Press Conference for Victoria Crater? Options

[diane]

Bingo - so no big wavey press conf. is going to change anything

Sure, it may not increase site traffic. On the other hand, it doesn't hurt to show the public that NASA is actually getting some return on their tax dollars.

[djellison]

Oh - I agree - there should ( and probably will be ) an S1K / Victoria crater press conf - and also a tie in that Spirit's finished McMurdo and got through winter etc etc....I'll look forward to it

HOWEVER

I don't expect it to cause any sort of spike in mission interest...the media will probably post a few stories, but there wont be an increase in general public knowledge, understanding or awareness of the rovers.

Doug

[climber]

Let's try something new. May be if they paint a rover on Atlantis' tank, Nasa will bring back some interest to the public!

[dvandorn]

The point needs to be made that all of that money was spent right here on Earth, creating jobs and expanding human knowledge. It's not like this is some sort of interplanetary foreign aid program where we're just pouring money into that (very pretty) hole in the ground.

Couldn't have said it better, myself, Diane -- notwithstanding that I've said the same thing, in innumerable ways, for decades, now.

-the other Doug

[ups]

Those who care about such things have never lost interest. They have followed the project from the beginning. As for the rest.... who cares? Their attention will be held for a nanosecond, then they'll find another ball to bounce around their playpen.

The rovers have been making their paths for a long time now and are off radar for the vast majority of the public. It's time for the hard working MER team to receive some much deserved headline time [which leads to funding] with a few impressive images of a large Martian crater.



If you need a reminder of how powerful a Nasa image can be cue the Hubble 'Pillar' images or 'Earth rise' as photographed from the moon...


---ups

[CosmicRocker]

Google Trends will graph "interest" in a query of your choice. I ran a few based on Mars and the MERs, and all of them showed one major spike at the time they landed and almost nothing since then. In terms of whatever it is measuring, the landing seems to have solidly trumped everything since then.

Yeah, I called up some of those up a while back and came to pretty much the same conculsion.

Bingo - so no big wavey press conf. is going to change anything

Doug

The empirical data convinces me that despite the technical successes of their difficult missions, NASA's PR department hasn't learned to take the ball and run with it. The public interest is there at the beginning, but they are clueless when it comes to sustaining the wonder.

[atomoid]

Having also fretted over the lack of interest on the public media's behalf of this and most any space mission (until there is human peril involved it seems). I sometime feel lucky to even have the recent Mars missions and realize there are far too many who regard all this space exploration stuff as a bunch of expensive toys for scientists and government pork programs to study topics that are too academic to be relevant to so-called Life on Earth and would have these budgets slahsed.

A high-res panorama of Victoria crater will be seen on most news broadcasts for at least a few seconds, but by hundreds of millions of people when its is (hopefully) successfully completed, and what will people think of this iimage and what will it mean to them to see the big crater without having known the 90% of the story between the landing and this image. some might get curious about it and try to find more information on it, probably for more pictures. they should be able to explore whats going on and get some perspective on the story, but where will they get the details they are looking for? this all compounds on what the community is doing regarding the story and the richness of the offerings that are easily accessible to those looking, otherwise they will see a new toy in the periphery and abondon the hard-to-get one.

Even after Victoria new conference, which by most will be a picture on the evening new, I feel that this mission even in post-mortem, has all the qualities to be a public blockbuster and retain a far wider audience than most would expect, however, this wont be done by NASA, they have already given it their shot and it is not their nature to concentrate on these things much farther than grade-school-outreach considerations, we are going to have to do it ourselves. we are already on the path and creating a system whereby we can browse the mission in a non-linear fashion, although its just bits and parts right now in the community (movies, panoramas, images, data and its interpretation) and these dont yet come together cohesively as a whole to tell any definitive story. We do need a better way to make all this easy to find and most of all easy to use and easy to understand, but right now its pretty much just for us geeks with our 'secret' knowledge. How could this be done?

[djellison]

The public interest is there at the beginning, but they are clueless when it comes to sustaining the wonder.

What would you have them do? They did very regular press confs, on a daily and almost daily basis for most of the primary mission...but public interest had dropped to near zero by that point anyway.

Doug

[ups]

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Simply put I would want the team to put together some spectacular images of the crater and have a press conference to discuss them -- I believe that is all we are getting at.

Voyager can still grab international headlines as it makes it way through the heliopause so an impressive image of a large crater on Mars should do the same.

I also think some of the thought process here in this thread is for Nasa in general to attempt a bit harder to sustain some of the initial interest in their projects generate.


---ups

[djellison]

^

Simply put I would want the team to put together some spectacular images of the crater and have a press conference to discuss them -- I believe that is all we are getting at.

We will probably get that - that's the baseline..we had it on getting to Husband Hill for instance....I asked what MORE would you have them do.

Doug

[gpurcell]

There's an IMAX movie of this mission! That's about as much publicity as I can imagine for an unmanned probe.

[Jeff7]

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Simply put I would want the team to put together some spectacular images of the crater and have a press conference to discuss them -- I believe that is all we are getting at.

Voyager can still grab international headlines as it makes it way through the heliopause so an impressive image of a large crater on Mars should do the same.

I also think some of the thought process here in this thread is for Nasa in general to attempt a bit harder to sustain some of the initial interest in their projects generate.
---ups

At this point, it would be a news flash to quite a few people that 1) The rovers are still working, and 2) we have rovers on Mars.
The stuff that usually grabs headlines too is, "Mars rover Spirit stricken with memory problems. End of mission?" or "Mars rover Opportunity stuck in sand, expected to be stuck for months. End of mission?" It's too often things that portray NASA/JPL as a bunch of incompetent scientists incapable of driving a robot over dirt.

[Joffan]

I would love to see Volume 2 of Steve Squyres' book... an updated film using mostly mission photography... another film dramatising Steve's first book (hey Hanks, can you hear me?)...

The only time things happened really fast was the landing - the rest of the time, only patient devotees like us would get excited about each little move and make up our own interests (eg the Beacon) to retain that excitment. I'm not surprised that in general people aren't continuously excited about the mission, and I think it is foolish to either expect it or even strive for it. There are a lot of other events going on in the world, or your country, region, city, street, household, whatever.

Just regular, summarised, fascinating events - maybe once or twice a year - is all the load that this one mission can easily put on the public interest.

[hendric]

The stuff that usually grabs headlines too is, "Mars rover Spirit stricken with memory problems. End of mission?" or "Mars rover Opportunity stuck in sand, expected to be stuck for months. End of mission?" It's too often things that portray NASA/JPL as a bunch of incompetent scientists incapable of driving a robot over dirt.

Yeah, there needs to be more "OMG! Rover tops Martian mountain!", "Holy Sh!t, rover nears giant Mars crater" and "Rovers hit 1000 Martian days! Squee!!"

[ups]

I asked what MORE would you have them do.

Doug

Well, Nasa could hire an ad agency to put out some clever jingle sung by super star rapper 50 Cent...




Hey ya'll don't be a Hater,
we're almost to Victoria Crater...