[X] My Assistant

[imran]

Jason,

Are you really shutting down this site? I must say I'm really sad to hear this. (((
It was one of my favorite sites and I relied on it for up-to-date news on Titan and the Cassini Mission. I just want to commend you for your great work and hope you keep providing us with your valuable insights here. Keep up the good work Jason!

[4th rock from th...]

I think we should act. We should send an email to the person in charge explaining:

- Why we liked Jason's blog so much
- That it's important to connect with the people behind the mission (the human factor)
- That it's good to be able to put some questions about images and have some simple and honest answers
- With out this blog interest for this mission would be long lost
- It's understandable the need to restrict some information, but isn't this overreacting?

And sugesting a constructive solution:

- Turn the Blog into a official Cassini mission blog, open to posts by other team members.

OK, perhaps I'm being idealistic ;-) we all know how the world works. But if this type of thing starts to get worse (keeping all the data for themselfs) this forum might come under fire in the future.

[elakdawalla]

I think we should act.

I want to act too, because Jason's blog is absolutely GREAT. But before we act, we should make sure Jason wants us to act. Let me paint you one picture of a possible bad outcome: I was working with a bunch of kids inside MER mission operations, and they were writing daily blogs about their experiences. But because they had this inside position on the mission, everything they wrote had to be vetted through a press officer at JPL before I could post it. At times, great chunks of what they wrote were censored because it was revealing discussions going on in operations that the press officer didn't want talked about in public yet. The censored stuff didn't have to do with anything bad happening on the mission, just everyday decisions like which way they were talking about pointing the rover, and which rocks they were talking about investigating. We tried to guide the kids to talk more about life inside mission operations and less about decisions and events happening on the mission, but for some of them it was very very hard. Nobody likes to write under the threat of censorship. And I could very easily see Jason's blog getting resurrected as something where he had to submit each entry for approval before it could be posted. That would suck. The ONLY way it would be valuable for him -- and everybody else -- is if the powers that be could agree with him on certain ground rules of what he could talk about, and then leave him alone to write, and trust him.

I'm very very sad to see Titan Today go. It has been such a valuable resource for me and I'm sure a lot of other people.

Emily

[tfisher]

I was working with a bunch of kids inside MER mission operations, and they were writing daily blogs about their experiences.  But because they had this inside position on the mission, everything they wrote had to be vetted through a press officer at JPL before I could post it.  At times, great chunks of what they wrote were censored because it was revealing discussions going on in operations that the press officer didn't want talked about in public yet.  The censored stuff didn't have to do with anything bad happening on the mission, just everyday decisions like which way they were talking about pointing the rover, and which rocks they were talking about investigating.

Out of curiosity, do you understand why the press officer didn't want this kind of stuff posted? From your brief description, this sounds completely crazy to me. Was the point that no scientific speculation would be allowed to be published before it reached the point of a refereed journal article (or at least JPL press release)? I can't imagine the scientists saying something like "well, we can't allow the public to see the actual process of science, just the final results..."