[X] My Assistant

[Redstone]

According to the NASA TV schedule, there is an MER news conference set for September 1, at 1 pm EDT (5 pm GMT). Take it with a pinch of salt, because these schedules change a lot. Whenever it happens it will be shown on NASA TV.

This is the first press conference since when? I can't remember when we saw the last one...

I'm guessing this is when we'll see the "Mother of all Panoramas". Hopefully some news on the science too, and future route plans.

[dvandorn]

It is. But tedstryk is right -- and it's not just a phenomenon seen in the late 50s and early 60s. Particles & fields experimenters have historically had a bias that would have you believe that imagery is worthless -- after all, *anyone* can see things in visible light, but it takes their own special instruments (and their peculiar abilities to understand the results from those experiments) to understand everything *unseen* out there in the Universe.

I've spoken to people who are so antagonistic to imagery that they believe there should *never* have been a camera flown in space, period -- they just can't understand how anyone can gain any *important* data from images.

For an example of such anti-imagery prejudice, Pioneers 10 and 11 were originally designed without any imaging system whatsoever. Many of the people involved in the design of those probes went to their graves feeling that imaging on those probes was a waste of time and effort.

I feel comfortable saying that the anti-imaging prejudice is just plain wrong -- particles and fields sensors, for example, would *never* have discovered the basic truth about Io that non-scientific *navigation* images revealed. And nothing except imaging could have established the water-laid nature of the evaporite rocks at Meridiani. But the anti-imaging prejudice did exist, and still does exist to a certain extent.

-the other Doug