Huygens News Thread, News as and when we find it |
Huygens News Thread, News as and when we find it |
Jan 14 2005, 09:57 AM
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#201
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14433 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
Nasa TV will be starting coverage in about 3 mins - but I'm watching multiple TV channels to see if any carry coverage - and will post any news thru the day as it happens
Doug |
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Jan 18 2005, 12:01 PM
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#202
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Guests |
Actually, Simon Mansfield's argument was more that ESA built up excessively high expectations in advance for the quality of the DISR photos, and so their actual fuzzy appearance was invariably a severe letdown that is going to unnecessarily turn more of the general public off of space exploration -- presumably in the sme way that ESA's bungling of the live presentation of Giotto's photos of Halley infuriated Margaret Thatcher, with God knows what effect on Britain's later level of contributions to ESA.
But I'm not sure I agree with him -- after all, if ESA HAD made it clear in advance that the Huygens photos were inevitably going to be rather mediocre in visual resolution, that would have turned the public off just as effectively. And ESA handled this latest Huygens press conference far better than it handled the last one -- no bureaucrats stealing the limelight this time (except maybe for Lebreton, Southwood and Diaz taking up the first 20 minutes or so of the p.c., for which I think they can be forgiven. I was actually unexpectedly touched by Southwood suddenly bursting into apparently sincere tears during his statement.) My only real objections to this p.c. were: (1) ESA still hasn't released, on the web, the various graphs that were shown as slides -- slides that, even at this state, contain some very interesting-looking information, but which were almost impossible to read properly during the Webcast. (More on this subject later, since I've just spent a couple of hours squinting at them on Spaceflight Now's recording of the p.c., and as I said I think there's some quite interesting stuff visually apparent on them that wasn't mentioned verbally by the scientists.) (2) The really sloppy job the DISR team did on pasting together that panorama, which I myself found to be very interesting and rather dramatic-looking -- but which was so badly put together that the horizon lines in the various frames didn't even match up properly. Christian Waldvogel's version at http://www.futura-sciences.com/communiquer...g/cat/525/page/ is infinitely better. (Despite that, the ESA panorama DID get a round of applause from the reporters -- they weren't THAT disappointed with the photos.) (3) The last straw, for me, wasn't ESA's fault at all -- it was NASA TV's fault, for cutting away from the p.c. right in the middle of Tomasko's reply to a rather important question to switch back to their endless round of rerun video clips (in this case, a stupefyingly dull clip of some piece of Shuttle equipment being installed, followed by the trillionth replay of the Deep Impact launch.) I came very close to throwing something at my computer screen at that moment. So: ESA still very badly needs to clean up its act when it comes to its overall public presentations of space science data -- but it wasn't as bad, overall, as Simon and Jeff Bell have made out. |
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