The difference is between the sudden frisson of an awe-inspiring spectacle compared to the subtle beauty of scientific data analysis.

Oh, I think that's a little bit unfair. It had been suggested beforehand that a 10" scope might show a flash and maybe even a debris cloud. The result of the real impact - that even multi-metre-diameter scopes seemingly saw nothing - will be disappointing to the general public. There's the negativity, if any.

To quote the conference, it's the squiggly lines on graphs that'll obviously answer (and raise) the questions, and I doubt anyone here isn't looking forward to the real science results - but (if you want to hear my own bug-bear) I think it's unfair on the conference panel to be wheeled out after a very long night, just a few hours after the event, to be asked questions that they can't in all honesty answer at this time.

Andy

The press is definitely skeptical if you look at the briefing. Someone actually suggested an LCROSS 2!

Amen to that!

This sounds like someone who thinks LCROSS is a good idea -- after having witnessed one.

My version of IR sequence near Centaur impact (16sec total duration in the video)

OK, maybe I was being too sensitive.

I appreciate the time taken by those very tired panelists to give the post impact briefing. Even that soon after the event, we saw some interesting stuff: The flash, the crater, some yet-to-be-interpreted spectra. A rough time line was given: two weeks for behind doors hypothesis to hypothesis combat, two months to public disclosure of the fight results. A major professional conference in December to reveal detailed result at.

Can someone put up a scale bar on the IR images so we can get a sense of size?

Where is the 350 ton, 6 mile high, 30+ mile wide plume they predicted that would have been very very obvious from all the great observatory pictures?

What has occurred is not what was predicted. Negativity, from that standpoint is, to a certain extent, justified.

I didn't see the thing live - I was away from TV and Internet. Just got some WiFi, looking at all the pics and vids - and before I even visited UMSF, I said "Hmm - I wonder if anyone else will be saying 'is that it'" an indeed they are.

It's certainly not helped by a scientists with this attitude:

"Will you know if you saw water by this afternoon?" Colaprete: "I probably will but I'm not gonna tell you."

The value is in the science - and that science is yet to be done. BUT - what was seen was not what was forecast by that science team.

this is what science is all about

Sometimes the best science comes from results of an experiment which don't match predictions. Or in sports parlance, 'that's why we play the game.'

Re: "Will you know if you saw water by this afternoon?" Colaprete: "I probably will but I'm not gonna tell you."
In context, the meaning is clear: Colaprete may know what he sees, but his colleagues will also know what they see and there will be differences. They will take a couple weeks to discuss those differences before making a public statement. He also said that!

So some people are angry because nature did not behave the way we thought?

I agree with Paolo.... this IS what science is all about.

Personally I am excited that they got GOOD data. Now let the scientists do their jobs. And let them do it correctly with no rushed results.

Craig

We all know what he meant, and he did go on to say that he needed to await scientific consensus. But the way he phrased it was unfortunate. I know he was tired and all, so it's hard to blame him, but unfortunately he came across as smirky and smug, and the whole panel seemed to avoid the issue of the lack of a flash, which didn't produce a great impression; I worry the press won't treat the team well.

Shoulda put a bigger "bomb" on it :-)

--- I mean

A newclear bomb ?

Angry? Certainly not.

A bit disappointed with the early results? The lack of an obvious plume from even the very best ground based observatories? I think so.

Couldn't agree more with the sentiment though - this really IS what science is about. If we got exactly what we expected, then would we really learn anything anyway

It was a superb opportunity for ground-based observatories, curious to see what Hubble saw...
http://keckobservatory.org/index.php/news/...ew_of_the_moon/
(.)

I just watched the replay, seems they underestimated the bandwidth needed, also were getting confused as to which camera they were talking about, and the main commentator of course said "I am not sure what we saw, which translates to "we did not really see anthying just now did we.....?".

They seemed pleased at LOS, presumebly confident they hit the Moon !

Emily, as ever, says the right things, in the right way :
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002157/

Here - a less positive commentary on events
http://jesseknoll.com/blog/?p=270

This is more or less consistent with the result from the Lunar Prospector impact. No visible plume there either although a small one was expected. One difference so far is the detection of the sodium line mentioned at the press conference. They did not see even that after the Prospector impact.

http://www.ae.utexas.edu/research/cfpl/lun...discussion.html

The truth surfaces....

""There's not going to be these grand, spectacular images of ejecta flying, kind of what you've seen in animations or cartoons," LCROSS principal investigator Tony Colaprete told reporters Thursday. "It's going to be more of a muted shimmer of light, but that muted shimmer of light contains all the information we need to answer our questions."


I wonder what % of people watching knew about that statement........I did not.

I think the press conference was premature, people were tired and the data was too tentative, to the point that there was an initial statement that they weren't going to state if there was water found, what the reporters were likely to be there to hear about.
The MIR flash detection image was intriguing, and the adaptive optics image from Palomar was amazing. the Apache point telescopic video was reasonably good quality, but the MMT enlarged view was so awful it shouldn't have been shown. Unfortunately the Ranger style spacecraft image sequences were not shown! Too many squiggly lines were dwelt upon to be appropriate to a non technical audience.
Colaprete said in response to a question 'I see something in the spectrometer data but I can't say anything more than that', then he apparently vacillated in the awareness he had of that data, finishing an exchange of questions thus:
Q:"Will you know later this afternoon...if there's water or ice?" A:"...I probably will but I'm not gonna tell you."
He (presumably unintentionally) looked like he was coyly BSing the press, something you don't want to do. A day of rest and analysis and image preparation would have worked wonders. As it is the info barely crept above the 'noise' in discussions of the event in the popular media. It's hard enough to get people interested in the Moon and gathering reporters prematurely to tell them the big news isn't forthcoming doesn't help.
I am glad to see Ames get more cool missions. I'm sure that the optimum means of getting information out in the aftermath of a successful mission, for which they can be proud, will evolve with experience. The data from various sources will eventually speak for itself and provide a composite view of this rather dramatic experiment.

I remember Deep Impact and was expecting something similar. The observing craft must have been much farther away in this case.

If they did enough analysis to determine they got a sodium signal, why not water? Would that indicate any water signal they might tease out of the data will be weak at best?

Lack of water/ice is consistent with Kaguya results. The LRO press kit mentioned that in addition to the water theory, the decreased neutron flux seen by Clementine (and I gather Chandrayaan-1) near the poles could also be explained by hydrogen deposited from solar wind, being more stable and able to accumulate in the cold polar regions. So is that now the leading theory?

I was happy with the press conference. I was happy seeing the squiggly lines even though I don't know what they mean. Being told that they were there, that they contained plenty of information to be teased out over time, was good enough for me. I do not wish to be robbed of such small pleasures by those who would prefer nothing rather than a brief, incomplete story. I'm happy with the preview and my appetite is whetted for the main course when it comes.

I suggest that those who are not happy with incomplete information wait two weeks before reading another story about the mission. Better yet, wait for the release of the preliminary papers in December.

Did anybody happen to get any screen caps from the NASA TV briefing this morning? In particular I'm looking for this one:
Click to view attachment
If I recall correctly, the one shown on NASA TV had a more pixelated view of the one in the lower right corner instead of the blobby upsampled version they posted on their website, so that you could tell how the flash showed up in several pixels.

After all the pre-flight hoopla, the public need to be given something. CNN has seemingly dropped all mention of the mission because they have nothing to show. At the press conference it was mentioned that the new crater created by the Centaur was seen. Could a picture of the new crater at least be released to the waiting media?

When they say it "was seen," it was just one pixel. So probably not what CNN really wanted.

Still, they could have done a much better job getting their images to the media. Ames doesn't have JPL's polish when it comes to putting out graphics for media. Right now actually I'm trying to collect all the useful images I can for posting in a more easy-to-browse format, but it'll be too late to help anybody who's got a news deadline today.

--Emily

Yes, I remember seen 3 pixels verticaly but very clear, not blobby.

Someone in a German forum captured several pics. Also this one you're looking for.

From HardOCP


From Wired.com


from an IT forum


Comments at Space.com


Toms Hardware


Nothing wrong with LCROSS. Something quite clearly wrong with the expectations put out there before it happened.

Hmmmmm been out all day, just got in and been catching up on events, Had a feeling we might get this reaction if we didn't see lots of "fireworks" lol.

You are the man, Tman!

Guilty

Can we change the thread? It's about the science/spectroscopy, not about the media. A science thread would be nice, since there IS science and this forum will suffer if it follows the media trail.

Is this better, Emily?

When we get some - then we can start a new thread. This was (and continues to be) an as-it-happened discussion thread. When the science comes out (and we were told it is 2 weeks away) then we can have a new thread for it.

Given that they saw sodium in the early results, this item from 1999 concerning natural impactors may be of interest:

The Moon's Sodium Tail and the Leonid Meteor Shower





Also

Surely what might be useful at a press conference would be to show:

1) The Deep Impact images (yes, apples to oranges comparison, but stay with me)
2) The Smart 1 impact movie (from memory hardly any flash, but clearly visible material in a ballistic trajectory, and yes, I know that was a glancing impact from a smaller impactor)

...and just go - "look, we really didn't know what to expect, we are as surprised as you are about the lack of a visible flash, but its that very uncertainty that has brought us here in the first place, this is still a mysterious area and we are trying to probe those mysteries. And you were/are along for the ride, we are all learning new things at the same time"

P

I'd just like to report that the BBC news coverage was very good. The emphasis was on the success of the impacts and data collection process. They reviewed the hoped-for science and mentioned the absence of a visible flash almost in passing. As usual radio was better than TV.

As someone who has called attention to the LCROSS mission in another thread ("Earthlike Mars?"), and who was in fact expecting the mission to be a "game changer" in terms of immediately clearly identifying water at the lunar south pole, let me express some thoughts that others of my ilk may be feeling.

The basic idea is that a disappointment is best handled by acknowledging it as such -- THEN you can wake the morrow morn with some more hopeful thoughts. As it is now -- due to the hemming and hawing of NASA and the media -- we are still stewing over the question of whether the initial results of the mission were or were not a disappointment -- and of course they were.

NASA absolutely did publish statements to the effect that the impact might be detectable through a 10" telescope, when in fact some of the largest telescopes in the world saw virtually nothing.

The shepherding spacecraft itself detected, as far as publishable images are concerned, only a changed pixel or two, and that in only one of the monitored bands.

And none of this bodes well for establishing the presence of significant amounts of water. I'm not saying that this is now impossible -- I'm just saying that when there is virtually no data in the visible band, there's probably not going to be much in the other bands; not to mention that we were only looking for small amounts of water to begin with.

So c'mon, NASA, help me get over this -- let's admit that the initial results have been a big disappointment -- and then let's carry on from there.

Well...It's definitely far far far too soon to rush to judgement about any aspect of the science return. Consider the frenetic pace of the data acquisition period, and now the big job of reducing this vast mass of data begins...and only after that's done can analysis begin. "Instant science" JPL-style really only works with pictures, and that aspect of the LCROSS payload was mostly for nav/post-impact localization.

However, it's hard not to say that expectation management was not well performed. Perhaps it should be called the "Kohoutek Effect": an interesting and/or unusual astronomical or space event is oversold in 'ooh-aah' potential to the general public, and the result is disappointment...even worse, a percieved lack of credibility ("But they PROMISED Kohoutek would be the comet of the century!"...or even "Does a fizzled flash mean no water?") As has been stated earlier, it's damn hard to predict the results of a novel experiment or event, and if the outcome WAS known with certainty then it wouldn't really be science.

The lesson that should be learned here for future space would-be spectaculars is beware the Kohoutek Effect. It can be done; JPL's getting pretty good at it. It may explain ESA's PR efforts in part as well; one way to manage expectations is to not foster any, but that's the other extreme from today's experience. There's a balance to achieve.

Wow; that sure was a long way to say "patience, grasshoppers!", huh?

Nprev, Kohoutek may be a better example than you realize! For are not comets bodies of rock and ice which sometimes flare spectacularly and unexpectedly, and sometimes not? And do we not hope the floor of Cabeus to be of the same composition? So maybe there are related phenomenon at work here . . .

While the fizzle nature of this one is sort on an opposite of Deep Impact, my cynicism tells me that what's it's probably going to be most like is the Galileo probe... a we-just-hit-the-wrong-place-and-we're-not-changing-the-models kind of sentiment. It's hard for me to put a happy face on that sort of result. And everything worked perfectly in both cases! Sigh. Ah well, if this sort of thing went by the book, it'd be pretty boring, too.

I'm pretty sure they didn't know what to expect as far as the kind of plume seen. I'm getting the feeling that the media over-hyped this (and the animations we were shown didn't help much either). Science isn't just pretty pictures. I'm quite happy-faced about the spectroscopy. Even if there wasn't a wonderful ka-boom, there's still great data gathered, and I look forward to seeing the results of this mission.

Then why did they put out figures? 350 tons, 6 miles high, 30 miles across, 10-12 inch telescopes.

Which leads to dissapointment when..
spaceflightnow.com

The media (apart from using the word bomb a lot) seemed to accurately retell the story that LCROSS told them in press releases etc.

It will be scientifically interesting to find out how or why the predictions were so very different to reality.

Yeah...that really is a million-dollar question. Hell, amateurs with modest scopes have picked up flashes from shower meteor hits (particularly the Leonids, IIRC) before, which are really small & really fast but nowhere close to that Centaur in terms of impact energy.

Somebody half-jokingly said something about it being gulped up by a deep dust pile. That's almost beginning to sound plausible!

Although no spectacular impact plume was observed, some reports:
(Nothing so far on IRTF and Lick observatory websites)

Keck 10.0 m
http://keckobservatory.org/index.php/news/...ew_of_the_moon/

Hubble Space Telescope 2.40m
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/r...s/2009/26/full/

Palomar 5.00m
http://palomarskies.blogspot.com/

I didn't expect much.

"When you kick the surface, [the dust goes out in] a little fan which, to me, is in the shape of a rose petal," recalls Armstrong. "There's just a little ring of particles--nothing behind 'em--no dust, no swirl, no nothing. It's really unique."