Inaccuracy in reporting astronomy and science Options

[elakdawalla]

People at ESOC were very very pleased by the silence of those people during the landing

[tdemko]

Check out the caption, too. My son's comment was "amazing the pictures they can take now from space, eh dad?"

[TheAnt]

Hmm finding PT1 - 3 is described as saving New Horizons "in the nick of time" from "missing out of ½ the mission".
The possible KBO encounter is a tag on, though a good and interesting one, but not even approved as of yet so how can that be seen as 'part of the mission' right now.
..and what the heck is a "principle investigator".

Sky and telescope

[TheAnt]

Zero gravity day(Jan4) is debunked in most media.
But the part about Pluto passing behind Jupiter (conjunction) is still included in some stories, and some appear to take some kind of compromise approach on the matter - stating that we might not float around but should fall down more slowly if we jump up at the correct time.

[Explorer1]

Sigh, it never ends, does it?

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/na...looking-5577958

[JohnVV]

--- WOW!!!!! ---
--- STOP THE PRESSES !!! ---
Andre Gignac found jpeg compression artifacts

[hendric]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansiegel/20...eatest-mystery/

An otherwise ok article (is water ice stable at Ceres for billions of years?) is marred by this glaring error:

"But is that really sufficient to explain these “white spots” at the bottom of what appears to be perhaps the largest crater on Ceres?"

:headdesk:

It's not even the largest crater IN THAT PICTURE.

[ElkGroveDan]

Huge lava lake spotted on moon orbiting Jupiter

Discovered by the space probe Voyager 1 of the NASA in 1979, the moon Io is roughly the size of the moon orbiting the Earth and, according to PRAS, it has "the greatest volcanic activity" in the solar system.

Only off by 370 years.

[Ron Hobbs]

I think these guys should have stuck with business reporting.

There is another interesting contradiction in this story. It starts with the statement that a "US radio telescope ... captured images of an enormous lava lake" which is questionable in its own right. It then goes on to talk about the Large Binocular Telescope observations.

I always wonder how these stories get so warped. This identical story is posted on at least three web outlets, but I can find no original story from the Puerto Rica Astronomical Society. I suspect they may be conflating a couple of different stories.

The actual story from the LBT press release is actually quite interesting. (And yes, they get the story of the discovery of Io correct.)

LBT Press Release

There is a way cool video of a transit of Io by Europa as seen by the LBT that is worth seeing. And there is a link to the Astronomical Journal article.

Maybe this information should be put up on the Jupiter forum.

[Paolo]

from the New Horizons Facebook page, this is how NOT to report science. you just can't compare speeds in different reference systems!
for ex a person walking on Earth is still traveling at over 100,000 km/h relative to the Sun...

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[djellison]

Those speeds are all relative to their local frame of reference and absolutely ARE suitable for comparison - nothing wrong with it at all.

[Deimos]

I'm not sure what 'local frame of reference' means. The NH speed is in an inertial (solar system barycenter) frame with its origin instantaneously co-moving with Earth-moon-barycenter, Pluto-Charon-barycenter, or the solar system--but the origin locality is immaterial. The space shuttle is the same (with Earth) but is within ~10% of an Earth-surface-fixed value. All the others are in Earth-surface-fixed frames. So consistency demands Earth-surface-fixed, non-inertial frames.

I get 1.2 billion km/hr for NH. Light can eat its dust.

Of course, that's the same sort of math that makes one invent imaginary forces to explain which way bathtubs drain or something. The graphic misses chance to educate the public about inertial vs. non-inertial reference frames, translations and rotations and vector math, and basically misses out on the fun of a steep learning curve, all just to clearly communicate one relevant and potentially interesting thing[*].

OK, maybe that's not so bad.

(* And true too: it is fast in any relevant frame--compared to understandable scales--except for the most 'local' frame, one co-moving with the spacecraft. But in that frame, that pedestrian sure is zooming.)

[ZLD]

If I drive a car 60mph, I'm moving 60mph in relation to the road/land/Earth beneath me which is the local frame of reference. New Horizons is moving ~34,000km/h away from the Sun, the Sun being the frame of reference once again.

Alternately, if you're floating in ultra deep, intergalactic space, you could be completely still or, moving near light speed and the only way to know is to have a frame of reference.

[Floyd]

ENOUGH and now back to bad reporting in astronomy and science

[JohnVV]

'local frame of reference' .

this is something that reporters CAN get confused on
explaining the naif SPICE references without a chalkboard .......