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NASA's Mars 2020 Websites Are Not Ready For Prime Time

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
January 23, 2021
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NASA's Mars 2020 Websites Are Not Ready For Prime Time

Keith’s note: NASA JPL and NASA SMD recently put out a press release “6 Things to Know About NASA’s Mars Helicopter on Its Way to Mars“. Helicopters. Hmmm .. that’s aeronautics. You’d think that the Aeronautics part of NASA would be mentioned. The word “aeronautics” appears nowhere. Nor is anything related to aeronautics on NASA’s various websites linked to. If you go to the JPL press kit link for Ingenuity the word “aeronautics” appears nowhere. If you download the actual press kit the word “aeronautics” appears twice. Once in the agency’s name (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and then again on page 31 where it says “The Mars helicopter technology demonstration activity is supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, and the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate”. There is a page describing how it flies, but no mention or linkage is made of anything that NASA has been doing in Aeronautics since its inception 3/4 of a century ago.
Moreover, there is no discussion as to how it is possible to fly anything on a world with an atmosphere only 1% the thickness of Earth’s. There is a great teaching experience that is being ignored. And of course no mention is made of any educational tools even though the NASA STEM Office has them and the JPL mission site has several – which are buried within the website.
Although NASA’s Aeronautics Research and Space Technology Mission Directorates are listed as participants neither the Space Technology Mission Directorate website or the Aeronautics Directory website make any mention of Ingenuity. There is no mention in the Aeronautics programs page. But … if you click on the “more stories” link at the bottom of the Aeronautics page – 6 times – and go back in time 7 months there is a single story on Ingenuity. The landing is 3 weeks away. Why isn’t this sort of stuff being promoted?
And of course, in addition to not bothering to cross-coordinate within NASA’s internal participants in this mission, NASA is not content with one official Mars 2020 Perseverance website. So they have two – one at NASA HQ and the other at JPL. As I have noted before, neither of these two official Mars 2020 websites link to one another and yet they duplicate each other’s content. That’s two web development teams at twice the cost working on the same thing.
And if you go to the JPL site and use the drag down menu for “spacecraft” you only get options for “Overview”, “Rover”, “Instruments”, and “Rocket” none of which mention the Ingenuity helicopter. None of the links under “Timeline” mention Ingenuity either. Under “mission” only “technology” mentions Ingenuity. Its almost as if NASA is not interested in spending more than minimal effort on this helicopter. Oh yes, they have invested around $80 million on Ingenuity.
NASA is less than 3 weeks away from landing Perseverance and Ingenuity on Mars. The agency has had years to get the PR and outreach stuff into place. And yet their websites are not at all synched up with one another, are badly designed in terms of navigation, and often needlessly duplicate on another by creating parallel stove pipes. This is not a new problem. If you read NASAWatch then you have had to endure my rants about this. Last week I did an exit Interview with Jim Bridenstine and I brought this up:

NASAWATCH: This reminds me of something. When I look at the Mars 2020 mission it is going to be flying a little drone – the Ingenuity helicopter. Right off the bat you just look at this thing and you think OK, this is aeronautics. Reynolds numbers and all of that. People can’t imagine that you can fly on Mars but it is actually quite easy to do. And then you think about it a bit further and ask where are drones being used on Earth? You just mentioned agriculture. People are using them in agriculture and are combining GPS and geolocation and satellite imagery from smallsats. You would think that you should be going over to the NASA Aeronautics or Technology websites to see how they are helping with the Mars 2020 mission. But they do not talk about it. And if you go to NASA’s Earth Science website – which is run by the very same Science Mission Directorate that runs Earth Sciences they do not talk about it either. There is an obvious analog there. And what is the most popular gift under many Christmas trees? Drones. You would think that this would be such a no brainer sort of thing to be highlighting and yet you do not see it being done.

So – my question (there is one here) NASA buys its stove pipes by the truckload when it comes to outreach. You put a memo out a in May 2019 that says ‘OK we are going to cut down on the number of websites and make them more interactive’. From what I am told, and I regularly highlight this on NASAWatch, zero progress has been made. Why is it that NASA doesn’t seem to want to tell a single, coordinated story about what it is doing. The various parts of NASA all seem to want to go off in their own little direction.”

Think of all of the students and farmers in agricultural communities who are missing out on a no-brainer link between things that are important in their world and something that NASA is doing on Mars. What a colossal missed opportunity.
Yes, there will be crazy web traffic for one day for the landing. One day. That’s it. NASA seems ill-prepared for the months and years to follow. How many people know or care that Curiosity has been there for years? Show of hands please. And that Moon rock in the Oval Office? It is last week’s news.
NASA is forever whining and complaining about the way that the news media covers things and what the public does or does not think about what NASA does. The same goes for what Congress thinks. Now a new Administration seeks to renew a strong focus upon the role of science in government decision making. You would think that NASA would have taken this task to repair and upgrade its website seriously – perhaps not for the previous Administration, but certainly for the new one. Bridenstine’s memo and direction was issued nearly 2 years ago. Nothing has been fixed – as noted above. There are urban myths within NASA about some sort of website upgrade but it will likely be equally out of date when it finally manages to crawl online.
But who cares? If NASA cannot get its team together to provide a coordinated, easy to understand story about what it does the whole space exploration thing, why it does it, and how it does it, then how can they expect people to support billions of dollars being spent on it – especially during a time of pandemic, economic desperation, and political unrest? Trillions of dollars are being devoted to keeping our nation afloat and all spending priorities – big and small – are under the relevancy microscope.
But wait – there’s more: in that very same constrained budgetary environment NASA wants to spend billions more to bring samples that Perseverance will be collecting back to Earth. You would think that there would be some strategic thought given as to how to excite and engage – and then retain and build upon – the public’s attention for complex, expensive science missions like this so as to generate support for these future missions. But no.
NASA has a chance to be a bright shining light in this time of darkness. Its big rocket choked last week during its big engine test. Let’s hope that NASA steps up to the plate and sticks the Mars Perseverance landing both on Mars – and within the hearts and minds of people back on Earth.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

17 responses to “NASA's Mars 2020 Websites Are Not Ready For Prime Time”

  1. Bob Mahoney says:
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    I like you, Keith, have been pondering NASA PAO’s (to attach a singular label to the organizational collective responsible for public engagement) failings for a very long time. While I’m sure multiple factors have and are contributing to various degrees, I’m beginning to suspect the main source is a cultural normative understanding on the part of most of the folks doing it: it is not our job to do ‘that’.

    There is a disconnect. You & me & all the many who get jazzed about NASA’s doings have a notion of just what there is to get jazzed about and we also have notions of ways to engage folks with those cool things.

    PAO evidently does not share our take on things. They see their job as different than what we imagine their job is. [One can speculate, based on the decades of evidence, as to what they see their job to be.]

    Nothing else I’ve considered in this matter all these years seems to offer an explanation for such a widespread and consistent missing of the boat. This also would explain the consistent deaf ear shown to your many appeals for easy-to-implement changes. They think YOU are rambling on about somebody else’s job.

    Just a thought.

    • ed2291 says:
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      NASA PAOs being lazy and/or incompetent is a simpler explanation.

      • Bob Mahoney says:
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        I would concede the point in a small number of cases (people are people and some suffer from various failings…while others shine with enthusiam & talent) but I don’t think those two causes can explain all these decades across the entire organization.

        Poor web presence is only a portion of a much broader malady. [I would point to my 2007 Space Review 2-part essay ‘Space for Improvement’.] Somehow, for some reason, the vast majority of the personnel charged with sharing NASA and what it does with the public don’t do much substantive sharing in well-understood engaging ways. Their communications formula is old or stale or flawed or misdirected or internally misunderstood or misguided…or some mixture of all or some of these.

        I had suggested some ideas for fixing things back in 2007, but nearly all addressed end-product aspects. I am nearly convinced now that it is a root problem with task worldview: they see no problem needing repair or renovation because they are doing what they think they are supposed to be doing…and doing it well!

        We the customers on the outside know otherwise since our worldview & point of view are different.

      • fcrary says:
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        I think it’s more a matter of the PAO work being distributed and not centrally coordinated. The PAO people at JPL work for JPL. Their job is to tell the public what _JPL_ is doing. And diluting that message by talking about the Aeronautics Directorate’s role would (to them) not be doing their job. The PAO people at headquarters want to communicate what _NASA_ as a whole is doing, not get the story bogged down in the details of what part of NASA is doing what. Aeronautics Directorate may feel that a story about a primarily JPL project is wasting their resources which could be better use to communicate that _they_ are doing. And, in the case of other missions, if it’s a PI-led mission, the PI’s home institution wants to have their own web page which emphasizes what _they_ are doing. I remember lengthy debates (to use a polite word) at _Cassini_ project science group meetings before the spacecraft got to Saturn, over whose institution got to issue press releases or release images. So I think that a big part of the problem is that every institution involved has their own PAO or media relations people, and they see their job as spinning the story to emphasize the role of the institution which pays them (and conducts their performance reviews.)

        • kcowing says:
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          You are half right. NASA HQ PAO runs everything. Their way of running everything is often to give in to dueling factions by letting them do whatever they want since that is easier than working up a cohesive education and public outreach plan with a management structure that actually works. Also, NASA is stuck with a lot of civil servants who are bad at their jobs but cannot be fired and are hard to reassign.

          • fcrary says:
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            I agree, but with a slight quibble about wording. I’d say NASA Headquarters PAO has the authority to run things. But when they just let the centers and other institutions do whatever they like, because that’s the path of least resistance, I wouldn’t say Headquarters is running everything. I’d say they are failing to exercise their authority to run everything.

          • kcowing says:
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            This is a circular argument so we are both right.

    • kcowing says:
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      Actually it is halfway between that and what ed2291 suggests below. The net result is a cumbersome web presence that is designed to cause the least amount of internal managerial friction – not to provide the best public information.

  2. chuckc192000 says:
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    If they had mentioned “aeronautics” instead of “helicopter”, 99.9% of John Q. Public would not know what they were talking about. They’re just trying to relate to the common man.

    • kcowing says:
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      Right “guest”. No one in America knows what aeronautics is.

    • fcrary says:
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      Fine. They say “helicopter”. And then say, “developed with assistance from NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, which handles research on terrestrial aircraft.” But it’s unlikely they would, since that last clause is _explaining_ what something means. There’s a strong and fairly common opinion among media relations people that readers don’t like having things explained to them; that it’s better to just use simplified and watered down language which won’t need any explanation.

      • Bob Mahoney says:
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        Which is a serious part of the problem: the presumption that the audience doesn’t care about the actual realities, combined with the presumption of an inability to understand those realities anyway. “Dumb it down & gloss over the specifics” (you know…the actual parts that make it interesting in the first place. Instead, rattle off gee-whiz trivia that isn’t actually gee-whiz at all.

        • fcrary says:
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          I wouldn’t put all the blame for that on NASA’s PAO people. Part of their job is to get their content picked up by major media sources. And those sources are believed, correctly or not, to dislike press releases which are don’t dumb things down and which sound too much like a lecture or an attempt to educate people about the details. If someone’s job is to get the story picked up by papers like the San Francisco Comical, and those papers _expect_ gee-whiz trivia rather than solid content with explanations, guess what those someones will want to put the press releases they write.

          That view about what major media sources want is not exactly correct. But I did shift to reading the BBC for my morning news during the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Unlike most American sources, they did bother to explain what things like a secondary coolant loop are. Admittedly down on in the seventh or eighth paragraph of the story, but at least in the stories they published.

          • Bob Mahoney says:
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            Which returns to my original conclusion in a specific manifestation: PAO personnel have a different conception regarding their job than we have regarding their job.

          • fcrary says:
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            I’d broaden that from “PAO personnel” to “PAO personnel, their managers, and the senior management of the institutions they work for.” I don’t think the problem will be solved by blaming the PAO personnel exclusively. I think a solution will require changing what management expects from their PAO people, and making those managers understand that NASA-funded PAO work is _not_ about promoting their institutions’ image.

          • Bob Mahoney says:
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            No argument from me. I tried in my 1st comment to note that ‘PAO organization’ must refer to the whole entity responsible for the agency’s public engagement.

  3. Brian_M2525 says:
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    I am on their Mars exploration social media list and so today on Facebook they sent an image and mention about the Curiosity landing on Mars in 2012. There was zero mention of Perseverance. I thought surely they must be trying to tell me to watch the forthcoming Perseverance landing in 3 weeks, which will be a repeat of Curiositys 7 min of terror, but no mention of it at all. very peculiar!