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Journal of Cosmology Contributor Sues NASA To Investigate Mars "Donut"
An anonymous reader writes "Rhawn Joseph, a self-described astrobiologist involved with the infamous Journal of Cosmology, is suing NASA, demanding 100 high-resolution photos and 24 micrographs be taken of the 'donut' rock that recently appeared in front of the Opportunity rover on Mars, on the basis that it is a living organism. The remarkable full text of the complaint, which cites NASA's mineralogical analysis of the rock as evidence against it being a rock, is available to read at Popular Science."
Really, the lawsuit is worth a read.
Doh!!
Very funny, this makes my day on /.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
NASA will send Inspector Gadget up there right away
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Translation: Some attention whoring quack is going to waste taxpayer money and NASA time to no good end.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Von Braun may have designed the rockets, but Sgt. Schultz drives the rover. NASA has a history of "Look over there. Isn't that interesting!", "Lets go this way instead..."
i think it is just some gunk picked up by the rover, it was buildup of dirt probably made sticky by water or grease or oil or some other fluid and it finally fell off the rover
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Seriously, why not get the data? It's an exploration drone, with no solid destination or timetable. If something is interesting, point every sensor you've got at it until it's boring.
If some loudmouth thinks something is interesting that you don't, it's really not like you're in a hurry, spend a day getting data and then go on your way again.
Dude, that's a shroom!
Don't they have a set exploration plan?
The rover only has so much battery life until it needs to be solar recharged, they have set experiments, etc ...
I would guess that if something were really interesting, they'd make it part of another mission.
It may not be a rock... it kind of looks metallic. I am willing to bet it's something that broke off the lander. When Curiosity landed the landing platform fired rockets to clear away from Curiosity and landed hard. Add the low gravity and the impact I am willing to bet that this is a piece of the lander.
its the arm off of one of my kerbals
It cost $2.5 billion to send Curiosity up. Even assuming it gets 5 full years of operation - and something could go wrong well before that - that's over a million dollars a day. And that doesn't even consider the cost of the Earth-based teams that need to actually analyze the data. Wasting a million dollars because of some loudmouth doesn't seem like a great plan.
Dr. Squyres says that if this object has been recently flipped over, "we are seeing the surface, the underside of a rock, that hasn't seen the Martian atmosphere for perhaps billions of years."
Trouble is, unless he's proposing that the underside of this rock was somehow vacuum-sealed against atmospheric influence, it has very much been exposed to the gases of the Martian atmosphere.
The undersides of rocks experience a different environment due to less exposure to wind erosion and the UV component of sunlight. But as far as being exposed to the gases that make up the atmosphere, the undersides are about as exposed at the topsides.
Most if not all of the minerals observed on Mars have been seen before, on Earth. Can you think of a terrestrial example of a rock whose underside has a significantly different chemical composition than its topside? I can't.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I thought NASA dismissed it a little to cavalierly. I mean, it's not like that rover had found anything that would warrant the least bit of attention, after the first 3 months.
Dr. Squyres and his team have already chosen to spend lots of time and effort investigating this object.
How would releasing this data to the public, through existing channels that have already conveyed thousands of photos to the public, be a waste of NASA's time?
NASA has already acknowledged that this is "a very special rock, with rare properties." Therefore, shouldn't it, at a matter of course, release more data about this rock than it releases about the average Mars rock?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I realize that I'm probably feeding a troll - but you're an idiot. You weren't man enough to pass the physical, so now you want to dump on the servicemen who did serve. And, you're probably one of those queer baits who hung around the peers, hitting on sailors, hoping for a date. You're just another pathetic loser, dude.
another daze in paradise
If the thing was life, NASA would be highly secretive about it until everything has been checked and reviewed and the President make the announcement.
who hung around the peers
I think you'll only find peers around the pirate bays. I'm pretty sure anyone who was qualified to serve would know to head for the pier instead --- so, that means you're, um, --- wanna go out?
From the article "If the organism is biological, NASA must publicly acknowledge that the discovery was made by the Petitioner and must ensure that Petitioner appears as rst author on and has nal editorial approval of the rst 6 scientic articles published or submitted for publication by NASA employees which discuss and present this discovery." I hope this turns into something awesome, but it seems in his claim that he will get credit for the discovery even though NASA discovered the object first. I guess it's deserved if NASA really did overlook an object that proves monumental.
let me know. I'll be on the next flight out.
Every time I look at that those 2 photographs, I can see, what I would describe as, a precursor outline of the object that, looks to me, emerged from the ground. Frost?
Curiosity and Opportunity are DIFFERENT ROVERS! on pretty much opposite sides of mars... there is NO way any debris from Curiosity could land in front of Opportunity.
Hasn't that donut been eaten yet? Where are the police when you need them?
Rhawn is bullying NASA for the simple fact that he wants the data, and if NASA agrees that the item is biological in nature, then he wants the court to force NASA to have Rhawn as first author on its publications regarding this item. In other words, he wants the prestige of being a researcher in a project he had no hands in, and wants all the credit for a find he didn't find.
If this idiotic shitstain spent more than five hard seconds looking at the processed press release images, forgetting to take his meds, and crying conspiracy, he would've discovered that the Mars Exploration Rover site on JPL actually releases every single raw image the second it gets downlinked from Mars, including photos that deny claims of not taking micrographs, and also ignorant of basic traits of the MERs (well, MER now - RIP Spirit), such as the relatively low resolution of its sensors compared to modern standards, the microscopic imager just having a resolution of 1024x1024 and a working area of 3.1cm square at operating distance, and because it doesn't have an light on it like MSL/Curiosity's MAHLI, isn't as good at taking photos of things on the ground, like a little rock on the surface of mars.
In fact, there's even hazcam images of the arm being swung into place, denying that the rover never got close, and that it's actually just the really small rock it is.
Before arm placement, and after.
Anyways - oh look, close up, in focus images of a mushroom. Not. I hope this fuck gets laughed out and never returns.
"8. The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopic images of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre. Any intelligent adult, adolescent, child, chimpanzee, monkey, dog, or rodent with even a modicum of curiosity, would approach, investigate and closely examine a bowl-shaped structure which appears just a few feet in front of them when 12 days earlier they hadn't noticed it. But not NASA and its rover team who have refused to take even a single close up photo."
His claim for standing to sue is pretty funny too. It boils down to, "I did a bunch of impressive neuroscience work in the late 70s & early 80s, vanished for 20 years, and then reappeared two decades later in full Linus Pauling crank mode churning out books on astrobiology and 'proving' that the evolution of DNA predates Earth by 6 billion years, that upper atmosphere plasma are actually extremophiles, and that otherwise I'm super interested in Mars."
"Oh, and I'm a taxpayer and really interested in this rock, therefore I deserved to have control over what NASA does in regards to it since they're too boneheaded to see how important it is."
Here's one of his other books. The reviews give you an idea of how far this man has fallen as a scientist.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why are those procedures in place? It's public data, why can't the public see it as soon as NASA gets it?
The public does see it as soon as NASA gets it. All images are uploaded to marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/ as soon as they are received.
The Exploratorium also has a feed of the raw images as soon as they come down: http://www.exploratorium.edu/m...
Just from the depths of my armchair: perhaps because the data comes in formats that are completely useless to the public, and it takes time for NASA to decompress/deconvert/decrypt/convolve/whatever them?
The raw images are uploaded within a day of when they get received. As you note, these are raw images, and there's some processing needed to make pretty images suitable for public release: flat-field corrections, photometric and geometric corrections, as well as turning the individual frames into mosaics and color-corrected images, which takes more time. (There are also sometimes some dropped packets, and if you get the images right from the raw downlink, they won't have retransmitted the dropped bits yet.)
However, you don't have to wait for NASA to do all of that: there are some amateur groups that do image processing on the raw images, and do a pretty good job of making high-quality images, too.
Maybe they can do their own analysis with the data in a raw-ish format, but to give us the real numbers and sort out the metadata flags that say "This sensor is currently busted" takes more time?
Yes; all that gets uploaded onto the planetary data system (pds.nasa.gov/), including all the metadata, but that does take a while, since this is fully calibrated data.
I am suing NASA demanding 100 high resolution photos and 24 micrographs be taken of Scarlett Johansson, at various angles, from all sides, and from above, and under appropriate lighting conditions which minimize glare, on the basis that this is a living organism.
I'm wondering if it's even worth changing the comment threshold here to 3.
You do realize there is more data coming down than photos, right? Curiosity isn't as big as it is because the camera is heavy...
This guy is fucking insane as is any other lunatic who believes the government is somehow hiding E.T. There could be no greater show of the strength and superiority of the U.S. Government than the revealing of the discovery of extraterrestrial life.
History credits the relatively amateur journalist Matt Drudge with breaking the story about the Monica Lewinsky scandal -- not the professional journalist Michael Isikoff, who sat on the story.
The vast majority of images acquired by space probes have been released directly to the public, not as part of a published scientific paper.
If the data weren't acquired 100% at taxpayer expense, let the owners of the data sit and ruminate on it for as long as they please. But that's not the case, so there's not much justification for no timely release of the data to the taxpayers who paid for it.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
this rock appears to be a fairly pedestrian example
There must be some planetary scientists who disagree with you, because NASA has already acknowledged that this is "a very special rock, with rare properties."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Pretty sure everyone got the gist of what Steve was saying.
A Geode. Or half of one anyway. Or nearly any interesting set of crystals in a rock collection. They're always on one side of some other substrate. E.g. Vanadite.
With a geode, the inside is different from the outside, which is not at all the same phenomenon as the topside being different from the underside.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The donut has already been examined enough for NASA to think it's boring
Really? Dr. Squyres says the rock has a "strange composition, different from anything we have seen before... We are still working this out. We are making measurements right now. This is an ongoing story of discovery."
He doesn't sound bored.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Agency management do look at how many publications cite the project when considering further funding. Allowing competing projects to beat us to publication using our own data and not our analysis is seen as detrimental to continued operations.
The obvious solution is, look at how many publications cite papers that used the data you gathered; not how many publications cite your project. That would be a meritocracy where the projects that gather the most valuable data are guaranteed to enjoy continued operations -- and there'd be no need to restrict access to said data.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.