NASA’s Physical Science Informatics Database Now Open to the Public, NASA
“At NASA, we are excited to announce the roll-out of the Physical Science Informatics (PSI) data repository for physical science experiments performed on the International Space Station (ISS). The PSI system is now accessible and open to the public. This will be a resource for researchers to data mine the PSI system and expand upon the valuable research performed on the ISS using it as a research tool to further science, while also fulfilling the President’s Open Data Policy. Since 2001, microgravity experiments have been conducted on ISS in the physical sciences and have yielded rich results, some unexpected and most would not be observed in Earth-based labs. These results provided valuable insights into fundamental physical behavior that can apply to both terrestrial and space environments. Collecting this data in a single location not only provides scientists with scientific data from hundreds of NASA experiments, it also helps identify fields where more study is needed.”
– No Mention at CASIS (no surprise since they ignore the weekly NASA-developed Spaceline update (latest update)
– No Mention at NASA Space Station Homepage (also no surprise since they ignore Spaceline)
– No Mention at International Space Station National Laboratory (no surprise since they also ignore Spaceline)
Then there’s this research announced yesterday by FASEB “How Spaceflight Ages the Immune System Prematurely“. Do NASA or CASIS mention this paper? No. Oddly NASA and CASIS like to jump up and down and tell you about all of the amazing research they want to do on the ISS to solve all of humanity’s problems. Spaceline will mention this paper in their weekly summary – but NASA and CASIS ignore Spaceline. In yesterday’s budget briefing NASA mentioned how they want to ramp up ISS utilization in the coming years. Of course this is a good idea since the potential of this amazing facility has yet to be tapped. Alas, given the way that NASA and CASIS handle the dissemination of research results this will simply mean that more important and interesting research will be ignored.
This is also why some of us think NASA is adrift.
ISS gets the big bucks, I think they are still getting more than any other NASA program. You would think they would be able to coordinate their communications to tell the story of what they are doing and the benefits the taxpayer derives from the expenditures. Yet their communications coordination, after 30 years of this program, and after 17 years of flight is hosed. It seems like they are clueless!
For those of us in the know, we know they use the communications position as a promotion mill. They bring in someone with no demonstrated experience, qualifications or ability, give the guy a promotion, and then he is gone in a couple years to be replaced by another. They do the program a tremendous disservice because they cannot get the story out. Lately their focus is on social media and YouTube, neither of which provide any depth or focus. And yet the utilization and payloads efforts are head and shoulders in front of the human life sciences, applications for exploration, education and other areas that the public is interested in.
The program has let us all down for decades. Worst of all, they let down their own people and efforts. Do you think they will ever get it together?
You mean there’s more going on in the ISS then demonstrations of how to eat floating M&Ms and cool things to do with spheres of water??
“The program has let us all down for decades. Worst of all, they let down their own people and efforts. Do you think they will ever get it together?”
What this takes is leadership and there is none. O’Keefe was very good in the areas of program coordination, communications and education and he put a high priority on them. At the AA level General Abrahamson was great in charge of Code M and put a high priority on these functions. I remember him saying that “this was what it was all about. If we didn’t do this well, little else mattered because no one would know. This was the 1 thing!” Genl Abe got the student experiment program going against the wishes of lots of astronauts, managers and life science people. He gave us orders to let him know if anyone got in our way.
Bolden and Gerstenmaier are zeros in these areas.