[X] My Assistant

[Holder of the Tw...]

Latest DAWN journal is out.

Link

First pictures of Vesta should be taken today.

[tanjent]

Marc Rayman provides great commentary, and I appreciate the humor even as I cringe. But Marc is on the engineering side, so I doubt he feels any personal stake in how and when the images are released. I won't expect any clarification from him about that policy; even if he does know what's going on, he wouldn't be the science team's chosen spokesman. I badly want to see those approach images in real time, and the marketing speculations expressed above are just my best attempt to frame the recent lack of images in an optimistic way.

The trouble with the taxpayer argument is that the enthusiasts on this site only paid for a tiny fraction of the mission's cost - most of it came from people for whom the mission doesn't rate nearly so high a priority. "Outreach" to me is a longer-term strategy addressed mainly to the next generation. It's harder to take a jaded adult and re-awaken that sense of discovery, but they are the ones who do most of the paying. Any "marketing" strategy that will make today's hard-pressed taxpayers sit up and take a little pride that they have paid for something truly wonderful - that would be a sacrifice I'd happily make if it really seemed that a sudden dramatic unveiling was the best way to go.

Does Vesta have that potential to accomplish a marketing breakthrough? Unfortunately, the scale of rocky asteroids is hard to gauge when they are just hanging out all by themselves in empty space. For somebody who has not been paying close attention, I wonder if Vesta will have any features that clearly make it more spectacular than Rosetta, or even Eros or Itokawa. Ceres, with its ice, will be something entirely new - like finding Greenland or Antarctica up there in the sky. Whatever happens here, the Ceres visit will probably offer the best public showcase for robotic space travel since Voyager. The current encounter may prove scientifically very rich, but in terms of publicity, perhaps a dress rehearsal.

(Oh, and great news from Mike while I was responding to the earlier stuff! )

[djellison]

Whatever happens here, the Ceres visit will probably offer the best public showcase for robotic space travel since Voyager.

It's impossible to draw comparisons between missions in that way. One could argue MER is the best showcase for robotic space exploration. Or Cassini. Or any number of missions.

The crime here is that there are ever increasingly great images of this unexplored world being taken but not being shared with the public - it is an exquisit opportunity to engage and inspire the public....and for whatever reason they're forgoing that opportunity and revert to old-school media policy.