JPL Employee Complains When People Believe A Website They Developed
Bizarre. @doug_ellison complains about #Mars Opportunity false alarm because people went to a @NASA_JPL website he helped develop that showed Opportunity sending a signal to Earth. So Doug, maybe we shouldn't trust what @NASA JPL websites like https://t.co/oYsm5UOmKg say – right? pic.twitter.com/bCMH6LJ58x
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 16, 2018
Keith’s note: NASA has some pretty amazing websites. Some of the best ones are made by JPL. They are immensely popular. A lot of work goes into making sure that they work, that they are accurate, and, if needed, that caveats are posted explaining why the information depicted may be modified, delayed, or missing. In other words, there’s a lot of transparency and honesty that goes with thee websites – as there should be. Sometimes the websites have flaws that only emerge over time. Usually NASa is good about fixing these bugs. But sometimes a few NASA employees decide to get snarky and try to blame inaccuracies on the inability of news media or the public to understad a lot of geeky details that they should not be expected to know. That’s not how to behave when it comes to the presentation and maintenance of a “public facing” NASA website.
The other day someone at NASASpaceflight.com was sharp enough to notice that there seemed to be a signal coming from a Mars Exploration Rover- specifically via a DSN dish in Madrid, Spain. Their source: the NASA DSN Now website. Since Spirit is dead, Opportunity is the only MER rover left who could do this, right? Indeed on the right hand side of the screen you could see that Opportunity was sending information back to Earth. So, assuming that the NASA website was correct he tweeted his observation. Someone replied to note that the NASA Eyes website showed that there were up and down links from Opportunity. Even the unofficial NASA DSN Twitter account @DSN_Status (which gets its data directly from the NASA Eyes website) said that DSN was talking to – and getting data from – Opportunity.
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Lots of Twitter traffic ensued. I checked with several NASA sources who said that they were checking to confirm and tweeted that this might be a “false positive”. A short while later JPL tweeted “Today http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html showed what looked like a signal from @MarsRovers Opportunity. As much as we’d like to say this was an #OppyPhoneHome moment, further investigation shows these signals were not an Opportunity transmission.” And that should have been the end of the story.
But it wasn’t. NASA JPL employee Doug Ellison, one of the designers of the NASA DSN website, started to complain on his Twitter account @Doug_Ellison about things he does as part of his day job at NASA JPL. He was whining about how people misunderstood what the website was saying. In essence, it was the public and news media’s fault for getting things wrong. Among his tweets he chided people by saying “Willing a spacecraft to phone home is awesome. Misinterpreting data (in a way that’s been done before) that has people thinking it HAS phoned home isn’t.” In other words its our fault for believing NASA.
I have gotten tweets and emails from people lecturing me how this JPL DSN website works with lots of geeky details. I’m sure everyone is correct. Funny thing: none of what they are saying to me appears on the NASA DSN website. All visitors to this website see is a page showing little graphical dishes sending or receiving animated signas rom spacecraft. NASA tels people to go this website to see what is going on across the solar system. Since NASA is showing this happening as if it was happening in real time, visitors naturally assume that what NASA is showing is real since people trust NASA websites. If this is not a true representation of what DSN is doing then why did NASA go to such lengths to make it look real and not tell people that it is not real.
Right now if you go to this website there is no obvious note to people that the data may not be accurate. There is a little “last updated” notation with a time. And there’s a little “i” link. If you click on it you get this: “Below is the current state of the Deep Space network as established from available data updated every 5 seconds. Click a dish to learn more about the live connection between the spacecraft and the ground. The legend (below) shows the various connections between spacecraft and the ground. A carrier is a pure radio ‘tone’ used to establish communications or for navigation. Data is commands, scientific measurements or housekeeping engineering information. Uplink is commands being sent ‘up’ to a spacecraft. Downlink is data received from a spacecraft.”
In other words NASA is saying that this is what is actually going on with their DSN. Since NASA websites tend to have a stellar reputation when they show stuff like this, one would naturally assume that if NASA is showing something like this then it is accurate.
Based on the obvious flaws in this website’s depiction of ghost signals from a Mars rover, NASA JPL needs to put a caveat on their website saying that information on the website may not be accurate. Or take the site offline. This is an official NASA website and people tend to believe what NASA posts online. Faulting people for doing like some JPL people and fans have been doing, is silly. If NASA JPL PAO can take the time to add “artist’s impression”, “Illustration”, or “false color” to graphics they post then they can put a notice on this website stating that “the graphics depicted are conceptual and may not represent actual spacecraft communications”.
Dialing back the error, what happend? A lot of people were overjoyed to see a NASA website saying that Opportunity had phoned home. They trusted NASA on this. But in the end it was a mistake. Oh well. NASA JPL quickly admitted this. Hopefully JPL will understand that they have engendered an amazing amount of trust among visitors to many of the agency’s websites and will adjust this otherwise cool website to inform visitors that glitches happen. They also need to send at least one of their employees to training class for “NASA Public Outreach 101”.
My personal experience of the gentleman in question is that I don’t trust him, and have serious doubts regarding his ethics. Just sayin’…
I’m not questioning his ethics – just his judgement.
I think you are misunderstanding what the DSN-NOW website does. It reports which spacecraft is on aperture based on the preplanned schedules. The live signal data is just that – what the receiver is seeing in terms of data rates, received power, etc. In the general sense, the signal you’re seeing is from the spacecraft the dish is pointed at, but not always, especially if there’s multiple spacecraft in the same place in the sky (i.e. Mars)
I don’t think the data source that DSN-NOW draws from knows the actual source of signals being received – that’s not known until the data gets farther into the pipeline and the spacecraft ID is checked. It just knows “saw a carrier and this is the received power and data rate”. DSN just gets the bits and passes them off to the ground data systems.
Also, if they’re doing multiple spacecraft per aperture (which is pretty common when you have multiple spacecraft at Mars), it probably shows just the demodulator data for one spacecraft.
The uplink destination is probably more consistent – if it says you’re pointed at spacecraft ABC, and it’s showing an uplink, that uplink is almost certainly destined for ABC.
Yea yea yea you’re smart. But anyone visiting this website would not know anything you wrote. They see a NASA website that says that this is what the DSN is doing right now. So visitors take NASA’s word for it. If this website does not show actual data then NASA needs to put up a clear notice visible to all visitors that the data depicted is not rel. Otherwise this website is misleading people to think that they are seeing real data.
I’m a pretty well-informed enthusiast — regular reader of the unmannedspaceflight forum where Ellison is a moderator — and I didn’t realize the website signal data is live but the target labels are not until just now.
My first reax when I saw this come up on twitter was that Keith was being too hasty (and I still think he’s made this too personal about Doug), but I’ve come around that it would be a good idea to have a small disclaimer or link to a better explanation / disclaimer right on the site
I am not alone in my concerns. People at NASA are too. Stay tuned.
The problem is that your description is way too long. What the page needs is something brief enough that someone might actually read it, perhaps with a link to a FAQ with more details.
What about, “The spacecraft name is determined by the direction in which the antenna is pointed and the frequency to which it is tuned. This is not guaranteed to be correct, especially for weak signals.”
And they should add a FAQ. Especially if one of the people responsible for the site is complaining about answering questions. I know it’s annoying to have to answer the same question more that once, but as far as I can tell, it’s his job. If that still annoys him, a FAQ is the way to go.
Complicating this is that MRO and Opportunity happen to be on the same frequency – if you’re listening for Opportunity, and MRO happens to be transmitting, that’s what you’ll hear.
Check the long article I just posted. 😉
I was a little weirded out by the sharp reaction of some space enthusiasts/professionals/reporters over this “Opportunity’s Ghost” saga. NASA makes this information public to drive public interest in NASA missions, a recipe that has incredible advantages for science and society at large. So when a few eagle-eyed enthusiasts saw the MER signal downlink on the DSN website, why would anyone be pissed (let alone any NASA employee) that someone was paying attention? Heaven forbid should anyone misinterpret the data! This is akin to enthusiasts poring over Curiosity photos and seeing aliens and Mars gophers in random rock configurations. Sure, it probably gets a bit tiring for NASA personnel to repeatedly debunk fringe theories, but is that reason to lash out and claim the intellectual high-ground over people who are not “in the know”? I understand that Opportunity is beloved and no one wants to get anyone’s hopes up unnecessarily, but this whole episode is bizarre. It’s a teaching opportunity, not a reason to deride the public who love a sleeping robot on Mars
Yea seriously. Oops NASA, sorry if we all wished your Mars rover was still alive because your official website said it had phoned home.