Personally, I would go for a combination news conference/lingerie fashion show. They could call it....

Revealing Victoria's Secrets. I think that could work, don't you?

Brian

I like it!

There's a multi-level filter process here, and a key level is media triage of any given event. In terms of a major online news page, does a news item get presented:

1) Headline
2) Second-tier story
3) Third-tier story
4) No mention at all

Reverse-engineer the news agencies' "newsworthiness" function. For example, a battle in Mexico would get bigger attention than a battle in Afghanistan. A plane crash killing 150 gets more attention than a plane crash killing 1.

For space exploration, there would be a few factors: scientifically fundamental discovery, philosophical implications, eye candy imagery... a lot of these, reflexively enough, the news agency will have to depend upon NASA to evaluate. Aside from producing nice eye candy, I suppose the most powerful lever in NASA's hand is how OFTEN to have press releases, and regular = not newsworthy. Otherwise, I don't know.

"Can-do" engineering ingenuity... Although it is always a good PR accomplishment when the story is "NASA Ingenuity Overcomes Breakdowns" and not "$300M Rover Breaks."

Victoria's Secrets... she may have some nice features. Certainly there could be some good place names along those lines... THAT would get the mission press. Gisele cliff and Klum outcrop.

"Victoria's Secrets... "....

Heh... When they were proposing the cancelled VOIR mission <venus orbital imaging radar> <it turned into Magellion with non-radar science dropped>...

I proposed <very unoficially, in conversations> calling it Project Voyeur: To Strip Away the Veils of Venus.

I think that this forum is 100 times better at portraying the mission and keeping my intrest than the NASA MER site. Nasa hardly ever update their traverse maps. How hard could that be? they must have traversemaps to do their jobs and probably quite fancy softwares to do all kinds of nifty stuff. why not just dump it out in "realtime". Preferrably on the top of their raw images site to give people a easy way of putting the raws in context.

The raws should automatically be calibrated and stitched. Everytime i put together 3 BW photos and get a color one it increases the sensation of "being there" by a factor of 10. If Crotty et al can do it why cant NASA?

For people that are more interested there should be a 3d software that you could download that automatically builds a 3d landscape. Every rock or feature that anyoneone has written anything about should have hyperlinks. (it would also be nice if one could place small "astronauts" in the landscape to get a senes of scale)

That way people could have the sensation of actually being there with the rovers in realtime.

But all things considered I think NASA is doing a damned fine job compared to ESA.

Venus express to me feels like it is something that happened in the past even though its there now. They have what? 10 pictures on their site. all of them horribly disfigured by agressive and substandard processing.

And then after 6 months when their scientists have had their fun they release a wad of images at one time. to me that takes away all the sensation of being on a journey.

At least you can follow the Nasa missions as they unfold. I always keep coming back becaus i want to see whats behind the next "bend".

I wouldnt have looked at the early cassini images of hyperion and wondered how it would look as we got closer. i would just have downloaded the big ones and lost some of that feeling of having "a new world on the horizon".

I guess that what im saying is that i want more people to get the same rush that I get. The sensation of infiniteness.

/Mattias

Malmar - all the things you mention cost money. Where's it going to come from? I'd rather they made sure they could afford another mission extension..save every dime they can to run these things longer etc etc.

HOWEVER...

Some of the things you mention are already out there...

http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...true_color.html
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...alse_color.html

not to mention MMB putting together all the mosaics and colour images. Calibration takes a lot of time and effort - to throw those images straight onto the web would be unrealistic, and not to mention jumping the gun w.r..t scientific process and the perogative of the PI's to do science with the data before anyone else.

Much of what you describe was also covered in the Maestro package which was a public version of the planning software used by JPL - but to highlight my point, they stopped releasing new data for it at the end of the primary mission because of the money.

For those of us who care about these things - the data is out there to make the things you talk of and between us we're just about getting there. For those that don't care.....well....they don't care - no ammount o f added goodies would change that imho.

Doug

I'm not sure, Doug. I'm sure I'd make a poor PR person, but I really think Nasa's PR and public outreach program is mis-managed. I won't say what I think is a large part of the problem because it would be politically incorrect. I don't want my criticism of this part of Nasa to be mistaken as a larger criticism of Nasa in general. I think the science and engineering that they do are phenomenal, and I know of no other organization that can do that as well.

I think there have been some good suggestions already made by others in this thread. Regarding the press briefings and conferences, yes, they held plenty of them early in the mission. As they became fewer and farther between it seemed to me that they continued to be well attended by the media. Eventually they became essentially nonexistent while the rovers were proving Nasa's engineering and science prowess on a daily basis. But all of the press briefings and conferences could have been much more effectively utilized for PR. They were broadcast live, but usually at times when most Americans were at work or school. They were rarely rebroadcast, while NASA TV instead ran endless reruns of old shuttle and space station footage.Surely the briefings about an ongoing and phenomenally successful mission were more newsworthy, and would't have cost any more to replay in prime time.

The MER mission has been remarkable in that most of the groundbreaking PR and public outreach has been done by the mission team and not the PR department. They are responsible for the nearly realtime adventure we all have been so fortunate to enjoy. That stuff probably is funded by the mission itself, but Nasa's PR and public outreach programs surely have their own budgets. All I am saying is that those progams could be more effectively run to bring the wonders of the universe into the living rooms of the taxpayers that support Nasa. Doing so would not only enrich peoples lives, but would also improve Nasa's public image.

This conclusion may be an outgrowth of the fact that NASA is one of about four space programs (and by far the best resourced) while it contains one of an enormous number of PR programs worldwide -- and by far not the best resourced.

I worked for NASA in a non-space research field. There was nothing special about the NASA personnel, and something very wrong with the NASA management. Things were much better in the academic institutions where I did that work before and after and much better engineeringwise in the private corporation I worked for later.

Essentially, if we say that NASA is "better" than ESA, then it is the better of two at what it does. In any way that it can be compared with a larger set of competitors in a fair contest, I don't think it would come off looking special. But it's a very large organization with many subparts, and certainly some talented people, so I don't know how you'd begin to perform such a comparison. But the problems I saw when I saw there resemble ones I've heard about from people at different centers with very different job descriptions. "Stifling bureaucracy" says it pretty well in two words.

I think some of Nasa's PR problems might be traced to the classic left brained / right brained description of engineers vs. artists. Perhaps we need more right brainers (art types) working the info gathered by the "left brained" scientist/ engineers into press conferences that feature images correlated with dialogue that creates a better sense of of adventure and excitement for the general public.

If I were a PI proposing a mission now, I would carefully consider how I could engage the significant technical talents of volunteers on this site and elsewhere to beef up my data processing ability.

Well, I can tell you that, if the lingerie model who was briefly featured in this thread was "sold" to the American public as Victoria Crater, fully 90% of adult males would do everything that they could possibly do to, um, get inside Victoria... crater, that is...



-the other Doug

It never happened...

Puts a whole new perspective on where the beacon is, doesn't it?

Brian, wondering how long before this whole thread gets purged

Yes it costs money. Taxpayer money. So by having a larger amount of the population being positive to the spaceprogram we can ensure a larger budget or at least maintain the budget that we have now.

Basic advertising... You spend some money to raise more money.

That being said I know that what Im asking for is probably too much. But it would be fantastic if all the stuff on this forum where picked up by nasa. (it wouldnt cost them much to link to the places you suggest.)


/Mattias