[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

I know this picture doesnt look like much. It's grainy, it's bleached out quite a bit

But you owe it to yourselves to look at that picture, and think.

There is a rover climbing a hill on mars.

Isnt that amazing?

If you think hard enough - you can actually imagine being there. Walking with a rover, that we sent half a billion km's to a whole other world.

Sometimes, an image will just catch me off guard and I'll go "wow - LOOK at what we can do!"

Doug

[Phil Stooke]

Yes, this is a good place. I think about how things have changed over the years. I was around for Apollo, watched it live on Tv, and that was truly an amazing thing. The seventies - Viking, then Voyager at Jupiter, and the first Venera images of Venus, another amazing period.

But things got bad in the 80s. For a long time it looked as if planetary exploration would come to an end. No new launches... true, we had the Voyager encounters with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and they were amazing. There will never be another Voyager! (in our solar system anyway). But there were no new launches for a long time. it was actually the stated goal of David Stockman, head of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan, to get NASA out of the planetary exploration game. (If I'm recalling this correctly). Luckily it turned around, and now we have missions all over the place. This decade is almost as great as the 60s for space nuts!

And of course the amazing thing is that we get to follow it all live. Others have commented on this - but it's worth repeating. Take Viking 1 - I saw the first pics on TV. Next day they are in the papers... well, just a few press release images. After a week or ten days the weekly news magazines have them, then Aviation Week. After two or three months they are in the astronomy magazines... but it was so drawn out! Any always the same press release images. Look at us now, with access to daily images from MER and Cassini, with hundreds of thousands of MOC and Themis images to play with, and off the shelf software to work with them. Armchair exploration has never been so easy! Now, if only ESA and JAXA would wake up to the fact that public release is the best kind of PR... it will be interesting to see what India and China do, but probably not much...

Phil

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Now, if only ESA and JAXA would wake up to the fact that public release is the best kind of PR...
Phil

Alas I have a feeling that there is still a prejudice (at least in my country France) as what the public is not clever enough to understand science, so scientists here do only very few releases with very simplistic explanations. Images and results are not released, they are processed only by "specialists". And amateurs are deemed "not serious" "not valuable work". There is some need of the american way in this matter...

I do wonder how many of the guys from the MER teams and JPL are members of this forum. I think it would be good if they indicated their presence and acknowledged the great work of all these amateur picture editors.

If there are, it is understandable they are perhaps instructed to stay anonymous, for reasons like avoiding giving caution to ideas or theories which are not from the JPL. There are other forums where really mad ideas are expressed...

I too hope that they read this forum, as there are sometimes valuable reflexions which could be a real help for the MER teams or to interpret what they see. But they also have specialists in geology, so perhaps they do not think useful to read this forum.