[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Forwarding an email that was sent out today by Dmitri Titov, Venus Express PI. Cross reference with this UMSF thread.

Dear Colleagues,

the General Assembly of the European Geophysical Union (EGU) will be held on April 15-20, 2007 in Vienna, Austria. The Symposium PS 2.1 "Venus Express: one year in orbit", included in the science Programme, will be focused on presentation and discussion of the results obtained during the first year of the orbital mission. Please find the description of the Symposium at the end of the e-mail and visit the EGU Web site: http://meetings.copernicus.org/egu2007/ for more details about the Assembly.

We would like to encourage you to take part in the Symposium and to submit contributed abstracts. Please note that the deadline for abstracts submission is January 15, 2007.

Best regards

Dima Titov and Hakan Svedhem,
The Conveners
_________________________________________________
On April 11, 2006 Venus Express-the first European satellite at Venus- was inserted in orbit around the planet and began collecting data. The results of the first year of observations will be presented at the Symposium. The Programme will consist of solicited talks focused on the Venus Express observations and contributed presentations of the preliminary data analysis. The contributions related to the physics of Venus atmosphere, its plasma environment and the surface and based on the analysis of the data from Venus Express and earlier missions, theoretical studies and numerical modelling are highly welcome. Perspectives of the future Venus exploration will be discussed.

Convener : D. Titov (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany) Co-convener : H. Svedhem (ESA/ESTEC, The Netherlands)

[djellison]

Outside the remit of outreach - but still a job it should be doing and isn't.

My point was that whatever picture they showed at AGU - it was not their 'first' - as they showed several in Valencia a couple of months before.

I don't doubt the emense difficulty in doing that sort of thing and the effort and time required. This stuff is hard. Other missions are also doing hard things..AND doing a good job with outreach. It's a culture issue - it's just something ESA doesn't feel the need to do but to remain accountable to the taxpayer and indeed perhaps gain support for a bigger chunk of that tax to come their way....something it should do. There are data product that the wider science community would like, the enthusiasts would do good work with, and that exist, ready to go, sat on ESA servers.....but they just don't share them. As a program that is funded by the public, I believe that is very wrong.

The means to share data and give people a sense of being involved in this adventures are more accesable, easier to deploy and indeed cheaper than ever before.....I can see no honest excuse as to why they should be avoided.

It's unarguably the hottest debated subject here - and in some respects reminds me of the manned-v-unmanned-v-politics ones of old... unresolveable as two camps of opinion seem so polarised and sure of their opinion there can be neither concession nor middle ground.

Doug