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Amateurs Beat Space Agencies To Titan Pictures
loconet writes "Nature.com is reporting that a group of enthusiastic amateurs managed to process raw images of Titan from the Huygens probe faster that any of the giant space agencies in charge of the mission. Terragen, a freeware program that converts the basic brightness data in aerial pictures into a topographical map, to generate the ground-level vista was used."
Without quality control it's usually possible to beat a company, or organization to the punch.
(And doesn't mean it is necessarily inferior in quality either).
But it is a little unfair.
I'm impressed with them..., but it's not a surprise really. With the raw data images being released as soon as they were made available, anyone who was interested enough could begin processing them immediately. I doubt NASA/ESA thought it was a race. But still, great job for them! They probably did it for a fraction of the cost that the big agencies needed to process the images ;-) So much beaurocracy..
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
From the article:
Liekens does caution that not all of the pictures will be scientifically reliable, something that ESA and NASA obviously have to take care over.
"We're impressed with their ability and enthusiasm, and looked at their images with great interest," says Bashar Rizk, part of the Huygens imaging team from the University of Arizona, Tucson.
A key paragraph. Does fater always means better? Before we jump on the NASA/ESA bashing bandwagon, we should remember that both are renowned scientific institutions that gain reputation not by doing everything as fast as possible, but as accurately and precisely as possible.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Amazing how the texture/wave pattern stays consistent right up to the land.
Hmm...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
'Distributed contributions' are turning many industries on their heads; think of music and more lately the creep into entertainment at large, for example, Napster on.
Science, even space science, has not been exempt from these sweeping changes even as those guarding the capitalistic infrastructure are, frankly, more intelligent and capable than those guarding 'entertainment' have been. It ought not to be that I need pay US$thousands to simply read scientific articles in the Journal of _______. The Internet exists because scientists pushed ahead (in the military's wake) in the name of information sharing. In protecting their overpaid publishers' investors, fat Universities and other players minting on controlled access to knowledge, the scientists have to some extent let us all down.
I'd very well expect more significant contributions from 'amateurs' and including the crowd here, were the general quest for knowledge less constrained by capitalism. We have all the tools at our fingertips, literally, to undo more of the corporatism we can refer to roughly as 'closed source'. It's up to the real players though, the scientists themselves, to do as they have done here. Way to go, ESA. Viva la revolucion.
BG
If am amauteur goofs and gets the wrong color, or maybe points out something that is really noise, no one is going to really notice. If NASA goofs, on the other hand, everyone notices. Besides, the NASA people were also probably trying to find signs of fluid motion and stuff, the amauteur's were going for "cool" views. :-).
But I must say to the amauteurs, GO FOR IT
These guys are amateurs. They admit that they're not trying to compete for scientific accuracy with the major space organizations, and that they have taken creative licence with the coloring of these images, and that the details may be inaccurate. If they were trying to do a professional job of processing these images, with an emphasis on accuracy, then they would be doing a professional job, and you would refer to them as professionals. Since they are taking creative licence with the images, and admit to the distinct possiblity of inaccuracies, they are considered amateurs.
The NASA scientists would be fools to release these images in a raw format as soon as they're available and then try to beat amateurs, who aren't responsible for the rest of the mission. Once the information is obtained years can be spent analysing it. In other words, when the mission is in progress the teams are focused on the mission, not post mission analysis.
All these guys did was use software to make 3d models of the terrain and then pictures from those models. If you want to try something really fun, and have a mathematical inclination and a lot of time on your hands try downloading pictures from hubble, or from one of the large radio telescopes and doing some data reduction. The software's freely available on the web and runs on Linux. To get anything meaningful from the data you'll have to spend a lot of time learning about the data, instruments used to capture it, and the astro sources you're looking at though.
This is the sort of thing that should be encouraged in highschools and unis around the planet.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer