Although that would be a huge boost for manned spaceflight, I don't see it happening. This lovely chap (or a cooperator or team member) would probably get to review the article

I agree with Alex that the rules are not there, but in this case the peer-review proccess or the Editor would act as the publishing "police". Having said that, one can simply stick to the simulations, as Phil suggested, there is nothing wrong about publishing that part, I would guess.

I think the upshot of this is that if one wishes to, say, become Carolyn Porco's research assistant, or not worry about an ISS team member being one of the anonymous peer reviewers (a very real possibility!), or not fear being poisoned during the LPSC Wednesday Night Social Dinner, etc., then Emily's point in this instance about not publishing before the ISS team is well taken

If, on the other hand, one doesn't care about that sort of thing, then there is absolutely nothing to prevent one from attempting to publish, especially if the supporting data (unvalidated though it may be) has been publicly released.

The world of Publish or Perish is a jungle and caution is advised. However, Joe has made a brilliant observation based on general data and he should get the deserved recognition for it.

--Bill

I can't help thinking that the Cassini folks really need to clear this up. Frankly, we're in rather poorly understood ethical ground here, because we are living through a transition in the way data are distributed.

The old idea was that NASA data were proprietory for a while to give the team who did the hard work to get the images the first chance to use them. Then it would be publicly available. That in itself was different from the more distant past, and other areas of science, where data might be proprietary for ever, basically.

But now the MER, Cassini etc. projects are releasing raw images almost as soon as they get them. The Mars Odyssey Themis team just started doing the same. Apparently MRO will as well.

(aside: NEAR said they would, but chickened out a few days before going into orbit... Calvin Hamilton and I were playing with the daily releases of images just like we are today with Cassini and MER, until it was shut off)

The catch is, the "raw data" are not really raw. Images are contrast stretched and heavily jpegged. Now, I may be wrong, but I have believed all along that when they say 'should not be used for scientific analysis until a validated copy is deposited in PDS' or words to that effect, what they mean is - it's full of jpeg artifacts and has no photometric validity, so you can't trust the pixel values. For instance, you can't calculate albedo or optical depth, and small details may be artifacts. I really don't think anybody intends that the images are totally out of bounds. In fact I think that would be unenforceable as well as just plain foolish.

But maybe we need clarification here. If the Cassini imaging team really don't want people doing anything scientific with the daily releases, they need to be specific about it on their website. If it's only the caution about pixel values they are intending, they could be more specific about that. But frankly, we live in an era where any one of us could discover a new satellite or whatever in these images, and there's nothing to stop that happening once the images are on the web. If the team really doesn't want that, they shouldn't put it out there!

Phil

Two more saliant points:

1) Historically, Cassini-Huygens is a mission that the probes themselves, and not whoever discovers whatever in the data who will get the primary credit.

2) It should not take nearly as long today for mission principles to reduce the primary data - yes, there is a lot more data, and perhaps smaller teams working on it, but the number crunching rarely takes weeks upon weeks. The Deep Impact team is just hand wringing when they say it will take forever to crunch the data. They didn't get the resolution they needed to draw the conclusions they are trying to reach.

3) The moons of Saturn are turning out to be an enormous puzzle - these pages are helping the principles, they are reading, and they have thousands of eyes and hours they would not have otherwise, scrutinizing the images. In an absolute paradox to point 2), there is too much processed data for the hired eyes to pick up everything. This will be especially truo of the MRO and Messenger, and if the PI's do not realize the internet is their friend, they could sit on precious data for decades and never know it.

The discussion going on here is interesting... but to attempt publications could change
a policy of posting these 'raw' JPEG'ed images for the public in near real time....

Of course we all get a kick out of the science extracted from JPEGs ... finding ray guns
and such on mars based on image compression artifacts...

I doubt that any reputable peer reviewed journal would touch an article using images
that do not have a clear 'OK' from the ISS Team Leader.

The modeling discussed might seem to lie in a grey area but it is based on ISS data
( and also CIRS data ) so I doubt that it is publishable until the images go into the
PDS in about one year or until articles by various Teams are officially published.

It took a lot of work and politicking to get the Cassini Images put out into public hands
in near real time, it would take one instance of abuse to basically have that stream of
images cut off to the public and to only be able to see images that go thru the official
PIO image press release process.

Enjoy the images... please don't push buttons that could shut off that stream of images
for all to enjoy.... a lot of people worked hard to get that public image URL.

I can promise you that the Cassini imaging team absolutely doesn't want people doing anything scientific with the raw releases (or the press released images for that matter). In fact the team doesn't want any of you to be doing what you are doing with the raw releases. (I've been yelled at a few times, which is why I'm so sensitive about this, and I'm letting you know that that's among the potential consequences of crossing the team.) Unlike with MER the raw image releases are happening over the objections of the team, and the team believes that no responsible scientist is even looking at the raw images (which I find hard to believe--I couldn't resist if I were them). But JPL is going ahead and releasing them, and they are wishing us armchair image processors godpseed; both the public information people and the project science people for Cassini are in support of public access to the raw images. I think it's interesting that JPL didn't manage to do the same with Deep Impact, even though that was also a JPL mission. They have that horribly clunky viewer at the "View Near Real Time Images..." link on their Gallery page but that's it. Hopefully as time goes on, the Mars data model will become the common one.

EDIT: and let me thank everyone at JPL who has anything to do with the raw image releases. They are allowing us all to follow the mission in a way never achievable before. We are all "doing science" just looking at and thinking about these pictures and discussing them amongst ourselves.

--Emily

There will be no hi phase imaging for the Dec 25 opportunity. It was not possible
to alter existing sequences on such a short time scale.

The next hi-res hi-phase opportunities occur in 2007 ( DOY 273 and DOY 321 )
and the time for one of those opportunities is 'owned' by ISS at present.

However, the Cassin Tour will be altered in early 2006 and these opportunities may
go away while others may appear. There are a number of other hi-phase opportunities
but they are all at considerably lower resolution inthe Tour as it stands today.

This reminds me of Steve Squyres statement about how hard it has been to get papers finished when they are still spending time still driving and collecting data. It seems as sensor density increases, there will be bandwidth bottlenecks not only transmitting, but also analyzing, the tremendous amounts of information the probes can now deliver.

Data mining other people's projects to preemptively publish smacks of playing unfair, unless you are data rescuing of a sort by going through NASA vaults as some of our august members apparently have. It seems entirely appropriate for the PI and the team who designed the experiments to have first dibs by withholding the calibrated keystone.

I agree though that the "fair use" statement should be made more explicit if the team has any fears of being upstaged.

(And just think in the future if some AI from a competing university starts doing analysis and announce results before the original team - that would be awkward!)

Hmmm. This is news to me. It would have been helpful to have known it before now. (Hope I didn't step on anyone's toes in the D Ring thread, for example.)

Well, this has been really useful. I think we have the clarification we needed. It would have been a lot better if this had been spelled out on the website, though, to avoid potential misunderstandings.

Phil

just to add some clarifications to the publication discussion

You can't attempt to publish anything in a peer reviewed journal when you cannot say what images you are using. The raw images on the JPL site specifically DO NOT indicate what the actual image number of the image is. Without that you cannot identify the image. e.g. the unique identifier for an image looks something like, N1404789881, where N means the Narrow Angle Camera and the number corresponds to the seconds portion of the spacecraft clock at shutter close. Its only when the PDS releases the archive volumes 9-12 months after the image is taken that you can actually correctly identify the image. The identifier on the JPL raw image site, e.g. N00046830.jpg, isn't related to the actual image number in any way and will not be accepted as an identifier by any reputable journal

Until the PDS release of images you also don't have any of the necessary anciliary data for an image e.g. exposure duration, gain state etc. (also until you know the exact time of the image you don't know where the camera was actually pointed)

Until you know basic things like exposure time, the correct image number etc either the editor or reviewers should automatically reject any submitted paper which uses images or unpublished data from images

Also Emily's comment about the ISS Team comming down like the wrath of God on anyone doing anything with the raw images. I'd suggest that its the ISS Team Leader who is following this policy, I'd further suggest that the ISS Team as a whole might very well have been in favour of the rapid release of the raw images. The participation of at least two members of the ISS Team in this forum strongly hints at this. I'd also imagine that many of the ISS Team members are quite enjoying the products being posted online by non ISS Team Members

Even if they are suspicious of the eyeballs, they must be aware of the heightened public interest these images and data are bringing to the program...and as a plus, we are getting educated as to what may or may not be appropriate. Jason was discovered on the internet, and he is a valuable asset on the Cyclops team.

Let me be the Devils advocate: Suppose the images were not being made public, and the Cyclops team, (which is under UNFAIR pressure to find things first) backed off and missed the sputtering on Enceladus. Less priority might have been placed on the follow-up, and the unambiguous evidence of Enceladus' plumes lost forever.

On the other hand, when a certain scientist tried to lie, cheat and steal a Keplarian planet discovery, the internet had his fingers all over it. We need to find these clowns and drum them out, not wait for embarrassing scandals like the Korean government is facing over cloning secrets.

Finally, I think revised science is necessary to understand the phenomenon being unleased by this mission, and I think this can demonstrated with Cassini and Huygens observations. If it does take revised theory to explain what we are observing, mission scientists need these new tools in their bag to make sense of the data.

I should note that I determined the positions of the tiger stripes (latitude and longitude along their lengths) based on a cylindrical projection from Steve Albers, who in turn based his map on a previous Voyager-based images from Phil Stooke and Jens Meyer.

It's generally hard to extract latitude and longitude information from the raw images, & Steve apparently did that by eyeball in making his mosaic. If the descriptions of the raw images included the time of observation, it would be possible to find the (tentative) geographic coordinates in an image by using the SPICE kernel data about where the camera was pointed when, etc., but the time of observation is only given to the day on the Cassini website. But I suppose to provide more would be leaking out more "science."

Don't mean to step on anybody's toes--I actually looked a while ago for some kind of usage restriction statement but wasn't able to find the same. PDS Imaging Node says:



If one searches the PDS Imaging Node for "Enceladus" a link is provided to the Cassini Enceladus images released to the Planetary Photo Journal.

I got an inkling that UnmannedSpaceflight.com might raise a few hackles on the Cassini team based on a Slashdot article on the Enceladus plumes that referenced this thread. A poster in that thread complained:



Rather inflammatory yes, but it got this response from someone evidently on the Cassini team:



After getting some feedback about taxpayers who are paying the bills, etc., came this response from the same person:



And then:



Seems like there's a bit of negative feelings about amateur analysis of the raw data?

I would say it more looks like negative attitude towards statements like "Cassini team is slow at releasing data". I can't say I blame them, I also perfectly understand why the people who designed the damn thing should be able to get credit for discoveries first.
I don't believe they're against raw data processing folks like us, it's more against someone claiming afterwards they discovered something before the PI did...
Frankly, I don't see what the purpose of the raw images would be if not to allow ordinary guys like us to play around with data.
Another thing, though - what if the discovery process went the other way: someone on a forum like this actually discovers something that escaped the official team, someone on the inside team finds this out and publishes the finding as it was their own, without due(?) credit to the "ordinary" guy. That wouldn't be very nice, either...