ESA Press Efforts, Moved posts Options

[Littlebit]

Has anyone, besides me, tried to extract information from the Huygens data archive? It is actually not too difficult, once the data base is understood. But there are some problems:

1) Not all of the science is there - several experiments have not been added - the folders are still empty, including sonic and surface science data.

2) What is there, is incomplete. The altimeter data is 'corrected' and there is a reference to a paper that explains how and why, but the paper is not included in the archives...i don't think - there are hundreds of pages of supportive documents with minimal indexing and no capacity for key word searches.

There is only one file containing barametric pressure data, and it is entered at 77 second intervals. These values were recorded at least every second, where is all the data?

3) To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a release of the results of the investigation into the software error that caused the loss of data on channel A, and no release of the VLA triangulation data which may or may not collaborate the calculated Huygens' descent profile.

This is very important, because with the loss of the Doppler experiment, assumptions had to be made, including the existence of a powerful wind shear in the upper atmosphere. These turbulant wind profiles are quite at odds with the Voyager and Cassini Titan limb and cloud observations, which indicate a very benign atmosphere at all altitudes. There is also the issue of Huygens rotation in the opposite direction from what was expected. Is the atmosphere turbulent, or was the parachute tangled? Or do we just not know?

[Littlebit]

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM7QJRMTWE_index_0.html


Huygens’s second landing anniversary – the surprises continue


But don't be too surprised...If there is any new information in this release, I am surprised:

Huygens has exceeded expectations and shown Titan to be an 'alien earth', giving planetary scientists a new world of fascination to explore.

[ustrax]

ESA outreach efforts back at spacEurope.

[Mongo]

Seems to me this is a system that grants the PIs *far* too much power and secrecy. They are guaranteed a lion's share of the credit for any discoveries made by their experiments, they ought not be so paranoid about anyone other than themselves seeing anything beyond what The Wizard decides to allow us to see in His published works... *sigh*...

Sorry if this is getting too off-topic, but at least the data exist, and will (I assume) eventually be released.

Compare this to archaeology, where the excavation leader used to have full control over the publication schedule, and often waited years or decades before publishing. There were many cases where he or she died before getting around to publishing, resulting in a complete loss of information about what was found at that site -- and since the site is destroyed during the excavation, the information is gone for good.

Compared to that, a few extra years' wait for Venus Express results is not too bad. (not that it's good, since the delay presumably hinders planning for followup missions)

Bill

[JRehling]

Sorry if this is getting too off-topic, but at least the data exist, and will (I assume) eventually be released.

Compare this to archaeology, where the excavation leader used to have full control over the publication schedule, and often waited years or decades before publishing. There were many cases where he or she died before getting around to publishing, resulting in a complete loss of information about what was found at that site -- and since the site is destroyed during the excavation, the information is gone for good.

Compared to that, a few extra years' wait for Venus Express results is not too bad. (not that it's good, since the delay presumably hinders planning for followup missions)

Bill

Good points, but archaeology digs don't cost $200 million, and Venus is a much harder place for unscrupulous raiders to poach your dig.

[tedstryk]

I don't know about the other instruments, but I know that in the case of the VMC, until recently, there haven't been any scientific results due to callibration issues as a result of instrument anomalies. Now that these anomalies have been characterized, the data can be properly processed. As I understood it, it was just on time to put together the nature paper, which is embargoed.

[ustrax]

...in a thread that was, after all, started by an ESA employee to share information with us that wasn't yet available elsewhere.

Sometimes I can't really understand some people...
Looks like they're doing it on purpose...
I, as European AND Tax Payer am extremely proud for the work developed by ESA since its foundation almost 20 years after NASA.
I'm proud to see my miserable 1,5€/year being spent in such manner, helping making great science, taking us to Mars, Venus, unravelling some of the Universe's secrets...

If people are unhappy with the outreach policy they should complain to the proper authority and not to someone who freely gives some of its time.

The rules of the game are clear, even if those same rules are against what some scientists might think on the subject:

"In fact, much differently from NASA, ESA - by its constitution - doesn't fund the payload of its spacecraft, which are on the contrary funded by European Scientific institutes or National Space Agencies. The payload
scientists have priority right to use the scientific data for a few months from their reception; only after this time ESA can claim back its full property of the data."

Contrary to what some people might think ESA is not part of the EU, is an independent organism.

...And I won't even start talking about people starting making suppositions about Rosetta's images...

[djellison]

The ammount of time that ESA has been around is in no way a mitigating factor in their current press efforts.

I am very proud of what my money does with ESA (even more so having visited ESOC) ...but I still maintain, based on the facts of what is and is not available to the public, they are not doing enough.

I was discussing only last night with someone who was in the room with me when I asked Bernard Foing when Smart 1 data would start being released. That was last October in Valencia and he said a few weeks.

Hmmmmm.. (checks PSA) . Nope. DISR, SSP.....Nope. VEX.....Nope.

If you want to compare something for a laugh - look at the speed with which every ounce of DI data was dumped onto the PDS before the end of '05.

It's a two fold problem - they're not in the habit of release science data as quickly and as completely as they should which is unacceptable from a scientific perspective - and the ammount of imagery released by VEX and Smart 1 was nothing short of disgracefull. I'm not looking for MER and HiRISE like performances....although that would be nice...I'm just looking for enough information so that if someone goes "can you give a talk about Venus Express" - I don't have to go "Sorry - there's not enough information out there to do a talk about"

BUT - to be fair...at least we see something from MEX and HRSC and VEX. I'm beginning to think MARCI has fallen off MRO.

Doug

[Stu]

What really, really disappoints - and, yes, bugs - me about ESA's poor public Outreach efforts isn't anything to do with "getting value for my money", it's about ESA displaying a quite frightening lack of common sense, and an even more disturbing lack of appreciation for the treasures they have. I've said it before but I'll say it again - ESA is Just Not Getting It!

We live in a visual age now, and a 24hr image-on-demand age at that. A news story breaks, it is on internet news sites within minutes and on the TV News a few minutes later, we all know that. Instant gratification, for good or bad, that's just the way of the world now. Pictures talk, they always have done. But pictures aren't just worth a thousand words anymore, they're worth ten thousand, as people surfing the net at breakneck speed scan page after page, eyes flicking in search of something that grabs them by the eyeballs and makes them think it's worth pausing in their mouse clicking to take a closer look. NASA knows this, which is why it releases killer pics from Hubble, Cassini and the MERs at the earliest opportunity.

ESA isn't NASA, I know that... different budget, different missions, different hierachies etc etc... but they're in the same business, and have the same customers: us. I don't mean we're financial customers, I mean that, after the media, we're the main group of people who take what they produce and work with it, day after day, spreading it to others, either through using the images in illustrated talks to large groups or just by calling someone at work over to our computer to show them something cool. Most people here have done that, I'm sure. And we're all here because we want to see new pictures as often and as quickly as possible, let's face it.

This weekend, with the public more aware of Mars than ever before - thanks to the wonderful images taken and released from MERs, MRO, Odyssey and MGS, splashed all over the internet and on the pages of magazines from Norway to Antarctica - with Rosetta passing Mars ESA had a huge, impressive Gift Horse, a great steaming beast of an animal, ready to let loose upon the world. Instead they let it out of its paddock for a brief trot around, allowing the public a brief, tantalising glimpse of it, then penned it in again, out of sight. Today, breathtaking images from Rosetta should have been dominating the internet space pages and headlining every TV news program too. Rosetta should have been proclaimed across the world as a triumph, proof that European technology was equal to American (not saying it is, not getting into that argument at all! ) but nothing new has come out since yesterday, and that's not just a shame, it's not just disappointing, to be brutally frank it's b****y stupid. I'm sure they're not, but it makes ESA seem aloof and snobbish, as if all that mattered was getting in the right position to take the pictures and not the pictures themselves.

ESA has big plans, Big Plans, a sleek, silver Mars rover among them. If those plans are going to succeed, then they need to re-think their whole approach to Outreach, because if they don't they just won't get the support - political or public - necessary to stage such ambitious missions.

There are only two real possible reasons why they are so bad at this. One, they just don't care; the science is the important thing, and we, the Little People, couldn't possibly understand the science, so why bother trying to explain - or show - results to us? Or, two, they genuinely Don't Get This, they don't realise that out here the Little People now have a hunger for these images, and are genuinely excited by them. They don't realise that some of us out here give talks and want, desperately, to include ESA missions in our presentations but, as Doug said, can't because there's nothing to use. (Just last week I gave a talk, and at the end someone said to me, quite pointedly, "Why have you just shown pictures taken by American spaceships? Europe has a space program too you know!" I had to explain to him that I'd love to show pictures taken by European probes but they're rarer than dragon's eggs... I honestly don't think he believed me...)

I want to believe it's #2. So, with that in mind I'm going to send a copy of this posting to David Southwood and see what comes back. I'll let you know.

Wish me luck!

[dvandorn]

Good points, but archaeology digs don't cost $200 million, and Venus is a much harder place for unscrupulous raiders to poach your dig.

And nothing makes the practice in archeology right or useful, either.

Hoarding useful (and interesting!) data is simply not justifiable to me. I appreciate it when a PI says "We've put so much of our lives into this, isn't it fair that we get to see and use the data before anyone else sees it?" But while someone may have spent years or decades of their lives working on these programs, his or her salary almost invariably comes from the public.

If I'm helping to pay salaries, I don't think it's fair that they keep their work secret from me, or want to release to me only those bits of it they choose to show me. As an American who grew up in the 1960s, that kind of behavior was always characterized as the Soviet approach to things. It was invariably criticized, and cited as one of the reasons why the Soviets had such high failure rates in their space programs.

The whole thing *feels* like an attempt on the part of the PIs to avoid any accountability for their work. These people are accountable to their supporting taxpayers and to humanity in general, *not* just for the publication of whatever small subset of their data they choose to show the world.

Maybe it's just an American cultural thing, I don't know, but I think Americans tend to mistrust people who hoard information. In America, people who keep secrets are usually thought of as people who have something to hide. I know that my basic emotional response to ESA's poor excuse for public outreach is "What the heck are they hiding from me, and why should they want to hide anything from me?"

This is the kind of behavior that just fuels the kooks and c0nspir@cy guys, too -- how many times have those guys pulled the line "if this probe took thousands of pictures, what's in the ones they haven't shown us??? Why are they keeping them secret???"

-the other Doug

[mchan]

Good points, Stu. Perhaps an appeal to European pride, then. Rosetta is a European flagship. On such a good opportunity as this where many people around the world will notice, wave that flag! Attract more notice with new photos!

[4th rock from th...]

The strangest thing is that if you start Googling and clicking you can find some unreleased, at least to my knowledge, images. Please look here http://www.dlr.de/dlr-rosetta/desktopdefau.../347_read-7819/ and scroll down the page for two excellent Mars Express images that I'd never seen before.

As I really don't know that much German, I wonder if there are much more great images "lost" in sites like these!

[ugordan]

That's a great find right there! These are probably pending release on the ESA site. If you don't mind, I'd post the link in the Rosetta Mars Flyby forum also.

[mchan]

This a good example of great eye-catching images that should received wider public notice. I don't know if these have been released on ESA's websites. It is my first time seeing these images. If these images have not been released on ESA's websites, then they should have been.

But as noted in an earlier post, the images may "belong" to the investigators. In which case, it's the investigators that should consider better PR / outreach.

[helvick]

Those pictures are a very cool discovery but they are both MEX HRSC shots not Rosetta flyby images as I commented in the Rosetta thread
As far as I can establish ESA has (as yet) not published either of these shots as MEX images though which bang on topic for this thread.
It's a pity really because they are wonderful.