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Kepler Mission Finds 752 Extrasolar Planet Candidates
An anonymous reader lets us know about the initial release of data from the Kepler spacecraft, launched in the spring of 2009, which has been hunting extrasolar planets. The instrument has found 752 candidates to examine in its first 43 days of operation. This is exciting news, because even if only half of the possibilities pan out as exoplanets (as the Kepler team expects) the results would still almost double the count of known planets. And some of the new ones could be Earth-sized, or not too much larger. Controversy has erupted however because NASA has decided to allow the Kepler team to withhold 400 of the best candidates for its own examination, releasing about 350 others to the worldwide community. The reasons for this are complicated and the New York Times does a good job of digging into the issue of proprietary vs. public data. Nature.com first reported two months ago on the decision to hold back some of the data.
If you do a search there appears to be anywhere from half to two thirds of the data that are marked as proprietary data which their search help gives a brief explanation of:
Clicking on entries in this column will mark the entry for retrieval. To mark all entries, click one of the buttons labelled 'Mark All','Mark public', or 'Mark Proprietary'. (Unmarking all entries can be done the same way using the appropriate button.) For missions with proprietary data, the mark button element will have a yellow background and a '@' symbol to indicate data sets not yet public.
I think the majority of those that are unreleased are simply Q2 data or later since this data is just from the first 42 days of the mission. What's available as the tar file appears to be all Q0 and Q1 data so I'm not certain if the 400 that are 'censored' are included in that or not. If they are withheld it seems odd that the announcement, release notes and README file make no mention of this. Still, we're talking 12+ GB of compressed data here.
Overall and despite the reported censoring of the best candidates, I personally applaud their transparency here that surpasses anything another government related organization (or even scientific field for that matter) exhibits. Alright, maybe CERN or the LHC will be as transparent or more transparent but this is still pretty impressive.
My work here is dung.
"All these worlds are yours, except for this list of 400. Attempt no landings there."
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
NASA is indeed a scientific organization. I know a decent number of people who have/currently do work for NASA, due to my step father being an electrical engineer for Orbital (formerly Fairchild) (he helped design some of the tools used in the earlier Hubble Repair Missions. He no longer works there [he is, for all intents and purposes, retired at this point], but he worked for Fairchild/Orbital for a little over 20 years.) They are a dedicated, unbelievably intelligent group of people, who are amongst the most passionate people in the whole country.
The people in charge of their funding, those are the folks that are political. The people who actually work for NASA are just trying to utilize what little freedom they have been given.
Living With a Nerd
This is standard operating procedure for major spacecraft missions. Cassini and Galileo missions to Saturn and Jupiter did the same thing. Kepler's choice of the word "proprietary" is unfortunate: Cassini and Galileo used "embargoed", which is less of a Slashdot buzzword.
To understand why it works this way, you need to realize that your average spacecraft scientist will spend their *entire career* designing and implementing one mission. Two if they're lucky.
So suppose you've been working on making the Kepler mission a reality since 1990. Every day for 20 years you've spent designing instruments, writing proposals, doing proof-of-concept studies, to make it happen. Then one day, the mission launches, and you release data to the public in realtime. The next day, some random dude like myself hits your website, happens on just the right file, writes a quick note to Nature, and gets the credit for discovering the first Earthlike extrasolar planet. You get a brief mention in the acknowledgements.
Folks on Slashdot are used to thinking of the value of data as measured in pennies or dollars. This data's value is measured in lifetimes. Without this sort of "embargo" system, no scientist could afford to pursue a multidecadal project, and cool things like Kepler wouldn't happen.