused on presentation and discussion of the results obtained during the first year of the orbital mission. Please find the description of the Symposium at the end of the e-mail and visit the EGU Web site: http://meetings.copernicus.org/egu2007/ for more details about the Assembly.
We would like to encourage you to take part in the Symposium and to submit contributed abstracts. Please note that the deadline for abstracts submission is January 15, 2007.
Best regards
Dima Titov and Hakan Svedhem,
The Conveners
_________________________________________________
On April 11, 2006 Venus Express-the first European satellite at Venus- was inserted in orbit around the planet and began collecting data. The results of the first year of observations will be presented at the Symposium. The Programme will consist of solicited talks focused on the Venus Express observations and contributed presentations of the preliminary data analysis. The contributions related to the physics of Venus atmosphere, its plasma environment and the surface and based on the analysis of the data from Venus Express and earlier missions, theoretical studies and numerical modelling are highly welcome. Perspectives of the future Venus exploration will be discussed.
Convener : D. Titov (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany) Co-convener : H. Svedhem (ESA/ESTEC, The Netherlands)
[...]
"VE is a failed mission."
On the contrary, it's just a nuisance to us space fans.
I'm personally not interested in atmospheric dynamics or composition, but I know it's important, and waiting won't hurt it. The surface temperature mapping will be interesting for filling a few blanks in topo maps at low resolution, and might hit the jackpot with dtection of volcanism. It doesn't matter if we wait a year or more for the data, it matters that it's being collected.
I hope the people who are involved with Venus Express (and ESA in general) will release more images more quickly in future, but to call Venus Express a failed mission is unworthy of UMSF.
Phil
A PR failure - but not a failed mission by any stretch of the imagination and I'm dissapointed to see people HERE who can't see beyond poor PR.
Doug
True it is only a PR failure and apart from the PFS deployment problem it is very much a success for which I am very glad.
However I do not think that some persistent nagging about the paucity of their publich outreach is out of place and it is surely very much appropriate to point out here that ESA continues to miss significant marketing opportunities by failing to engage the public in its missions.
Oh - we all know that ESA is just utterly utterly crap out outreach. Just look at the efforts of people like Alan Stern, Steve Squyres, Marc Rayman, the HiBlog guys. Taking the time to fill us in - giving the tax payer a true sense of what these missions are about, what they're doing, why they're doing it etc etc. Now show me a single European PI or Co-I or infact just about anyone doing an ounce of that.
Yes - the Cassini team, outside of Ciclops and perhaps Radar is lacking, MSSS are dragging their feet with MARCI and CTX - does MCS even work, - but those are blots on an otherwise very good and indeed improving record. ESA's record is just a big blot from top to bottom.
Difficulty is that because ESA is the managerial equiv. of distributed computing - there being no answerable central outreach or educational body involved, no obligation (and absolutely NO money) for each instrument team to do any of this...and worse still there isn't actually anywhere to go to complain about it. There isn't a PAO to moan at, or even a Politician to go to. I have emailed every single email address relating to HRSC that I can find regarding the release of DEM's ( I know as a fact that they are generated in near real time on the ground after data reception ) or even just map projected versions of all HRSC channels, which again, I know are sat on servers within the HRSC team's infrastructure. Not a single damn reply from anyone (and these are email addresses I know to be valid). When was the last time you heard anything from SPICAM or MARSIS or, indeed, anything on Venus Express apart from what, a small handfull of images. Where's the 'image of the week' or 'PI Perspective' - Where's Smart 1's images - it's just mind blowing that this stuff is not getting shown to the public. I have to stress to people when showing them HRSC pictures in the UK that they were taken by a European spacecraft...."really - I thought only the Americans did that". That...is unforgiveable.
Doug
Yes - but there IS someone to observe the event - the scientists on the instrument teams ARE seing this stuff going on - they're just not telling anyone about it.
The apple falls, it's measured by scientists, written in their notebooks -but they don't think to publicise the fact.
Doug
Since this old chestnut has come up again: I thought the following snippet from a http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/sig-event-details.cfm?newsID=693 last year was interesting in this connection (my emphasis):
I think that in the US the space community long ago woke up to the idea that with no bucks, there will be no Buck Rogers - whether manned or unmanned - and that to get the bucks the taxpayers have to see some return (questions of pork etc notwithstanding). In the European context, things are still very cosy, and there's less need to strive for survival - when it's Buggin's turn for funding, out it rolls (oh, and if you're a heretic with a Beagle-ish project you'll never be welcome, and whatever slight funding you're pleased to have will always be just sufficient to cause a convenient failure!).
Don't start me on ELDO. That'd be a rant, and us UMSFers don't do rants, oh no!
Bob Shaw
[...]
A question: who does all the outreach for the MERs etc? Who actually made the software for image viewing, wrote the articles etc and how do they get payed? Of course some PIs like Squyres, Bell and Stern do a lot of work themselves, something I haven't seen much in the EU (Pillenger maybe).
Maybe in Europe it somehow isn't essential to do good PR in order to get funded.
BTW: isn't there a thread about this already? maybe we could have only the VEX discussion here...
I have said this before and I am going to say this again.
The constant ESA bashing that is a persistant part of this board makes me really, really angry. It is utterly unneccessary, completely pointless, and based on an arrogant assumption that what NASA does everybody else should do. Just about every discussion about an ESA mission on this board has its obligatory childish whine about about their PR than than becomes several pages of whinging. It is sickening. Even a simple announcement of a forthcomoing meeting for announce results beomes a platform for this rubbish.
ESA is a completely different organisation with a different charter, different buget, and different goals. Accept it. live with it. They are in the business of doing science, not running PR or education. if you want to get results as they come in, get on the science teams. Otherwise wait until the results are published like the rest of us and shut the hell up.
I spent nearly a year off from contributing to this board because of the crap attitude to ESA, and if this keeps on I will again. It reduces the tone of the board to a common political chat room.
Jon
Doug & admins, please move this post as appropriate...thanks!
Hmm....convergent issues! I just did a post re the Pluto mess, but the server isn't letting me post the link in compact form; here it is: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=3724&pid=79657&st=0&#entry79657. Poor PR seems to be an overarching problem for space science.
Solution: ESA, NASA, and a whole lot of other SF activities need to undergo a significant cultural change & elevate their marketing departments to the same level that major corporations do (decision-maker/board level). These organizations simply do not realize at the gut level that marketing is essential to their survival.
Okay, that was an attempt to frame the problem in very broad strokes. Anybody have some practical implementation/solution approaches?
This discussion is more noise than information. Can I suggest Nils Muller's astonishing extraction algorithm as a way of getting at what lies beneath? Anyone who wonders why VEX has taken so long to release product should read the Mueller paper (summary below). This young man and his colleagues have slaved for month after month to extract surface emissivity data out of the scrambled VIRTIS data. Their first "picture" (yes, one) was displayed at AGU last month. Mueller was the proudest planetary researcher I have ever met, bar none. Does he care he's not a daily POD?
ESA's non-core budget was evicerated several years ago to repay (IIRC) seven BILLION euro to industry. If that debt of honour was not repayed there would have been no ESA. P.R. was a major victim. Vote now: PODs or missions?
Individual MEX PI's such as Bibring and Neukem use their own precious time and budgets to turn up at virtually every planetary science meeting around the globe. I have found them willing to share information at a level that matches or exceeds the undoubted openness of their U.S. colleagues.
I am not associated with ESA, but I believe their public outreach staff do a very credible job in often straitened circumstances. My in-box tells me that ESA's press office has issued seven press releases in the first week of 2007 - four on Friday alone. I am aware that ESA is currently exploring novel alternative ways of structuring its public outreach with the help of member governments, but there's a limit to what you can do in-house if the-powers-that-be insist on putting research ahead of PODs.
P42A-07
Algorithm for Extraction of Surface Emissivity in the Context of VIRTIS on Venus Express
* Mueller, N (nils.mueller@dlr.de) , DLR Institute for Planetary Research, Rutherfordstr. 2, Berlin, 12489 Germany
Jorn, H (joern.helbert@dlr.de) , DLR Institute for Planetary Research, Rutherfordstr. 2, Berlin, 12489 Germany
Hashimoto, G (george@kobe-u.ac.jp) , Graduate School of Science and Technology, Kobe University, Nada-ku, Kobe, 657-8501 Japan
Marinangeli, L (luciam@irsps.unich.it) , IRSPS, Universita d Annunzio, Viale Pindaro, 42, Pescara, 65127 Italy
Piccioni, G (piccioni@rm.iasf.cnr.it) , INAF - IASF Roma, Via del Fosso del Cavaliere 100, Roma, 00133
Drossart, P (Pierre.Drossart@obspm.fr) , LESIA - Observatoire de Paris, 61 avenue de l observatoire, Paris, 75014 France
Venus nightside multispectral images aquired by VIRTIS contain information of surface emissivity at wavelengths close to 1 micron. This information is relayed by thermal emissions of the surface escaping to space through the NIR spectral 'windows' in the atmosphere. On its way through the atmosphere the thermal radiation is modified by scattering and absorption by clouds. Variations in the optical thickness of the clouds modulate the spatial distribution of upwelling radiation. Multiple reflections between surface and clouds generally wash out image contrast from surface emissivity. We present an algorithm to extract surface emissivities by separating atmospheric influences from the images inside the spectral windows at 1.02, 1.10 and 1.18 micron. The necessary processing steps detailed are: 1) Removal of scattered sunlight 2) Binning of appropriate images inside the window spectral ranges 3) Correction of limb darkening 4) Removal of contrast due to attenuation by clouds 5) Removal of contrast due to surface temperature 6) Correction for multiple cloud-surface-reflections For a first quick guess on general trends of emissivity with respect to geological circumstances this algorithm is applied with several simplifications and ad-hoc assumptions. This simple model assumes the atmosphere of Venus to be one horizontally homogenous layer with spatial variation of transmittance allowing for direct inversion of the data. For an improved estimation of surface emissivity tabulated results from previous forward modeling of radiative transfer are used for steps 2) to 6). With this approach the accuracy of a detailed modeling of the atmosphere of Venus is combined with the speed and traceability of the step-by-step inversion of radiance data using the simplified model.
Let me dream a little, but part of the solution to these PR problems might be with interested and knowledgeable people, that have the resources and time necessary to process raw data, for example. It's imagination, yes, because that would be almost impossible to put to practice, but if you look at Amateur Astronomy as an example, you see that some people do make a very good public outreach for science in general. I've done some public observation sessions and it's a very rewarding experience. The same can be done in writing for a mission website... even unofficial.
[quote name='djellison' date='Jan 9 2007, 03:34 PM' post='79831']
Not true.
Sorry, Doug, but I don't understand what's not true? They *did* work for months and they *did* show just one picture at AGU. Maybe they showed the same pic or an earlier iteration at IAF, fine. My point is the effort it took to get to one POD.
As for raw data releases, that's beyond the remit of ESA's public outreach.
Outside the remit of outreach - but still a job it should be doing and isn't.
My point was that whatever picture they showed at AGU - it was not their 'first' - as they showed several in Valencia a couple of months before.
I don't doubt the emense difficulty in doing that sort of thing and the effort and time required. This stuff is hard. Other missions are also doing hard things..AND doing a good job with outreach. It's a culture issue - it's just something ESA doesn't feel the need to do but to remain accountable to the taxpayer and indeed perhaps gain support for a bigger chunk of that tax to come their way....something it should do. There are data product that the wider science community would like, the enthusiasts would do good work with, and that exist, ready to go, sat on ESA servers.....but they just don't share them. As a program that is funded by the public, I believe that is very wrong.
The means to share data and give people a sense of being involved in this adventures are more accesable, easier to deploy and indeed cheaper than ever before.....I can see no honest excuse as to why they should be avoided.
It's unarguably the hottest debated subject here - and in some respects reminds me of the manned-v-unmanned-v-politics ones of old... unresolveable as two camps of opinion seem so polarised and sure of their opinion there can be neither concession nor middle ground.
Doug
[...]
I know there's no way of knowing how this would turn out without doing it, but it might be a decent mental exercise anyway...imagine this as a polling question for the general public:
There are active spacecraft in orbit about which of these planets:
A) Venus
B) Mars
C) Saturn
D) Jupiter
I think (but hope I'm wrong) that there would be as many people incorrectly answering Jupiter as there would be people knowingly answering Venus.
I agree with others who say that the differences between ESA and NASA come down to two different academic cultures. Americans like to know where their money is going, and like to be dazzled--and indeed, many of our space projects over the last 30 years have leaned toward those end, along with the requisite data mining and number-crunching. I'm sure that if, say, HST had been launched with no capacity for images--e.g., with only spectrographs and photometers--that it would have been round-filed over the Pacific a long time ago. I can't say too much about ESA without more experience, but from what I've seen so far, the clearest explanation I can muster for the differences is the aforementioned cultural one.
Needless to say, this is one *major* reason why I want to see our Kepler, SIM, and TPF go up, even though ESA has versions of its own on the books. I know that ESA won't keep the lid on a major exoplanet discovery--but I also know that they'll be less forthcoming about all such data whether it relates to exoplanets or not.
To be fair, I thoroughly applaud the accomplishments of ESA over the past two decades--Giotto, Huygens, MEx etc. are magnificent achievements that I feel everyone can be proud of--but I also feel, as apparently do many others on this board, that more publicity stunts on ESA's part would definitely be a good thing.
"have sites that look like they were designed to display a lot of results,"
You see that on a lot of US sites. The MRO Sharad site hadn't been updated for ages, at least till the AGU Meeting results were posted. It may have been updated by now. . . but I wonder "why bother".
I'm unsure whether this observation should go here, or in the policy forum, or what -- but here goes.
In America, science and research operate in a "publish or perish" mode. Every scientific investigation (except for those undertaken by the defense and intelligence agencies) is *designed* into a process that results in articles and papers which document the investigation and its results. It's nearly impossible to get funding for anything here in the U.S. that doesn't lead to published results -- if you spend grant money and don't publish results, you don't get any more grant money.
Now, while there is similar pressure to publish in Europe, I imagine, there is (from what I have observed) somewhat less pressure to do so. As long as you don't need more money, a European scientist can take as long as he/she wishes to play with his/her data and publish results. There is less pressure to get your results analyzed and published than in the U.S., since in the U.S. that next grant is always riding on whether or not you got the results of your last grant's investigation published.
I don't know why there seems to be less publishing-pressure in Europe than in the U.S. -- perhaps it's a manifestation of the same phenomenon that saw the French CEO of a primarily American consulting firm come to its Chicago offices and complain about American productivity, announcing cuts in holidays and vacation allottments, while his European employees all received six *weeks* of vacation time annually (as a start-up benefit) as opposed to the five *days* of vacation per year that he was now imposing on his American employees of less than five years' employment. In other words, perhaps it is simply a slower, less pressing culture in Europe (but with an expectation that someone else will work their butts off for them) that reduces the publishing pressure in Europe.
Then again, you have the old Soviet system. In the Soviet planetary exploration program, while it resulted in a number of papers and some reduction of the data received, it seems that their investigators could publish if they wanted, but that there was no expectation of scientific results. The simple act of sending the probe to another planet and receiving *any* data (usually pictures) satisfied the political goals that generated the funding, and so actually reducing the data and analyzing it seemed to have been a poorly-attended-to afterthought. I mean, just how many of the tens of thousands of Lunakhod images still exist? How much of the fields-and-particles data returned by *any* Soviet planetary probe is available for further analysis? Like I said, there seemed to be no real interest in doing anything with the science returns from Soviet probes, except in some cases by a few individuals who were really interested in the results. There was no connection between funding and even *looking* at the science return, it seemed.
So, that seems to be the spectrum. And while the pressure to analyze the data and publish your findings seems to get a little more accomplished here in the U.S. than gets done (or at least released to us peons) in Europe, I will point out that, even though the data return may be lacking, the purely political motivators for the Soviet explorations got nearly as much done as the somewhat more scientifically motivated American explorations. We just didn't see as much in the way of results from it.
-the other Doug
The abstracts for this session are now online. Check out the link in http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=3597&view=findpost&p=82070.
Does anyone need a http://www.space-careers.com/jobsearch/view_2553.html?...
A lot more http://www.space-careers.com/latest.html?gclid=CL_appvurYoCFSIZZwodJ2PjVA.
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