AGU Scientists Want Their Research Publicly Available Except When They Do Not
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Keith’s note: Simon Porter (@ascendingnode) works at SwRI on New Horizons. Juno is managed by SwRI, so I assume he knows something about JunoCam too. Despite the Twitter scolding by Porter, the JunoCam website has no statement as to when specific images will be released. Here’s the strange thing: someone on the Juno team clearly has an image file of Jupiter’s rings as seen by Juno – an image that they managed to put into a format that could be shown via a laptop on a screen for hundreds (thousands) of people to see at AGU. So, if such an image file exists, why can’t the Juno folks Tweet that same image for the rest of us to see? If it was not technically possible to Tweet the image, someone in the audience could have taken a picture of the picture and then tweeted it. But wait, there is some sort of ban of pictures taken inside of the AGU sessions – even though people in those sessions constantly post them with a #AGU16 tag on them anyway.
Meanwhile, today, in a public park across the street from the meeting site in San Francisco lots of AGU attendees went to a rally to promote transparency for climate science research – something that may be threatened under the incoming Trump administration. On one hand these scientists want government funding for their research and for their data to be publicly available. Yet in other cases they want government funding for their research but only show the results of their research to each other and maybe to the public – eventually. I have made a request to NASA SMD and PAO for this image. I am waiting for a yes or a no.
You science folks can’t have it both ways. If you want government money then you need to be proactive in all instances with the results of your government-funded research.
Keith’s update: According to NASA PAO: “the plan is to post the Jupiter ring image to the Mission Juno website tomorrow morning. As you may have noticed, most of the images from Sunday’s second science pass (PJ3) have already posted – a day ahead of schedule. Unlike most of our raw images, the “ring” needs some processing, since it’s a full spin image with 360-degrees of spacecraft rotation vs an arc.”
I still do not understand why the image shown publicly at AGU could not have been tweeted. NASA posted/tweeted raw images from Opportunity, Spirit, and Curiosity as soon as they arrived on Earth. Cleaned up versions were posted later.
Well, I spent a whole 17 minutes poking around, and I couldn’t find the ring image. Juno does have 46 raw images, from the PJ-1 and PJ-3 orbits (PJ-3 was last Sunday.) That’s about right for the expected number of images per orbit and the number Candy Hansen reported in her presentation today. That’s under
https://www.missionjuno.swr…
I agree the site isn’t a wonder of organization, but then, they aren’t getting paid much for this. In any case, Hansen said most (nearly all) of the processed images were done by amateurs, who downloaded the images, did the work on their own, and then uploaded the results. The web site has almost 200 uploaded images of this sort, and the ring image may be one of them (I didn’t spend too long looking.) The fact that there are so many images processed by amateurs (by definition, outside the NASA-funded team) makes me think the raw images are publicly available. 17 minutes of my time may not have found the most convenient way to pull them.
On the other hand, I did hear some rather negative (in my opinion) comments about public access, in the questions to Hansen’s presentation and in another Juno one. Someone asked Hansen what she meant by “amateur”, since the people doing the processing didn’t match the “dictionary definition.” That person, who is a Juno co-I, clearly confused the dictionary definition: It’s about being paid, not being good at the job. (I note that, at one point, there was a requirement for Olympic athletes to be amateurs, but this was not taken as a slight on their competence.) In another talk, the speaker made some comments about the difficulties of correctly interpreting the data from one instrument (which is quite true) and said anyone planning to work on the data should make sure they worked with someone from the instrument team. In fact, NASA policy is for the instruments to archive not only their data, but also enough documentation on these complexities to make this unnecessary.
I made a similar comment over a year ago on this forum about the availability of Kepler Data to the public. I said “Fine we can give the public the raw unprocessed data and they will be able to do absolutely ZERO with it.” That is because you need to know WAY too much technical data about the photometer and the spacecraft to be able to process it. And to tell the public everything they need to know about the photometer and spacecraft would be a violation of ITAR. SOME science data certainly requires vast amounts of information about the instrument and systems that captured the data for just any layperson to make sense of it. Another example: If I gave you the raw data from the Stardust CIDA instrument, could anyone but the PI interpret it without detailed specifications of the instrument itself? – No
The expectation from NASA is that all data be archived and available to any NASA-funded scientist. (In practice, it’s available to everyone.) Further, the data is expected to be in a usable form, and that means usable without assistance from the instrument team. That means either raw data with sufficient documentation for someone to use, or data which has been processed, calibrated, corrected, etc. by the instrument team to the point where anyone can use it without assistance. If an instrument team isn’t doing that, they aren’t doing their job.
The idea is to make sure no one can treat the results as a personal monopoly. That occasionally happened in the past, and most people in the field don’t want to see it happen again.
Comment on the update: If the ring image was from PJ3 (the morning of Dec. 11) I’m more astonished by the fact that Candy had it in her presentation today (Dec. 15.) Faint ring images require quite a bit of processing, since the contrast is poor and the brightness is low. In the raw images, you usually can’t see anything at all. That’s especially true when a new instrument is observing one for the first time. The fact that they turned the processing around in under two days is astonishing. The fact that they are taking another day to push the results out to the public web page doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me.
Keith’s reaction is that they had the image physically sitting there on a computer to be shown at a talk. It was already processed, and already being shown off to other researchers.
The burden of attaching that image to their “Z0mg!!tEh ringz!” tweet seem pretty low.
In the time it took Porter to post his reflexive series of responses to Keith, he could have posted the damn image.
It is not that astonishing. On Stardust I was able to extract a navcam image from telemetry and display it with GIMP in a matter of seconds of it being taken (while on the ground) and that used the Cassini CCD. We saw the first images of the DI impact within minutes in the JPL control room as well, but to process the images to be press-worthy took hours to de-convolve.
I agree it could have been released more quickly. But public image releases get tangled up in mission rules for data release, and these mission rules vary from one to the next, often without rhyme or reason.
I do have sympathies for scientists who have worked years to get a mission from concept to first-light data. It’s only human to be concerned that someone will see something in an uncalibrated public-release JPG, and scoop them on a discovery. That’s gotta hurt.
Also, I suspect many scientists on a new mission with new data don’t particularly like operating in the glare of publicity, whatever the organization’s preferences are for media coverage. Some get used to it, others don’t.
In this case, that isn’t an issue. JunoCam is on Juno specifically for public outreach. The original proposal even didn’t include it. The normal process is for anyone who is interested to make proposal for what images they should take, and the observing plans are based on a vote on their web site. Once the images are on the ground, the raw data are put on the web site. It appears that takes a day or two. Then anyone who want can download, process the images and upload the results to the web site.
The question is whether this few day delay is acceptable, or if they should go out instantly. Or, more specifically, whether, because of the timing (periapsis on Sunday, conference presentation on Tuesday) a particular image shown at the conference should have been treated as an exception. I’m against making it an exception, because I don’t think there is such a thing as one exception. Someone else would want special treatment for another image, and you’d end up with custom treatment for everything. That gets expensive and time consuming. If they’ve got a pipeline, and they set it up to be reasonably prompt and affordable, I don’t see the problem.
No, that’s not the issue. The issue is that an image is not only being presented in a limited venue, then bragged about on social media, but when questioned about it, the researcher becoming stupidly defensive about it:
“Three seconds of research would have told you this.”
“launch a tinfoil hat “NASA is covering stuff up” attack”
What on Earth is the point of someone responding like that?
O.k. But I think there are two, separate issues you are objecting to. First, there is the presentation at a limited venue, before the image was publicly available. Candy Hansen certainly did that. But so did a large fraction of the presentation at the AGU conference. I’m not sure what to make of that, or what to do.
But the social media bragging and the remarks you reasonably object to were not made by Dr Hansen, the researcher who presented the images in question. It was from a Simon Porter, who Keith identified as working for SwRI on the New Horizon mission. Not Juno, although SwRI is the PI institution for Juno (at the San Antonio rather than the Boulder office.) Hansen, who presented these images, works for PSI not SwRI. And JunoCam was built and operated by yet another company.
So you are objecting to some cheerleading and rude behavior in social media. But that’s the behaviour of some guy in the audience with an apparently tenuous connection to the Juno mission and the researcher who presented the results. I don’t see how you can fairly blame Hansen or the Juno project for that.
Er… As far as I can tell, Juno is putting the raw JunoCam images online within a day or so. They don’t _collect_ images every day (mostly at periapsis, which comes once every 54 days) and the images may sit on the spacecraft awaiting downlink for days. But everything seems to be out within a day or two of the bits hitting the ground.
If you want processed, not raw, images, then you can do it yourself. In fact, you are encouraged to do so and share the results. That’s why Juno has a camera. It’s for public outreach and their plan (and budget) for data processing is all about making raw images publicly available and having amateurs do the processing. Of course, they can’t set a schedule for volunteer work by amateurs.
Since the images are released, I don’t get it about such impatience. It took decades for the mission to develop, it really nothing to wait another day.
I don’t like the tone when tax payers are mentioned, as if they are some sort of master while scientists are mere servants. Hell no! The public fund research for their own good, they are already benefiting without the need to learn math and hard science and still can claim to live in the most advanced country. Taxpayers have no right to dictate how science is done. If you don’t like it, stop funding it.
“Public servants” even. Oh the horror.
Yes… that is the alternative.
And given the choice between showing a modicum of respect for the people who fund you, or not having publicly funded science, you would choose not having publicly funded science?
We can move to places where the public understand what they can get by respecting scientists.
You got the whole thing backward. The first thing not to do dining at a good restaurant is insulting the chef by emphasizing that you are paying party. Same thing with good science, the kind we had since the largest exodus of the science talents from the old world during WWII and the cold war. Of course, if you only want mediocre sciences, yes, by all means remind the science slaves who is paying them.
If you read the original post, it was the “waiter” who insulted the patrons for daring to ask when the meal they were paying for would be served.
In other words:
I don’t know your background. As a scientist myself I consider it beyond ridiculous that a stupid picture is the meal you expect from scientists. You can get a much better deal by hiring visual artists. The instruments on NASA space crafts are designed to do quantitative measurements, not for taking pretty pictures. The pictures are by products with zero scientific value.