I'm european as you see it, and I can't understand the attitude of the ESA to show very few pictures. I.E. I can't believe that they took 2 or 3 pictures during the Rosetta's mars flyby.
I'm very pessimitic about the next mission Pasteur (ExoMarsRover). I don't want one poor panorama per trimester. For me, they MUST have the same politic has Nasa. They can win a lot of feedback and a better popularity than those they have now.
Remember when RAW images from Huygens were put on the web : a lot of "amateurs scientists" took them and processed the data.

View thez differences : NASA, raw pictures all the days (or just a bit more) ; ESA, pictures given one time a month. It's too much!

In a way, I understand ESA's actions. They tend to hold their releases until they have something truly exciting to show, which is fundamentally different from NASA's general policy of immediate publication of even raw data...quality vs. quantity, it seems.

Still...they really do need to work on their press relations & revise this policy...seems like most of it is an afterthought. Witness the fact that Doug had no Internet access during the Rosetta flyby; this certainly indicates that rapid information dissemination during the event wasn't on their list of concerns. In fact, it's quite possible that ESA's PR department is seriously understaffed & underfunded because the organization has an extraordinarily tight science focus. From what I've heard, NASA had somewhat similar problems in the early days, but this was quickly overcome by massive public interest at the time. If so, this is an organizational culture thing, and not easily changed.

EDIT: Hey, I just became a "senior"...post 1000!

I believe that most of the people has just bad will towards ESA...
ESA is developing a consistent, objective, very well conducted space exploration program and things will only get better after the Cosmic Vision presentations...

Of course I would like to see more images but knowing that scientist are working hard paving our way Onward just erases my common citizen's will for instant consumption images...
I'm no scientist, I'm not a space educated person. I just want the people with the formation to do so to take us there.
One more thing, ESA is developing a lot of studies to make space exploration a ctiizen's benefit activity...
Everyone will have a place There and not only on a internet forum.
That worths my 1,5€ a year...
Where can I make an additional donation?...
This might sound provoking but I can more easily imagine, under ESA's policy, an European on Mars than an American...

Lyricism is nice but real work is better.

Read what I've written. Read what other people have written. There is universal kudos and credit toward the achievments of ESA...or at lteast, towards the achievments they are prepared to tell us about. How's VEX doing by the way?

This is all about how they share those achievments, how much information they share with people, how much scientific data they release and when they release it.

WHERE IS THE SMART 1 DATA?

huh?

Where?

That's not bad will - that's something I was promised would be happening "in a few weeks" last October.

Do you find that acceptable? Do you think the level of public awareness of VEX is acceptable? Do you think the 1/6th of the CIVA images, one sequence from OSIRIS plus a tiny crop of another and NOTHING from Alice or Virtis is the best they can do for the Mars flyby?

For someone clearly so passionate about space exploration as yourself - it genuinely defies all understanding that you would consider ESA to be doing a good job of outreach and data release. Genuinely, I can not understand where you are coming from. It's like your speaking about a parallel universe where things are the opposite of what they are here. Is there some secret ESA website that only you know about where 10,000 Smart 1 images and a swathe of VEX results have been release or something?



They're going - but with outreach and data releases like they are now, they're leaving the rest of us very much behind.

Doug

Since Alice is a US-provided instrument, I'd have thought that if the PI (Alan Stern) wanted to release some data he could do so without ESA's involvement, but I don't know exactly how that relationship works. I would guess that the Alice team is subject to the same PDS data archiving timetable that instrument teams on a NASA mission would be.

I don't know what the obligation of ESA science teams to release data to ESA member states and their citizens is; as a US citizen, I can expect nothing at all from ESA.

Please give me links for these "high quality" ESA's images.

Well, I wouldn't agree with your assessment of ESA, but that said,
NASA doesn't have a "general policy of immediate publication of even raw data". Some instrument teams have done this and some haven't, but no planetary mission team that I know of is under any contractual obligation to release data on any timescale other than the PDS archiving schedule; typically six months. My understanding is that researchers on non-planetary missions (e.g., HST) have even longer to release data.

Doug, as you well put it I'm a space exploration passionate not a data release one.
I'm coming from a place where I trust (...call it faith...) the work being developed by European scientists.
Maybe I'm not as demanding as you are but I pay the same so we're in the same ground...
Ask your neighbours what they expect to see from Rosetta...
Where can we get from their answers?
Do they give a damn about the mission or do they trust the people conducting it?
Doug...you have all the right to get annoyed by not seing the pretty images but I, as European, am proud and really, REALLY optimistic regarding ESA's future, step by step, the European Space Agency has achieved goals that we're supposed to be failures.
We have spacecrafts on Venus, Mars, towards a comet, looking out for Earth's sake, we're on the surface of Titan, on the way to Mercury, unravelling Universe's secret's, looking at the Sun for 15 years, a respectable Astronaut's corps...It's a long term policy. For which I'm pleased to contribute.
It's an adventure.
All of this in less than 30 years...

Just to clarify...I meant that I sort of understand ESA's apparent policy...not that I agree with it!

Rowhat?

90%+ of Europeans will go "What?...what's Rosetta?"

It's an adveture for the people involved, but they are not involving anyone else. They should, they must, and to date, they are not.

We're covering the same ground again and again, but I will repeat it. I'm proud of what ESA is doing, I'm ashamed of how it's keeping people informed about it.

Doug

The only thing I can suggest would be to mount a "letter-writing" (e-mails, actually) campaign to ESA demanding more open access to (and timely release of) mission products. Understand that public awareness of space in Europe is probably almost as low as it is here in the US, but pressure like that is probably the only way to help ESA see the light.

Perhaps TPS could help... they have a lot of experience with things like this in the political domain, anyhow.

I wrote (very constructively and diplomatically) to David Southwood as I said I would... 5 days ago... nothing back.

Imagine my shock.

Welcome to the club! You'll now start receiving mailings from AARP once a month...

-the other Doug

Eh? Speak up, sonny!

Completely OT here, but congrats to Stu on his new position as poet laureate...most deserved!

Anyhow...Onesies & twosies in letter-writing campaigns usually do disappear down the rabbit hole. Perhaps an online petition might be effective...

Thanks nprev, I'll do my best to show myself worthy of the honour...

Ustrax, I know where you're coming from on this. Like you - and Doug, and others here - I am very proud of the European space program and all it has achieved. You listed very good examples of its accomplishments in your posting, that no-one here would disagree with.

But the fact is that right now, this very minute, as you sit here reading this and as I sit here typing it, exiled on a hard drive on an ESA computer somewhere are images taken during ROSETTA's fly-by that should, by now, have been released into the public domain but, for some reason, are just sitting there, in the dark, listening to water drip from the dungeon walls, wondering why they were taken in the first place if no-one was going to bother to look at them. And that's wrong, just wrong. Actually, not only is it wrong, it's b****y stupid, for the following reasons, at least some of, if not all of which, should concern you as both a proud European and a member of the space exploration advocate community.

1. They spent YOUR hard-earned money designing, building, launching and operating Rosetta, getting it to Mars to take those pictures. Now, you might not begrudge them that money, fair enough, but are you happy to see it wasted or, worse, just taken for granted? If you don't get something tangible back from it, then it's *this* close to being... well... a tax...

2. At a time when space exploration budgets are under strain, and ESA faces a very serious challenge in securing the money necessary to meet its long term plans and goals, it needs all the friends - political and public - it can get. One way of keeping the friends it already has, and making new friends, is to show everyone - show the world - what it can accomplish, given the appropriate funding and support. They need to be coming out into the political and public arenas guns blazing, bragging about what they've done, showing off, and driving home the point that, given more resources, more money, they could achieve even more. Now, if that was YOUR job, raising that profile internationally, in political and public circles, and you had jaw-dropping images in your posession that would be guaranteed to be splashed across the pages of newspapers not just across Europe but across the world, and would be featured on web sites within an hour of them being released, would you 1) sit on them, keeping them locked up in that hard drive dungeon, or 2) release them with a deafening fanfare and bask in the goodwill and glory that would follow?

3. ESA's development and indeed survival will depend, like NASA's has done, on succesful and effective Outreach. People have it rammed down their throats by the media, day in and day out, about how much space exploration costs, about what else could be done with the money. And as much as it sticks in the throats of those people who have little time for pretty pictures and prefer to concentrate on hard science instead - the graphs, charts and measurements - it's the pretty pictures that grab people's attention and make them feel part of the whole space exploration "adventure", and have a chance of convincing them that space exploration actually is a good use of their wages. People need educating about the value of space exploration, about how it aids the development of terrestrial technology, how it drives industry and research, how it helps us understand how Earth "works" etc etc etc. And as worthy as plasma measurements and wind speed recordings etc are, they're no substitute for a jaw-dropping picture of a great gaping maw of a crater on Mars taken by a plucky little rover, or a portait of immense towers of gas and dust taken by a space telescope.

So, going back to my original point... right now, this very minute, ESA has pictures in its possession that could address all three of those issues...



That they haven't released them yet is disappointing at best, and ridiculously foolish at worst.

I have no bad will towards ESA, far from it; I know from the email correspondence I enjoy with many ESA scientists that they are hard working, dedicated and enthusiastic people. But there is a serious problem somewhere that needs addressing. And until it is, no matter what it achieves scientifically, ESA is going to come across as a second rate outfit compared to NASA, simply because no-one will KNOW WHAT IT DOES.

The question is, how can we help them tackle this problem...?