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Media Left Lost On Titan

The latest mosaic by Ricardo Nunes. 1024x768 Desktop available
by Simon Mansfield
Gerroa, Australia (SPX) Jan 18, 2005
The money shot is what they call it. While usually applied to less salubrious sectors of "film making," in this case we are talking about a mostly static 98 frame view of the surface of Titan.

How much this actually cost is hard to pin down. Do we include the total cost of getting to Saturn. Or do we assign a strict dollar per pound ratio for the transport segment and then add on the cost of the Huygens probe, mission control, and eventually the science work done back on Earth.

Whatever the exact amount is, it's a lot of money.

The pursuit of science is never easy and rarely cheap. It takes a certain amount of raw guts for public officials to plonk down hundreds of millions of dollars or in this case euros to send a probe billions of kilometres across the solar system and then have only a limited chance of success.

But that's what makes space science so exciting. Massive bets against massive odds, all in the hope of extending the knowledge of humanity that little bit further.

Overall the public is quite supportive of space exploration. I rarely hear people whine that it's a waste of money that would be better spent on the unemployable. In fact, I usually hear or read such comments as coming from people who claim that's what the public whine about. But the false straw man is typical of today's public discourse, but let's leave that for another day.

The working press or mainstream media that comprise the daily broadsheets, tabloids, and nightly news are very much like the general public when it comes to science.

Only a rare few have any formal science or technology training and they struggle through the S&T segments of space exploration waiting for the money shot, that has formed the bedrock of space public relations since Sputnik - though in that case it came in the form of a radio beacon - but given the dominance of radio in 1957 it was probably a brilliant and effective example of early multimedia.

But the money shot is what it's all about as far as the public are concerned. For my neighbors, my family and most of my friends, all they want to see is eye candy. They want to be transported from the here and now of Earth 2005 and be immersed in a picture that truly does communicate with a million words.

Despite the rhetoric of the so called alt.space community, most of the public aren't that interested in going into space. They can clearly see that the moon is dead, that Mars is cold, and Venus is hell.

But they aren't stupid either, and the general public is keenly aware that science and technology make their lives better. And most of the public remain strong supporters of public investment in science and by consequence - space exploration.

Europe's first landing on another world was never going to be a major visual experience, and was always going to be a very dull, but ground breaking, science experiment that only a few scientists would fully appreciate.

But when I watched the first Huygens science results press conference held the next day, I was stunned by how a major European achievement was reduced to grey bland goo.

With poetry filling the auditorium, the press looked on wondering what the heck was going on. They were here for the unveiling of space art, not poetry. They wanted the money shot and a few newly discovered facts about a world 99% of humanity could probably not even name let alone tell you where it was.

But hey this was Europe doing something no else had done before, it was spacey and there was that small x factor lurking in the background with murmurs of life. And for the conspiracy lover there was always the hydrocarbon angle which might mean a Big Oil angle could be rolled in.

So the press were dutifully there in their hundreds, ready to do their job by showing Europe, and the rest of us, a whole new world never before seen.

And once we got the poetry politely out of the way, it would be time for the eye candy.

But up comes chart 1, then chart 2, followed by a further 5 charts, with some white noise added in to give it a techno multimedia angle. For those of us who were as much interested in the science as the money shot, there were some great facts starting to come out - such as little evidence of surface hydrocarbons, that Huygens had probably landed in a "moist clay/sand" rather than flowing liquids, and that there was evidence of water ice.

But still no money shot.

Until finally we get to the main event - at least as far as the media is concerned - the pictures.

And low and behold they are really really boring. No eye candy here. Just a lot of black and white pixels that will need months of reprocessing to make into something spectacular. This could never have been different, but the press did not know that and despite an attempt at proud applause with obligatory woes - it was not what they had been expecting.

My predication is that there will be two main images that come out of the imaging segment of the Huygens mission.

An overhead mosaic that will slowly get better and better as the image data is combined with radar data and some you beaut computer graphics, and then we will get the ground image rebuilt pixel by pixel into something more akin to what we expect to see in National Geographic months from now.

Eye Candy Not Nationalism Sells Space

ESA made many mistakes with the public and media relations for the Titan landing. Rather than approaching it from a human perspective - ie the "art of space," they presented Huygens as a science experiment dressed up as rebirthed "European Nationalism".

While nationalism has always been part of space, most missions have also involved a serious slab of eye candy imagery that enables the public to ignore the political crap and just gaze at something new and wonderful.

While this was never going to possible with Huygens, ESA should have made sure that the hundreds of press reps that came from all over Europe were better prepared for what they were going to get.

It is quite clear from watching the next day press conference that the press were stunned - not by eye candy but what a let down it was turning out to be.

There was no money shot to fill page one or lead the evening news with. On and on they sat in embarrassed silence as poetry was replaced with chart after chart that meant nothing to the non scientist.

To be fair to ESA, the event was clearly billed as the first post-landing science results press conference, but does anyone truly think that the press or public would be excited by Doppler delay charts.

SpaceDaily has followed the Cassini mission since before it launched. Across Sol we have reported it's key milestone events while waiting for the main event at Saturn.

The lack of a money shot does not overly bother me, it just makes the job of illustrating our Titan coverage a little bit harder. And despite ESA's attempt to keep an early monopoly on the data, it took only one mistake on one server for the main image data set to be leaked.

I'm not sure how this will play out for European space, but the press have been treated like children and editors all over Europe must be scratching their heads wondering what the big deal was all about.

Robots are so much cheaper that men in spacesuits, and they truly are extensions of ourselves. And nowadays the interested public want to be there for the whole ride, they want to see the images arrive in real time, they want to hear the scientists do their science on the fly as they speculate and imagine what the next questions will become.

Hopefully there will be a next time, and ESA will learn from this event that the true owners of space exploration are not the scientists but the toiling masses who pay the taxes that make all of this possible.

Postscript: Recent suggestions on news forums such as Space.Com that we should sack Jeffrey Bell as he is bad for advertising are ridiculous. As much as I live and eat for the next advertising check, I do not publish SpaceDaily on the basis of sucking up to advertisers. SpaceDaily is an independent news service, and we do not censor the news to fit the opinions of government employed technicians or starry eyed teenagers. In 2004 SpaceDaily and associated sites published over 20,000 news articles, of these Jeffrey Bell's contribution represented less than 0.1 percent of our publishing efforts. To condemn an entire newspaper on the basis of disliking 0.1 percent of what's published is ridiculous.

Simon Mansfield is the publisher of SpaceDaily.com and can be contacted via a variation of simon@[email protected].

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Walker's World: The New World Order
Washington DC (UPI) Jan 17, 2004
The tectonic plates of geopolitics have just shifted. On an issue of major strategic concern to the United States, the European Union has decided to flout American concerns and side with China, and Britain has put its vaunted special relationship with the United States to one side, and has gone along with its fellow Europeans. A new world order is coming.



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