The fact DISR is an U.S. instrument seems to be forgotten all too often IMHO.

There are two issues being discussed here - ESA's self-promotion through its PR efforts, and data releases.

Referring to the former, as I alluded to in a previous post, the national funding agencies that fund the instruments that ESA flies do a lot of the publicity work themselves, with varying degrees of success. e.g. in the UK, it's PPARC (which incidentally will be no more in three weeks' time when it morphs into this), Germany it's usually DLR, etc.

Maybe there's some fundamental problem here, with some of the national bodies leaving all the publicity work to ESA, while ESA is leaving some of the work to the national bodies. I'm not making excuses for the very unsatisfactory state of the publicity machine(s) at the moment, just trying to figure out why it's like this.

I think there may also be a problem with the media themelves... As much of space news is, quite naturally, driven by US efforts, the European media tend to follow the lead of those in the US, and may often ignore sources of news much closer to home.

Not a brilliant example, but Sky News on this side of the pond was showing wide-field pictures of this last weekend's lunar eclipse courtesy of NASA TV. I guess it was a cost-free, copright-free feed, but it seemed a little odd to me when they seem to have dozens of camera teams, any one of which could have produced similar quality views, weather permitting (as it did in most places).

Hey Doug, maybe you can work on getting ESA to release Raw images on the web. If they can't find the money/people to do press releases, I'm sure the wizards here can do something with them. Would be a great pro-am collaboration opportunity. Of course, this would mean they find money/people to setup the Raw image releases...Oh well, while I'm wishing, I'd like a Galileo II, and a pony.

I think that might be tricky - the data aren't actually "owned" by ESA; for each instrument, I think it's the PIs plus the relevant national funding agency that would probably decide whether they could, or be happy to do that. In the case of visible light images from Rosetta, Mars Express, and Venus Express, in terms of funding it probably all falls to DLR in Germany. I'm not sure if other remote sensing instruments can produce readily-interpretable "raw" data.

That pony you mentioned might be less of a challenge.

If you're thinking along the lines of a daily raw image release, remember that it's the MERs that broke the mould - before them, and Cassini, everyone used to have to wait; now we've all, arguably, been spoilt. Personally, I think a happy medium would be a single daily image, e.g. the setups for NEAR and MGS.

Seems that MEX and VEX missions are being extended to May 2009. So that's what, 8 more pictures????

(I kid the good folks at ESA because I love.)

And very good points, ynyralmaen.

[s]
...well, sort of:

If you try to follow the link to the DTWG data volume you end up here:



Which was quite a while ago in all of the dimensions of the universe I am aware of.

There is also an interesting disclaimer in the hpacp data:

http://atmos.nmsu.edu/PDS/data/hpacp_0001/AAREADME.TXT


This is curious, because the Nature article contained both altimeter and reconstructed trajectory data; and I am not aware of any public comments about these descrepancies - other than this one.

In a way, this explains why release of some of the data is still pending, but what is it about the data that is causing the confusion and the holdup?

Hmmm... maybe the pictures are being held back for the meeting mentioned in this interview...

Just some updated info would be nice.

As for raw image release, going after MER like stuff would be like trying to climb Everest when ESA can't get over a speed-bump and you only want to climb Ben Nevis to be happy. Baby steps first.

Doug

Two weeks since the Rosetta Mars fly-by and still no sign of the crescent Mars images we were promised.

Just saying.

The few images the were released were for the media, who have a 12 hour attention span. As the media are no longer interested in the story there is no need for ESA to release images.

I had a press pass on the night. I'm interested

Doug

My "Press pass" is the money I pay into ESA's coffers from my wages. I don't ask for much, don't want to sit in on meetings, or be sent thousand page reports or technical papers, or vote on spending and funding... but I (clink clink) well want to see the pictures I've contributed to financially after they've been taken. Personally I don't think that's unreasonable.

ESA's behaving like a photographer that was paid - well- in advance for photographing a wedding, then turned up with a flashy camera, spent hours taking pics, then only handed over a handful of prints instead of the album he promised.

Hmmm... let me try and say this in an acceptable way, since I really do believe that this is a factor in what we're seeing with ESA's release policies (and with the entire, broken publish-or-perish system that exists in nearly every scientific research field).

The basic principle seems to be that, if you are doing any kind of research, your entire professional career depends on how much you can publish about your work in peer-reviewed journals. Correct?

This places enormous pressure on researchers to keep their pre-published data secret, lest their published works have less than the positive impact on their careers than they wish. It also puts forth a tremendous temptation to use *only* the data that supports the conclusions you want to publish.

This affects the process all the way up and down the line, creating a blindered, narrow-focused view on only that data a researcher *believes* he/she is going to see. The data he/she *wants* to see.

It not only affects the process of selecting which data you will use when you publish, it affects the very instruments you design and use to collect that data. (For example, if you're studying fields and particles and you expect to see "interesting" results in only certain wavelengths or energy ranges, you design your instruments to give you data in only those wavelengths and ranges. Allowing possible *crucial* data to slip past you unobserved.)

Now, to a certain extent, this is unavoidable. Instruments can't do all things for all people, and on space probes in particular, mass is a huge factor. You often have to decide what types of data you will collect before you can even propose a mission, and so you have to do a lot of "data triage" even before you start bending metal. But it can blind you to things you really need to know.

However, the broken portion of all of this is that you tend to produce researchers who are so narrowly focused on proving one specific hypothesis that they ignore data which tends to disprove it. At the very least, you produce an environment where there is a strong *temptation* to ignore such data.

That means that, unless you control the raw data and allow only yourself and your immediate confederates to see it, someone else might *dispute* your conclusions. And then your career doesn't benefit from the work you've done (or at least you truly believe that will be the result).

The people associated with the MER and Cassini missions have taken a very brave and bold step, to allow people to see raw data as it's collected. They're depending on the NASA culture to protect their careers, I think -- anyone who can become a PI for NASA has *already* achieved enough distinction within their field that they can afford to conduct their research more publicly, and they can afford to lose the option of ignoring data that doesn't support their pet theories. (And even then, some NASA PIs have had the system so ingrained in them that they still try very hard to keep their pre-published data as secret as possible.)

Perhaps that's what needs to change in the process, as it works throughout all fields of scientific research -- make the course of one's career *independent* of finding data that punctures one's pet theories. At the very least, it would eliminate the pressure on researchers to keep their raw data secret and the temptation to ignore data that doesn't support their own theories.

Until that happens, unless there is some other factor that will protect a researcher's perceived career path (like the distinction involved in being a NASA PI), I doubt any of us will see any significant reform in the process any time in our lifetimes.

-the other Doug

This is only true for image data for the most part and even then the automatically published data isn't truly raw and direct from the image sensors as in both cases it is automatically contrast stretched before being exposed to the unwashed masses.
I'm not complaining at all as this approach is a great balance between providing the public and amateur enthusiast with the one thing they want most of all - pretty pictures delivered almost "live" - without truly risking much in the way of leaking any ground breaking revelations or discoveries. It is also worth while noting that the data that is at the root of almost all of the MER's most fundamental discoveries (e.g. the APXS\Mossbauer\MiniTES) is never released early or automatically and the same seems to apply to the non image Cassini data.

Yes, but... I am a molecular microbiologist. I sequence the DNA of bacteria that can cause human diseases. During the course of the human DNA project, scientists and funding agencies (NIH, Welcome Trust, etc.) got together and decided that scientists should not sit on their sequence data. They established a rule that all sequence data has to be put in a public repository (GenBank) within about 1 week of generation. The people who generate the data usually publish first, but anyone is free to use the data and publish their own scientific paper. The loss to the individual scientist was deemed less important than having the data freely available to the scientific community. This decree has now been extended by NIH to projects they fund on the genomes of microorganisms. So I have an obligation to release my sequencing data immediately. This isn’t releasing compressed files to enthusiasts, this is releasing everything for anyone (any scientist) to run with.
So there is precedent for forcing data release and opening it up for competitive scientific analysis.

Floyd Dewhirst
Department of Molecular Genetics
The Forsyth Institute