You're ignoring the fact that this IS part of how NASA operates missions. (Except for Cassini ISS images. Go figure.) I've already stated this. Eccentric Anonomoly can deny that it's true all s/he wants, but that doesn't change the fact that it is the case. For most instruments on most missions, it's standard operating procedure to let the instrument team keep the data for one year before it goes public. I'm not 100% clear on how NASA got to publish the data to the web since I'm pretty sure that that wasn't in the original contract. (I doubt that the web was much of a thought when the project started.)
So, considering the above, why should YOU get to see these data before that year is up? YOU are the one who wants to deviate from the contract/way things are done at NASA. What's your argument for needing to see the data as soon as they hit the ground?
It is in the contracts. Actually, I'm not sure how JPL got to publish ISS images to the web at all, but for ISS and all of the other instruments (as well as virtually all NASA missions), the data are typically embargoed to the team for a year. That's SOP, and I'm fairly sure it's in the contract.
Why any of this should matter to you isn't my concern. You obviously don't care about the scientists and only care about getting *your* hands on the data, so I can see that you aren't interested in anything involving being fair to anyone else.
Actually, most of them were acknowledged in the instrment papers. And the non-scientists who help with the data are often co-authors on the papers or at least thanked in the acknowledgements. (My officemate, for example.)
Now, it's true that all of the engineers and administrative folks are not acknowledged on a typical paper. But that would get horribly unweildy (the list runs for pages even without including all of the good folks at, say, JPL who are only peripherally involved) and it doesn't do their careers a lot of good to be recognized in an Icarus paper. And, come to it, their main interest, career-wise, in the instrument is building it, not the data. Just like my doctor wouldn't get much of a career-boost out of an acknowledgement at the end of a paper for keeping me healthy enough to do the science.
And I know, from first-hand, that JPL has it's own data in that regard. The ISS people don't plan those observations and we don't control those data. The only way that there could be a problem there is if there were a timing conflict between a science observation and the nav team observations. And that could happen if it were *any* instrument wanting that time-slot and resolving it is a matter of discussion/priorities, not controlling the data.
Wow, so much of that was... wrong. It's hard to know where to start.
"I hazard to say that most scientific advancement, even "pure" science has come as a result of private investment - DaVinci, Newton, Gallileo were all funded by private patrons."
Actually, for the most part these guys were paid by the people in control of the governments. The distinction between "private" and "public" is therefore unclear. When Galileo was paid to be the court astronomer in Florence, which is that? (How about when he was a professor of mathematics?)
I'll skip over the name-calling at the "scientific aristrocracy", assuming you just have serious issues and knowing that I'm not qualified to treat them. But you are quite wrong (or possibly dissembling) about Einstein being an amateur. He wasn't being paid as a researcher in 1905, but he was being paid to employed his scientific training. And he *did* earn at PhD in physics by going through grad school. Hardly what I'd call an "amateur". In fact, Einstein highlights the problem, here: he couldn't get a job teaching physics (despite trying). He hadn't yet distinguished himself, and the job market, being what it is, didn't permit him a desirable position.
The scientific community has no gripe with amateurs, as such. Your arm-chair pyschology not withstanding, nowhere has anyone said anything bad about them here. What we take issue with is having priority to things that literally affect our careers and our livlihoods snatched away from us because people like you can't stand the idea that the people who put in the work to get the data should have a chance to look at it before you do. Of course, there's a rather glaring question here: why do you care about getting an early crack at the data, given that you don't support the idea of pure research in the first place?
Wow, you're going out of your way to avoid getting the point, aren't you?
I've already established why being the first to make a press release or to publish is important. You haven't counter-argued that, just avoided it.
The "scare resource" argument doesn't really hold up, either. The data are also scarce. Sure, you can reproduce it easily, but the bits are finite and the amount of information in the data is finite. Giving anyone and everyone equal access at the word "go" means that the people who are spending much of their time managing the instruments won't get to publish at all, or if they do, they'll only get very limited results. The career field in academia is extremely competetive. (As far as faculty jobs go, there are something like four PhDs graduated for every post; obviously, there are other jobs availible, but there is obviously also a hierarchy of value in the positions.)
You *do* get the NASA data. Sure, you might have to wait a year to see it. But that's more than you get out of most goverment-funded research programs. Do you think scientists in government labs release all of their data within a year of acquiring it? The ones at universities? Of course they don't. NASA is doing MORE than most folks, and yet you still have to complain.
Oh, check you source. We're not degrading any official ephemerides. NASA takes those images on their own with ISS, not the team. They get the data they want.
ISS releases the full data at the same rate as every other instrument. But only ISS gets all of its images posted as JPEGs to JPL's site as they appear. That's not a trickle, nor done just to keep NASA off our backs.
Are all of your facts this bad? Because you're not filling me with confidence about your understanding of the inner workings of this mission, here.
"What would that disadvantage be? Missing the opportunity to be the first to write about something? Do you really believe that you are entitled to that?"
Careers are made or broken based on getting things published first. From a PR standpoint, the amateur community only ruins press-releases. Which is a drag, but not seriously problematic. (Although that can be a damper on a career, too. Getting into the mainstream media for a new result helps when hunting for jobs.) But other scientists are also out there and when they see these things, they jump on them and race to beat us to publication. That can easily wreck a person's entire career.
Why do you think that the general public is entitled to beat the scientists to the results? Are you also prepared to argue that you're entitled to a ride on Air Force One or to look at the CIA's current data?
I'll avoid commenting on your stooping to an ad hominem attack based on a typo. I think people can draw their own conclusions.
Sure it's conjecture, but it's based on the data. If you poured several years of your life into building an instrument and weren't able to be the first to do anything with the data (or, more likely, were one of the *last*), you wouldn't do it. Academia is pretty viscious. You have be publishing or you're not going to get the job you want (or lose the one you have).
By your logic, government contractors would build spacecraft/bridges/ships/whatever at cost with no mark-up. Because, you know, they're getting paid, right?
There's not ungrateful about my attitude. I'm continually pleasantly surprised and thrilled by how well our nation supports science. Asking that the scientists who flush their careers down the toilet to make these things happen should have a fair chance to make the effort make up the career hit isn't ungrateful, it's just reasonable.
Are you, the taxpayer, not getting the data? Does a week or few make a difference to your life in any reasonable way? Has the modern technology age made you that impatient? If so, I think you have bigger problems than Cassini data.
Oh, I welcome the amateur community's involvement. Lord knows they do great work and they keep the professionals on our toes, which is a good thing. But I think that in all fairness that JPL has slid too far in their direction at the moment, since the way that they release the data right now almost guarantees that the amateurs will be making waves about news finds before we have a chance to spot them, make sure we're right, and then issue a statement (through channels). Really, even something like a one-week lag between downlink and release would give the team a chance to do our thing and still allow the amateurs to do theirs.
Yeah, why should the people who didn't devote years of their lives and continue to devote 60-80 hours a week running the instrument be at a disadvantage? Reminds of that story about the chicken who wants to bake bread and no one will help her, but everyone wants to eat it afterward.
The taxpayers have every right to the data. The question is, should they get it at the same time as the people who have spent years making sure that the data arrive at all? By comparison, are you going to insist that the data collected in labs (under government funding) be open to the public as the scientists take it?
If you want to head down this road, you're not going to get data at all. Scienists take a severe hit to their careers to PI an instrument like this. If they didn't get something back, like a period where they could have first pass at making discoveries in the data, you'd be hard-pressed to get anyone to build the things.
T = 285 K ((1-albedo)/distance^2)^(1/4), where distance is in AU. This assumes a "fast" rotator, but it's a pretty good approximation for a moon. Also, it sort of assumes that the moon doesn't spend a lot of time in the planet's shadow. And it is, of coruse, a globally averaged temperature. The poles should actually be a lot colder.
ISS does not hold back the data to a trickle. We're archiving at the rate set by JPL. One year after the data were taken, they're in the PDS.
Call it BS if you like, but the propriatary period is real and common practice with NASA missions. It's been part of every mission I can think of, anyway. The time and effort spent to design, build, and manage an instrument (let alone a mission) is HUGE. That's time out of a sciensist's productive time. If you let just anyone grab the data the instant that they're on the ground, the people who put the work in are not only doing more work than their collegues, they're actually at a disadvantage since they are usually still busy running the instrument so that they don't have as much time to devote to science.
And you're right: VIMS, RSS, etc aren't being posted to JPL's site. Kinda sucks to be ISS in that respect, doesn't it?
Actually... everytime we have a telecon disucssing Enceladus, we end up going down the street to the nearest Mexican place for lunch afterward because we end up craving enchiladas. It's great marketing.
Considering that Enceladus has an albedo of nearly 1, it's surface temperature is really, really low. (An albedo of 0.95 gives a surface temperature of 42 K.) So 110 is actually pretty impressive. And a perfectly black body at that distance should have a surface temperature of 90 K.
Pardon me, but Cassin is NOT slow to release its results. Some of these images came down in the past two *days*. And I'd like to note that they got posted to the JPL website almost instantly. That's actually rather unfair to us, since there's usually a one *year* propriatary period where the data are the kept by the people who put the work into designing, building, and operating the instrument. Thanks to JPL, anybody off the street can get up at 3 AM to grab the images of the website before we've woken up that morning, let alone gotten our coffees in.
Of course, amateurs are not bound be either rules for peer-review to get published or by NASA's process for press-releases, so their results will often appear on the web sooner than the offical findings. But they should also be treated with a certain measure of skepticism. Also, remember that the images that JPL posts aren't scientific quality.
I'd say that that counts for a *lot*, actually. In fact, with that in mind it sort of negates the entire insinuated point about Michael Bay's non-involvement. I personally consider it much more reasonable that an idiot director would turn down a good film than a brilliant director would take on a bad one. Singer has proved himself more than once, so I am unwilling to dismiss this movie just because Bay turned up his nose at it.
Uh, Galileo was the first to be able to SEE sunspots since he was the first to point a telescope upwards. It isn't like sunspots started only when Galileo looked. (Or was that what you were trying to somehow imply?)
What's your point and how does this relate to global warming or Chicken Little?
Also, a flush-less urinal might not splash as much. There's a researcher who has does studies on how far commodes splash when flushed (I don't recall if he has done tests on urinals, but I assume he has), and it's something like 2 meters. That, combined with the zoo of bacteria you find on your toilet, and that's just disturbing.
Furthermore, the effect of the greenhouse gases is seriously non-linear. Adding more water vapor (even if it stayed resident for a long time, which it doesn't) wouldn't do a whole lot of damage because the water lines are nearly saturated anyway. CO2 has bands that are in relatively unabstucted parts of the spectrum, so a little CO2 goes a long way. Plus, there's the residency issue. (CO2 doesn't flush/react out as fast as water, ozone, or methane. I don't know about nitrous oxide, alas, but those five species are the top five in our atmosphere.) And non-linear feedback effects (melting ice caps).
Also, bear in mind that the water vapor and other gases have already raised our global mean temperature from 255 K to 288 K. That's 33 degrees Celsius, which totally changes Earth's habitability.
"IANASPP (I Am Not A Sub-atomic Particle Physicist)" Probably just as well. If you were, you would be too small to use a keyboard or to set up your experiments.
This isn't meant to be a swipe at the astronauts in any respect, but why does the summary say "scientists" when the actual article only ever says "astronauts"? You don't have to have any real scientific expertise to be an astronaut, although quite a few do. Still, without knowing their backgrounds, why should we take the word of two astronauts that such a plan would even work? And if they do really think that this is a good plan, why didn't they run it past more of NASA before telling the media?
This may be a false impression, but I can't help but feel like this sounds as if a couple of astronauts were talking out of their asses to the media, and the latter decided to write a report on it rather than fact-check and do their jobs.
I found it ironic that in the article, towards the end, they mentioned how Microsoft has dodged a trademark violation with "Vista" by calling it "Windwos Vista". But apparently you can't make the same dodge with "Windows Defender". Maybe there's a nuance I'm missing, but that strikes me as a double standard.
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You're ignoring the fact that this IS part of how NASA operates missions. (Except for Cassini ISS images. Go figure.) I've already stated this. Eccentric Anonomoly can deny that it's true all s/he wants, but that doesn't change the fact that it is the case. For most instruments on most missions, it's standard operating procedure to let the instrument team keep the data for one year before it goes public. I'm not 100% clear on how NASA got to publish the data to the web since I'm pretty sure that that wasn't in the original contract. (I doubt that the web was much of a thought when the project started.)
So, considering the above, why should YOU get to see these data before that year is up? YOU are the one who wants to deviate from the contract/way things are done at NASA. What's your argument for needing to see the data as soon as they hit the ground?
It is in the contracts. Actually, I'm not sure how JPL got to publish ISS images to the web at all, but for ISS and all of the other instruments (as well as virtually all NASA missions), the data are typically embargoed to the team for a year. That's SOP, and I'm fairly sure it's in the contract.
Why any of this should matter to you isn't my concern. You obviously don't care about the scientists and only care about getting *your* hands on the data, so I can see that you aren't interested in anything involving being fair to anyone else.
Actually, most of them were acknowledged in the instrment papers. And the non-scientists who help with the data are often co-authors on the papers or at least thanked in the acknowledgements. (My officemate, for example.)
Now, it's true that all of the engineers and administrative folks are not acknowledged on a typical paper. But that would get horribly unweildy (the list runs for pages even without including all of the good folks at, say, JPL who are only peripherally involved) and it doesn't do their careers a lot of good to be recognized in an Icarus paper. And, come to it, their main interest, career-wise, in the instrument is building it, not the data. Just like my doctor wouldn't get much of a career-boost out of an acknowledgement at the end of a paper for keeping me healthy enough to do the science.
And I know, from first-hand, that JPL has it's own data in that regard. The ISS people don't plan those observations and we don't control those data. The only way that there could be a problem there is if there were a timing conflict between a science observation and the nav team observations. And that could happen if it were *any* instrument wanting that time-slot and resolving it is a matter of discussion/priorities, not controlling the data.
Wow, so much of that was... wrong. It's hard to know where to start.
"I hazard to say that most scientific advancement, even "pure" science has come as a result of private investment - DaVinci, Newton, Gallileo were all funded by private patrons."
Actually, for the most part these guys were paid by the people in control of the governments. The distinction between "private" and "public" is therefore unclear. When Galileo was paid to be the court astronomer in Florence, which is that? (How about when he was a professor of mathematics?)
I'll skip over the name-calling at the "scientific aristrocracy", assuming you just have serious issues and knowing that I'm not qualified to treat them. But you are quite wrong (or possibly dissembling) about Einstein being an amateur. He wasn't being paid as a researcher in 1905, but he was being paid to employed his scientific training. And he *did* earn at PhD in physics by going through grad school. Hardly what I'd call an "amateur". In fact, Einstein highlights the problem, here: he couldn't get a job teaching physics (despite trying). He hadn't yet distinguished himself, and the job market, being what it is, didn't permit him a desirable position.
The scientific community has no gripe with amateurs, as such. Your arm-chair pyschology not withstanding, nowhere has anyone said anything bad about them here. What we take issue with is having priority to things that literally affect our careers and our livlihoods snatched away from us because people like you can't stand the idea that the people who put in the work to get the data should have a chance to look at it before you do. Of course, there's a rather glaring question here: why do you care about getting an early crack at the data, given that you don't support the idea of pure research in the first place?
Wow, you're going out of your way to avoid getting the point, aren't you?
I've already established why being the first to make a press release or to publish is important. You haven't counter-argued that, just avoided it.
The "scare resource" argument doesn't really hold up, either. The data are also scarce. Sure, you can reproduce it easily, but the bits are finite and the amount of information in the data is finite. Giving anyone and everyone equal access at the word "go" means that the people who are spending much of their time managing the instruments won't get to publish at all, or if they do, they'll only get very limited results. The career field in academia is extremely competetive. (As far as faculty jobs go, there are something like four PhDs graduated for every post; obviously, there are other jobs availible, but there is obviously also a hierarchy of value in the positions.)
You *do* get the NASA data. Sure, you might have to wait a year to see it. But that's more than you get out of most goverment-funded research programs. Do you think scientists in government labs release all of their data within a year of acquiring it? The ones at universities? Of course they don't. NASA is doing MORE than most folks, and yet you still have to complain.
Oh, check you source. We're not degrading any official ephemerides. NASA takes those images on their own with ISS, not the team. They get the data they want.
ISS releases the full data at the same rate as every other instrument. But only ISS gets all of its images posted as JPEGs to JPL's site as they appear. That's not a trickle, nor done just to keep NASA off our backs.
Are all of your facts this bad? Because you're not filling me with confidence about your understanding of the inner workings of this mission, here.
"What would that disadvantage be? Missing the opportunity to be the first to write about something? Do you really believe that you are entitled to that?"
Careers are made or broken based on getting things published first. From a PR standpoint, the amateur community only ruins press-releases. Which is a drag, but not seriously problematic. (Although that can be a damper on a career, too. Getting into the mainstream media for a new result helps when hunting for jobs.) But other scientists are also out there and when they see these things, they jump on them and race to beat us to publication. That can easily wreck a person's entire career.
Why do you think that the general public is entitled to beat the scientists to the results? Are you also prepared to argue that you're entitled to a ride on Air Force One or to look at the CIA's current data?
I'll avoid commenting on your stooping to an ad hominem attack based on a typo. I think people can draw their own conclusions.
Sure it's conjecture, but it's based on the data. If you poured several years of your life into building an instrument and weren't able to be the first to do anything with the data (or, more likely, were one of the *last*), you wouldn't do it. Academia is pretty viscious. You have be publishing or you're not going to get the job you want (or lose the one you have).
By your logic, government contractors would build spacecraft/bridges/ships/whatever at cost with no mark-up. Because, you know, they're getting paid, right?
There's not ungrateful about my attitude. I'm continually pleasantly surprised and thrilled by how well our nation supports science. Asking that the scientists who flush their careers down the toilet to make these things happen should have a fair chance to make the effort make up the career hit isn't ungrateful, it's just reasonable.
Are you, the taxpayer, not getting the data? Does a week or few make a difference to your life in any reasonable way? Has the modern technology age made you that impatient? If so, I think you have bigger problems than Cassini data.
Good point. I meant to say that the peer-reviewed results could be treated with somewhat *less* skepticism than the amateur, unreviewed results.
Oh, I welcome the amateur community's involvement. Lord knows they do great work and they keep the professionals on our toes, which is a good thing. But I think that in all fairness that JPL has slid too far in their direction at the moment, since the way that they release the data right now almost guarantees that the amateurs will be making waves about news finds before we have a chance to spot them, make sure we're right, and then issue a statement (through channels). Really, even something like a one-week lag between downlink and release would give the team a chance to do our thing and still allow the amateurs to do theirs.
Yeah, why should the people who didn't devote years of their lives and continue to devote 60-80 hours a week running the instrument be at a disadvantage? Reminds of that story about the chicken who wants to bake bread and no one will help her, but everyone wants to eat it afterward.
The taxpayers have every right to the data. The question is, should they get it at the same time as the people who have spent years making sure that the data arrive at all? By comparison, are you going to insist that the data collected in labs (under government funding) be open to the public as the scientists take it?
If you want to head down this road, you're not going to get data at all. Scienists take a severe hit to their careers to PI an instrument like this. If they didn't get something back, like a period where they could have first pass at making discoveries in the data, you'd be hard-pressed to get anyone to build the things.
T = 285 K ((1-albedo)/distance^2)^(1/4), where distance is in AU. This assumes a "fast" rotator, but it's a pretty good approximation for a moon. Also, it sort of assumes that the moon doesn't spend a lot of time in the planet's shadow. And it is, of coruse, a globally averaged temperature. The poles should actually be a lot colder.
ISS does not hold back the data to a trickle. We're archiving at the rate set by JPL. One year after the data were taken, they're in the PDS.
Call it BS if you like, but the propriatary period is real and common practice with NASA missions. It's been part of every mission I can think of, anyway. The time and effort spent to design, build, and manage an instrument (let alone a mission) is HUGE. That's time out of a sciensist's productive time. If you let just anyone grab the data the instant that they're on the ground, the people who put the work in are not only doing more work than their collegues, they're actually at a disadvantage since they are usually still busy running the instrument so that they don't have as much time to devote to science.
And you're right: VIMS, RSS, etc aren't being posted to JPL's site. Kinda sucks to be ISS in that respect, doesn't it?
Actually... everytime we have a telecon disucssing Enceladus, we end up going down the street to the nearest Mexican place for lunch afterward because we end up craving enchiladas. It's great marketing.
Considering that Enceladus has an albedo of nearly 1, it's surface temperature is really, really low. (An albedo of 0.95 gives a surface temperature of 42 K.) So 110 is actually pretty impressive. And a perfectly black body at that distance should have a surface temperature of 90 K.
Pardon me, but Cassin is NOT slow to release its results. Some of these images came down in the past two *days*. And I'd like to note that they got posted to the JPL website almost instantly. That's actually rather unfair to us, since there's usually a one *year* propriatary period where the data are the kept by the people who put the work into designing, building, and operating the instrument. Thanks to JPL, anybody off the street can get up at 3 AM to grab the images of the website before we've woken up that morning, let alone gotten our coffees in.
Of course, amateurs are not bound be either rules for peer-review to get published or by NASA's process for press-releases, so their results will often appear on the web sooner than the offical findings. But they should also be treated with a certain measure of skepticism. Also, remember that the images that JPL posts aren't scientific quality.
I'd say that that counts for a *lot*, actually. In fact, with that in mind it sort of negates the entire insinuated point about Michael Bay's non-involvement. I personally consider it much more reasonable that an idiot director would turn down a good film than a brilliant director would take on a bad one. Singer has proved himself more than once, so I am unwilling to dismiss this movie just because Bay turned up his nose at it.
Uh, Galileo was the first to be able to SEE sunspots since he was the first to point a telescope upwards. It isn't like sunspots started only when Galileo looked. (Or was that what you were trying to somehow imply?)
What's your point and how does this relate to global warming or Chicken Little?
Also, a flush-less urinal might not splash as much. There's a researcher who has does studies on how far commodes splash when flushed (I don't recall if he has done tests on urinals, but I assume he has), and it's something like 2 meters. That, combined with the zoo of bacteria you find on your toilet, and that's just disturbing.
Furthermore, the effect of the greenhouse gases is seriously non-linear. Adding more water vapor (even if it stayed resident for a long time, which it doesn't) wouldn't do a whole lot of damage because the water lines are nearly saturated anyway. CO2 has bands that are in relatively unabstucted parts of the spectrum, so a little CO2 goes a long way. Plus, there's the residency issue. (CO2 doesn't flush/react out as fast as water, ozone, or methane. I don't know about nitrous oxide, alas, but those five species are the top five in our atmosphere.) And non-linear feedback effects (melting ice caps).
Also, bear in mind that the water vapor and other gases have already raised our global mean temperature from 255 K to 288 K. That's 33 degrees Celsius, which totally changes Earth's habitability.
"IANASPP (I Am Not A Sub-atomic Particle Physicist)"
Probably just as well. If you were, you would be too small to use a keyboard or to set up your experiments.
Sorry. Well, half-sorry. I just couldn't resist.
This isn't meant to be a swipe at the astronauts in any respect, but why does the summary say "scientists" when the actual article only ever says "astronauts"? You don't have to have any real scientific expertise to be an astronaut, although quite a few do. Still, without knowing their backgrounds, why should we take the word of two astronauts that such a plan would even work? And if they do really think that this is a good plan, why didn't they run it past more of NASA before telling the media?
This may be a false impression, but I can't help but feel like this sounds as if a couple of astronauts were talking out of their asses to the media, and the latter decided to write a report on it rather than fact-check and do their jobs.
I found it ironic that in the article, towards the end, they mentioned how Microsoft has dodged a trademark violation with "Vista" by calling it "Windwos Vista". But apparently you can't make the same dodge with "Windows Defender". Maybe there's a nuance I'm missing, but that strikes me as a double standard.
Am I allowed a say in who gets hurt? 'Cause if so, I'm all *over* this action. I have a list drawn up and everything.