We haven't had a press briefing or conference in months... anyone else think Opportunities eventual (hopefully) arrival and exporation at Victoria Crater deserves one? If oppy makes it ok, it would, in my opinion at least, make it one of the greatest achievements in the history of planetary exploration and certainly deserves some public/press recognition. Doug, maybe you could ask if the rover team are planning anything?

The MER team needs a big splash to ignite the public's interest in this project again -- Victoria has the best shot of doing that, but they need to generate some press.

Those who care about such things have never lost interest. They have followed the project from the beginning. As for the rest.... who cares? Their attention will be held for a nanosecond, then they'll find another ball to bounce around their playpen.

Science should not have to resort to being the Flavour of the Month.

Brian

This isn't really true. There are plenty of folks that may have been visiting the official NASA sites at the beginning of the mission that have just let checking up on Mars slip from their daily routines, and there are those that really only do get their news from traditional sources. Don't assume that everyone who finds this endeavour worthwhile also finds it worth paying close attention to.

That's not really what I meant, but nevermind.

Victoria is really going to be the Glaze on the Cherry on the Icing of the Cake for the MER program. I was looking back through the board to the first Q&D Endurance NavCam pans recently, and had forgotten just how exciting and dramatic it was to see into that crater for the first time. I am itching now to get to Victoria and I think interest* is going to erupt when Oppy gets there.

I have a feeling it will be the last hurrah for Oppy.

*I wonder how it will compare to the Husband Hill summit surge?

I imagine the same story as happened for Husband hill - a press conf, pretty pictures, review of recent science..perhaps around the S1K mark ?

Doug

I didn't say you had to be a Marsaholic. Whether you check on a daily or weekly or monthly basis, whether you get the information on-line or from newsmagazines or science shows on TV, you are still interested and following the mission, and you are finding ways to get the information at the level that interests you from a variety of sources.

The comment was made, we need a big splashy press conference to revive "public interest". The point I wanted to make without being overly verbose, was that trumpeting the pictures from the rim of VC through CNN or the BBC or the front page of the daily papers will have very little effect on generating sustainable interest in the project, or space exploration in general. Most people will view it with a "Well, isn't that neat?" sort of perspective, then not give it another thought. On the downside, it will invariably draw the ire of a handful who feel that money would have been better spent feeding the poor or curing cancer instead of going to stare into a big hole in the ground.

Sure a big public announcement will be a nice thing to do. I'm not saying, don't do it. Just don't have this expectation of a big upside. If the goal is to have the public at large keen on such missions, and being vocal in their support of providing sufficient funding, I just don't see a press conference from VC making much difference. We already have a staggering amount of information available to the public that wants it.

Brian

The point needs to be made that all of that money was spent right here on Earth, creating jobs and expanding human knowledge. It's not like this is some sort of interplanetary foreign aid program where we're just pouring money into that (very pretty) hole in the ground.

good point very well put

Google Trends will graph "interest" in a query of your choice. I ran a few based on Mars and the MERs, and all of them showed one major spike at the time they landed and almost nothing since then. In terms of whatever it is measuring, the landing seems to have solidly trumped everything since then.

Overlayed a few typical search phrases ( MER, Mars Rover, Spirit, Opportunity ) and got this lot - I've tried to tie in key events to match the peaks. Notice the 1st Mars Birthday kicked a huge media response but little search response.

I think the top bar (searches) is a measure of public interest, and the bottom bar is a measure of press coverage - and to be fair - the press have spiked at many major events, whereas public interest has not.

Doug

True, but it's better press than the "$400M Mars Mission Fails" Don't you love how when anything goes wrong, the total mission cost makes the first sentence, but when things go right, the information is irrelevant?

Just ONCE I want to see the total cost trumpeted in a press article reporting good news. "$400M Mars Mission Fantastic Bargain" rather than "NASA Shows off Crater Photos."

I think search volume may be a poor measure of interest in the program. Most people who are interested already know where the Mer site is. How much time do the marsaholics here spend googling. I usually check a few bookmarks or come here to see what someone else has spotted. A hit count of the MER site would be a better measure.

Bingo - so no big wavey press conf. is going to change anything

Doug

Sure, it may not increase site traffic. On the other hand, it doesn't hurt to show the public that NASA is actually getting some return on their tax dollars.

Oh - I agree - there should ( and probably will be ) an S1K / Victoria crater press conf - and also a tie in that Spirit's finished McMurdo and got through winter etc etc....I'll look forward to it

HOWEVER

I don't expect it to cause any sort of spike in mission interest...the media will probably post a few stories, but there wont be an increase in general public knowledge, understanding or awareness of the rovers.

Doug

Let's try something new. May be if they paint a rover on Atlantis' tank, Nasa will bring back some interest to the public!

Couldn't have said it better, myself, Diane -- notwithstanding that I've said the same thing, in innumerable ways, for decades, now.

-the other Doug

The rovers have been making their paths for a long time now and are off radar for the vast majority of the public. It's time for the hard working MER team to receive some much deserved headline time [which leads to funding] with a few impressive images of a large Martian crater.



If you need a reminder of how powerful a Nasa image can be cue the Hubble 'Pillar' images or 'Earth rise' as photographed from the moon...


---ups

Yeah, I called up some of those up a while back and came to pretty much the same conculsion.
The empirical data convinces me that despite the technical successes of their difficult missions, NASA's PR department hasn't learned to take the ball and run with it. The public interest is there at the beginning, but they are clueless when it comes to sustaining the wonder.

Having also fretted over the lack of interest on the public media's behalf of this and most any space mission (until there is human peril involved it seems). I sometime feel lucky to even have the recent Mars missions and realize there are far too many who regard all this space exploration stuff as a bunch of expensive toys for scientists and government pork programs to study topics that are too academic to be relevant to so-called Life on Earth and would have these budgets slahsed.

A high-res panorama of Victoria crater will be seen on most news broadcasts for at least a few seconds, but by hundreds of millions of people when its is (hopefully) successfully completed, and what will people think of this iimage and what will it mean to them to see the big crater without having known the 90% of the story between the landing and this image. some might get curious about it and try to find more information on it, probably for more pictures. they should be able to explore whats going on and get some perspective on the story, but where will they get the details they are looking for? this all compounds on what the community is doing regarding the story and the richness of the offerings that are easily accessible to those looking, otherwise they will see a new toy in the periphery and abondon the hard-to-get one.

Even after Victoria new conference, which by most will be a picture on the evening new, I feel that this mission even in post-mortem, has all the qualities to be a public blockbuster and retain a far wider audience than most would expect, however, this wont be done by NASA, they have already given it their shot and it is not their nature to concentrate on these things much farther than grade-school-outreach considerations, we are going to have to do it ourselves. we are already on the path and creating a system whereby we can browse the mission in a non-linear fashion, although its just bits and parts right now in the community (movies, panoramas, images, data and its interpretation) and these dont yet come together cohesively as a whole to tell any definitive story. We do need a better way to make all this easy to find and most of all easy to use and easy to understand, but right now its pretty much just for us geeks with our 'secret' knowledge. How could this be done?

What would you have them do? They did very regular press confs, on a daily and almost daily basis for most of the primary mission...but public interest had dropped to near zero by that point anyway.

Doug

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Simply put I would want the team to put together some spectacular images of the crater and have a press conference to discuss them -- I believe that is all we are getting at.

Voyager can still grab international headlines as it makes it way through the heliopause so an impressive image of a large crater on Mars should do the same.

I also think some of the thought process here in this thread is for Nasa in general to attempt a bit harder to sustain some of the initial interest in their projects generate.


---ups

We will probably get that - that's the baseline..we had it on getting to Husband Hill for instance....I asked what MORE would you have them do.

Doug

There's an IMAX movie of this mission! That's about as much publicity as I can imagine for an unmanned probe.

At this point, it would be a news flash to quite a few people that 1) The rovers are still working, and 2) we have rovers on Mars.
The stuff that usually grabs headlines too is, "Mars rover Spirit stricken with memory problems. End of mission?" or "Mars rover Opportunity stuck in sand, expected to be stuck for months. End of mission?" It's too often things that portray NASA/JPL as a bunch of incompetent scientists incapable of driving a robot over dirt.

I would love to see Volume 2 of Steve Squyres' book... an updated film using mostly mission photography... another film dramatising Steve's first book (hey Hanks, can you hear me?)...

The only time things happened really fast was the landing - the rest of the time, only patient devotees like us would get excited about each little move and make up our own interests (eg the Beacon) to retain that excitment. I'm not surprised that in general people aren't continuously excited about the mission, and I think it is foolish to either expect it or even strive for it. There are a lot of other events going on in the world, or your country, region, city, street, household, whatever.

Just regular, summarised, fascinating events - maybe once or twice a year - is all the load that this one mission can easily put on the public interest.

Yeah, there needs to be more "OMG! Rover tops Martian mountain!", "Holy Sh!t, rover nears giant Mars crater" and "Rovers hit 1000 Martian days! Squee!!"

Well, Nasa could hire an ad agency to put out some clever jingle sung by super star rapper 50 Cent...




Hey ya'll don't be a Hater,
we're almost to Victoria Crater...

Personally, I would go for a combination news conference/lingerie fashion show. They could call it....

Revealing Victoria's Secrets. I think that could work, don't you?

Brian

I like it!

There's a multi-level filter process here, and a key level is media triage of any given event. In terms of a major online news page, does a news item get presented:

1) Headline
2) Second-tier story
3) Third-tier story
4) No mention at all

Reverse-engineer the news agencies' "newsworthiness" function. For example, a battle in Mexico would get bigger attention than a battle in Afghanistan. A plane crash killing 150 gets more attention than a plane crash killing 1.

For space exploration, there would be a few factors: scientifically fundamental discovery, philosophical implications, eye candy imagery... a lot of these, reflexively enough, the news agency will have to depend upon NASA to evaluate. Aside from producing nice eye candy, I suppose the most powerful lever in NASA's hand is how OFTEN to have press releases, and regular = not newsworthy. Otherwise, I don't know.

"Can-do" engineering ingenuity... Although it is always a good PR accomplishment when the story is "NASA Ingenuity Overcomes Breakdowns" and not "$300M Rover Breaks."

Victoria's Secrets... she may have some nice features. Certainly there could be some good place names along those lines... THAT would get the mission press. Gisele cliff and Klum outcrop.

"Victoria's Secrets... "....

Heh... When they were proposing the cancelled VOIR mission <venus orbital imaging radar> <it turned into Magellion with non-radar science dropped>...

I proposed <very unoficially, in conversations> calling it Project Voyeur: To Strip Away the Veils of Venus.

I think that this forum is 100 times better at portraying the mission and keeping my intrest than the NASA MER site. Nasa hardly ever update their traverse maps. How hard could that be? they must have traversemaps to do their jobs and probably quite fancy softwares to do all kinds of nifty stuff. why not just dump it out in "realtime". Preferrably on the top of their raw images site to give people a easy way of putting the raws in context.

The raws should automatically be calibrated and stitched. Everytime i put together 3 BW photos and get a color one it increases the sensation of "being there" by a factor of 10. If Crotty et al can do it why cant NASA?

For people that are more interested there should be a 3d software that you could download that automatically builds a 3d landscape. Every rock or feature that anyoneone has written anything about should have hyperlinks. (it would also be nice if one could place small "astronauts" in the landscape to get a senes of scale)

That way people could have the sensation of actually being there with the rovers in realtime.

But all things considered I think NASA is doing a damned fine job compared to ESA.

Venus express to me feels like it is something that happened in the past even though its there now. They have what? 10 pictures on their site. all of them horribly disfigured by agressive and substandard processing.

And then after 6 months when their scientists have had their fun they release a wad of images at one time. to me that takes away all the sensation of being on a journey.

At least you can follow the Nasa missions as they unfold. I always keep coming back becaus i want to see whats behind the next "bend".

I wouldnt have looked at the early cassini images of hyperion and wondered how it would look as we got closer. i would just have downloaded the big ones and lost some of that feeling of having "a new world on the horizon".

I guess that what im saying is that i want more people to get the same rush that I get. The sensation of infiniteness.

/Mattias

Malmar - all the things you mention cost money. Where's it going to come from? I'd rather they made sure they could afford another mission extension..save every dime they can to run these things longer etc etc.

HOWEVER...

Some of the things you mention are already out there...

http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...true_color.html
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...alse_color.html

not to mention MMB putting together all the mosaics and colour images. Calibration takes a lot of time and effort - to throw those images straight onto the web would be unrealistic, and not to mention jumping the gun w.r..t scientific process and the perogative of the PI's to do science with the data before anyone else.

Much of what you describe was also covered in the Maestro package which was a public version of the planning software used by JPL - but to highlight my point, they stopped releasing new data for it at the end of the primary mission because of the money.

For those of us who care about these things - the data is out there to make the things you talk of and between us we're just about getting there. For those that don't care.....well....they don't care - no ammount o f added goodies would change that imho.

Doug

I'm not sure, Doug. I'm sure I'd make a poor PR person, but I really think Nasa's PR and public outreach program is mis-managed. I won't say what I think is a large part of the problem because it would be politically incorrect. I don't want my criticism of this part of Nasa to be mistaken as a larger criticism of Nasa in general. I think the science and engineering that they do are phenomenal, and I know of no other organization that can do that as well.

I think there have been some good suggestions already made by others in this thread. Regarding the press briefings and conferences, yes, they held plenty of them early in the mission. As they became fewer and farther between it seemed to me that they continued to be well attended by the media. Eventually they became essentially nonexistent while the rovers were proving Nasa's engineering and science prowess on a daily basis. But all of the press briefings and conferences could have been much more effectively utilized for PR. They were broadcast live, but usually at times when most Americans were at work or school. They were rarely rebroadcast, while NASA TV instead ran endless reruns of old shuttle and space station footage.Surely the briefings about an ongoing and phenomenally successful mission were more newsworthy, and would't have cost any more to replay in prime time.

The MER mission has been remarkable in that most of the groundbreaking PR and public outreach has been done by the mission team and not the PR department. They are responsible for the nearly realtime adventure we all have been so fortunate to enjoy. That stuff probably is funded by the mission itself, but Nasa's PR and public outreach programs surely have their own budgets. All I am saying is that those progams could be more effectively run to bring the wonders of the universe into the living rooms of the taxpayers that support Nasa. Doing so would not only enrich peoples lives, but would also improve Nasa's public image.

This conclusion may be an outgrowth of the fact that NASA is one of about four space programs (and by far the best resourced) while it contains one of an enormous number of PR programs worldwide -- and by far not the best resourced.

I worked for NASA in a non-space research field. There was nothing special about the NASA personnel, and something very wrong with the NASA management. Things were much better in the academic institutions where I did that work before and after and much better engineeringwise in the private corporation I worked for later.

Essentially, if we say that NASA is "better" than ESA, then it is the better of two at what it does. In any way that it can be compared with a larger set of competitors in a fair contest, I don't think it would come off looking special. But it's a very large organization with many subparts, and certainly some talented people, so I don't know how you'd begin to perform such a comparison. But the problems I saw when I saw there resemble ones I've heard about from people at different centers with very different job descriptions. "Stifling bureaucracy" says it pretty well in two words.

I think some of Nasa's PR problems might be traced to the classic left brained / right brained description of engineers vs. artists. Perhaps we need more right brainers (art types) working the info gathered by the "left brained" scientist/ engineers into press conferences that feature images correlated with dialogue that creates a better sense of of adventure and excitement for the general public.

If I were a PI proposing a mission now, I would carefully consider how I could engage the significant technical talents of volunteers on this site and elsewhere to beef up my data processing ability.

Well, I can tell you that, if the lingerie model who was briefly featured in this thread was "sold" to the American public as Victoria Crater, fully 90% of adult males would do everything that they could possibly do to, um, get inside Victoria... crater, that is...



-the other Doug

It never happened...

Puts a whole new perspective on where the beacon is, doesn't it?

Brian, wondering how long before this whole thread gets purged

Yes it costs money. Taxpayer money. So by having a larger amount of the population being positive to the spaceprogram we can ensure a larger budget or at least maintain the budget that we have now.

Basic advertising... You spend some money to raise more money.

That being said I know that what Im asking for is probably too much. But it would be fantastic if all the stuff on this forum where picked up by nasa. (it wouldnt cost them much to link to the places you suggest.)


/Mattias