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Why Does NASA.gov Ignore Cool ISS Photos?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 31, 2014
Filed under

Keith’s note Like these photos? I sure do. But you won’t see most – if any – of them online at NASA.gov. Why? The crew tweets lots of pictures via @NASA_Astronauts but they are low resolution and yet virtually none of them appear online at NASA. Nothing has been posted on the NASA Flickr account since 16 December 2014. The NASA ISS page is similarly out of date. If you go to spaceflight.nasa.gov the last thing that was posted are training photos from November 2013. Isn’t it odd that the ISS crew – busy as they are in space – are conscientious enough to plan, take, comment, and in some cases edit, and then download these pictures – from orbit – but yet back on Earth no one at NASA JSC seems to care? And yet NASA puts out articles like this on 29 December: “Astronaut Photographs Inspire Next Generation of Scientists” which reference images NASA does not put online. Baffling.

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

30 responses to “Why Does NASA.gov Ignore Cool ISS Photos?”

  1. Rich_Palermo says:
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    The ISS images don’t do anything for me. I frequently visit the realtime weather imagery at
    http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.go
    especially when there’s interesting stuff happening.

    I wish there was one like it for the polar orbiters. There are some nice images at
    http://npp.gsfc.nasa.gov/ and
    http://eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/
    but as far as I can see, no real time capability as with the geostationary systems.

    • kcowing says:
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      Your first link goes to a page that points to http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.go… which has not been updated for more than 14 years ….

      • Rich_Palermo says:
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        Hmmm…that’s odd. When I click on it, I get sent to:
        http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.go

        which in turn has imagery from today.

        The /satlinks.html page indeed has a very old date. But, the first link is to the NASA Global Hydrology and Climate Center which is the link I was trying to send in my original.

        Thanks for the crosscheck. I hope this clears up any confusion.

        • kcowing says:
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          These links are broken/not working

          – GOES data server’s on the Internet
          – World Meteorological Organization
          – NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory
          – METEOSAT weather satellite images from The University of Nottingham
          – Other weather links from the University of Nottingham

          and so on.

          • Rich_Palermo says:
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            A fair point.

            In NASA’s defense, I think the pages were created when portals with handmade links were the standard. Then the search engines came along. I normally get to NASA pages and even commerial/shopping pages of interest by searching rather than from traversing the site’s links.

          • dogstar29 says:
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            Nevertheless a current listing of satellite observational data from all the unclassified programs (not just weather) would be helpful.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        True that the page hasn’t been updated, bit that’s not necessarily a bad thing in this particular case as there are probably thousands of automated devices around the world taking data by following those links.

        That particular page isn’t really a ‘public-facing’ page in the sense of providing curated or edited content of pretty pictures for the general public; it’s used by scientists and weather geeks.

        Mostly. And it’s bat-shit ugly, I’ll give you that 🙂

  2. Neal Aldin says:
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    NASA HSF, especially ISS, is a peculiar place to work in recent years.

    The communications effort appears to be managed out of the payloads office. That’s why you see lots of information about payloads. Its frequent, repetitive, detailed. I think the payloads people will think that if you hear a lot about what they do you will think the payloads are more important than they are. Unfortunately there is not a lot of payloads that are all that significant and it is interesting that so much effort is spent on payloads and science which is not NASA managed. Consider the recent 3D printing of a plastic wrench. 3D printing has been done for 30 years. Lately it has entered the mainstream and you can buy a home unit pretty cheap. Its not that high tech. It might prove helpful to HSF in the future, though metal sintering or other high durability printing might be more significant.

    The news media people seem to think it is all about social media, so they twitter and provide all kinds of brief social media things that do not tell much of a story. The astronauts, because they are on a mission, do a little better with social media. But all the other tweets and social media production just add noise so I think most of it is not only wasted but is genuinely drawing attention away from interesting things.

    Imagery, because its somewhat random, is handled in a couple different ways. There is a sizeable video group in the astronaut office who generate some random things. Most of what they generate are edited versions of some of the better astronaut videos which I guess is why they are paid for out of that office. Its a wonder so many video people are on the payroll since the still imagery people,all of whjom worked in media relations, were all laid off a couple months ago; which is one reason you won’t see a lot of still images of recent interest. It has to be something pretty exciting for the NASA “news media” people to see and identify anything of interest, and earth imagery is not something most of them readily recognize.

    There is used to be an earth imagery science group but it was pretty small and they did their best to get images catalogued for posterity.

    The HSF management felt that earth imagery of potential scientific interest ought to be paid for by someone else, not HSF. The ISS HSF managers are mainly engineers so they think engineering is important. Payloads is mainly engineering (integration) so they think that is important. Imagery, public affairs, media are not engineering so not considered important.

    All in all there has not been much of a plan for how ISS is to be communicated.

    Compare that with the hype of the Orion flight. Not the same set of people.

    Compare ISS with virtually any recent planetary or science missions; usually they are well thought out, well orchestrated, and tells the story.

    I don’t think ISS knows what story it has to tell, especially since assembly finished years ago. If they know what their story is, they’ve failed to inform the rest of us.

    • Littrow says:
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      The ISS program will be over before they figure out what they should have been doing. Classic government bureaucratic mismanagement.

    • Rich_Palermo says:
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      “Payloads is mainly engineering (integration) so they think that is
      important. Imagery, public affairs, media are not engineering so not
      considered important.”

      I think that is both correct and speaks volumes about the ISS. It is up there to be up there, not to do anything of scientific or technical interest.

      “The HSF management felt that earth imagery of potential scientific interest ought to be paid for by someone else, not HSF.”

      This is especially galling given how much money has been diverted to ISS in the name of science.

    • dogstar29 says:
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      Your experience provides important insight into the current problem. But here’s why it is critical. Earth observation is the most valuable task the ISS can accomplish. I say this having worked on life sciences, so I could be wrong. I realize the remote sensing community is largely committed to unmanned polar-orbiting satellites. But new sensors can be developed and transported to the ISS for a small fraction of the money and time needed for a satellite program. With standardized external mounting points with power and data connections, they could be installed with minimal crew time and easily replaced if they fail or as upgrades are developed. ISS overflies the entire inhabited earth every day. Megabytes of data can be recorded and downlinked every second, more than the total data yielded by most microgravity and life science experiments. And that data isn’t a tenuous hypothesis that might apply to life on earth, it’s actual information about the earth. We need a strong ISS earth observation program that provides modest but reasonable funding for a substantial number of compact observation payloads from a broad spectrum of new investigators. That’s how we can get practical benefits from the ISS.

      • Rich_Palermo says:
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        The polar orbit is well suited to what the scientists need and want. Lighting, revisit times, orbital height, look angles, pointing knowledge and stability, … the list goes on. Why put payloads onto the ISS if they aren’t going to get at the phenomenology of interest? Dangling something off of the ISS and hoping for the best isn’t a good idea.

        • dogstar29 says:
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          That’s certainly the story you will get from people who have made their careers running half billion dollar satellite programs that take years to go from funding to data and can go off-line for more years if the satellite has a failure. That’s not the story you would get from dozens of environmental scientists and hundreds of graduate researchers with new ideas and new instruments that could fly in three months for $150K. Earth observation has a long way to go. There is a lot more to be learned with a dozen, or three dozen different sensors, passive and active, simultaneously and repeatedly observing most of the earth in a wide variety of sun angles, at minimal cost since only the sensor itself and a standard interface is needed, with the possibility for quick servicing or replacement via scheduled logistics flights if there is any problem and rapid evolution as new technology is developed.

          The ISS is not intended to replace satellites, of course. When an ISS-mounted sensor proves useful and reliable and reaches a stable level of development, it can be incorporated in a satellite with a minimum of further development to image the entire world.

          • Rich_Palermo says:
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            The polar orbiters and other science-driven missions are designed, built, and verified for the needs of continuous operation and generation of calibrated operational data for present analysis and future reanalysis. You seem to be talking about technology demonstrators – an entirely different breed of cat. There are ways to do those without having to have a full-up Class A flight program. I don’t know where you get the $150K/3 months number. That seems low even for a university payload development. Getting it past the paperwork to go onto a human platform would eat that up really quickly. I think launch costs are still $10K/lb so that would support a 15lb payload, max. Miniaturization is good but for a lot of earth science, you can’t beat aperture.

            I’d love to have the 200 half-billion dollar Class Area science programs that could have been done for the $100B sunk into ISS so far. Or 190 of those ($95B) and the balance of the $5B spent on cheaper tech demonstrators.

          • dogstar29 says:
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            I am not talking about “technology demonstrators”. I am talking about staying on the cutting edge. I am talking about reducing the development timeline and cost of multispectral scanners, high-resolution radiometers, sounders, imagers, radars of every description, that would produce new scientific knowledge about atmospheric phenomena, pollution sources, geologic processes, oceanography, biological diversity, science that will involve new innovative researchers and new universities and institutions, science that will be made widely available through published papers and online databases. The ISS orbit covers the entire inhabited Earth. It’s location is precisely known.

            Any field has a tendency to become insular and stale as the people who control it defend their own ideas, methods and funding and become convinced they have all the answers. The Earth Observation Program is under attack by members of Congress including KSC’s own Bill Posey; if you think you have funding problems now, just wait. We need to find a way to get those 200 programs done for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time.

            The SpaceX/Nanoracks process is a gamechanger. The availability of a vehicle going to the ISS every 2-3 months with standard accommodations and space allocated to payloads essentially eliminates launch cost for the researchers and vastly simplifies the payload acceptance process. I agree this won’t accommodate a telescope of unlimited aperture, but there’s a lot that can be done with less aperture and more ingenuity.

            Earth observation has become slow and expensive. It needs new ideas, new technology, new science, broader support, wider involvement of the scientific community, more practical benefits to the taxpayers and the world, and it needs to do it all at much lower costs and on much faster timelines. Earth observation needs ISS.

          • Rich_Palermo says:
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            “The Earth Observation Program is under attack by members of Congress
            including KSC’s own Bill Posey; if you think you have funding problems
            now, just wait…”

            I agree the visigoths are storming the barricades. Where is the money coming from to develop these innovative payloads looking at inconvenient facts? And how will these payloads interact with one another? How will the radiometer lie down with the radar when each one’s EMI fouls up the other? Laser payloads on a human platform? There will be some lovely regulatory hurdles to overcome there.

            If you want the multispectral equivalent of cellphone cameras looking down and taking happy snaps, you might be able to get that. If you want science data of comparable quality to the current orbiters, good luck. Actually, Congress might go for that bread and circuses approach since there will be no way to draw conclusions from such datasets.

            “The ISS orbit covers the entire inhabited Earth. It’s location is precisely known.”

            And raised periodically because it is so low. And noisy since it is there to keep some human beings alive within it. The ISS does not go over the poles so forget cryosphere research a la ICESAT. It isn’t the right choice for SMAP. It couldn’t do what the A-Train does. Astronomy is out the window (pun intended).

            “Earth observation has become slow and expensive….. Earth observation needs ISS.”

            The first point is correct and there are ways to do things faster and smarter. But, it does not follow that the Earth observation needs the ISS to do that.

            But, the converse – that ISS needs Earth Observeration is closer to the point. After $100+B of baldfaced lies about scientific value (it’s in the Congressional Record) to justify its construction, it is now casting about for something to do and looking back to the scientific communities to help it out.

          • dogstar29 says:
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            “the visigoths are storming the barricades.”

            All the more reason we should all hang together, as the alternative may be that we will all hang separately. Send a proposal to CASIS. Offer to provide a simple prototype instrument if they will provide launch services with ISS providing integration, power and data link. The ISS environment may be a lot cleaner than you expect. And SpaceX can accommodate large aperture instruments with a little planning. What do you have to lose?

          • Rich_Palermo says:
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            “All the more reason we should all hang together, as the alternative may be that we will all hang separately.”

            You can’t appease visigoths. There will be no piece of paper flapping in the breeze signifying peace in our time.

            I don’t remember where I wrote it, maybe on NasaWatch or somewhere else. This sounds like the Dr. Strangelove scenario. Gen. Ripper has ordered a first strike and the other generals say to go all in because there is no other alternative.

            I don’t have parts to build a space instrument of any kind sitting in my garage. It is not simple or cheap to get funding to develop an instrument – no matter how small or how much of a prototype it might be. The organizations that fund such things aren’t looking to the ISS. They’re looking for something that serves their needs, not to server someone else’s agenda. If a University built a tall office building on an earthquake fault in a high wind and bad weather area with uncertain power and water infrastructure, it could not tell its researchers, “There’s your bio/chem/physics building, go to it.” The faculty would rightly rebel. Buildings are put up for a purpose. The ISS is up there to keep humans in orbit for some reason other than science.

            I think this site has done a good job showing the shortcomings of CASIS so I don’t see that as an option.

            What I do see as a sick possibility is that Earth Observations is _directed_ to go onto the ISS or else much like the Shuttle was mandated as the US launch platform back in the 70s and 80s. That double-whammy would divert even more funding towards the ISS while clobbering all that pesky earth science.

          • dogstar29 says:
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            I have criticized CASIS myself but they have finally hired some experienced payload scientists and there has been some real progress.

            I certainly don’t advocate ordering anyone to do anything. But except for those who are paying their own way, we are all serving the taxpayers and I think we are obligated to at least discuss all alternatives to see which will provide practical benefits at a reasonable cost.

            The ISS truss is about 100 meters long, and the power and maintenance capabilities are not available for a satellite, not to mention the capability to add new items every three months without being charged for a launch. I hope we can all at least consider thinking outside the box.

      • Neal Aldin says:
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        I completely agree with you that the earth imagery could be of great significance. Just look at what was accomplished on Skylab, by comparison with what is not being pursued on ISS. Fact is there are a number of areas that could be of significance for ISS utilization, but no one is even pursuing many industries. 25 to 30 years ago there were NASA HSF managers from a wide range of disciplines who sought to ensure a wide variety of viewpointrs and inputs made it into the program. HSF was taken over about 10-15 years ago by a bunch of people with much narrower interests and very restricted experiences; I like to think of them as being chauvinistic about their parochial interests at the expense of the good of the progream. The program is failing to meet expectations for this reason.

    • Littrow says:
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      It sounds from your description that there are a lot of people in a number of organizations all trying to do the job with imagery and communicating. Why do you think they are ineffective?

      • Neal Aldin says:
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        Why? It really comes back to the knowledge an abilities of the people doing the job. What are needed in this function are people with broad knowledge of the design, functioning and multiple purposes of ISS with a healthy understanding of the human support requirements and how to tell about these in a variety of ways, visually, audibly, and verbally. An important part is the human story and rationale. Too much focus on science, or on astronauts, or on any one thing means you do need get the story. NASA has too many people in the ISS Program who know only their own focus. The scientists are a good example. They really think its solely about the science. Astronauts are another prima dona group. They and their supporters really think its all about the astronauts. Flight or mission operations are yet another group who for years now have been telling us its all about operating in space. Any one of these groups do not understand much of the program and so cannot communicate it regardless of their communication skills. When they are put into leadership positions they can do some serious damage if they do not embrace a much wider base of knowledge and instead focus solely on their narrow area of expertise. The communications/media specialists are just as bad because despite their potential communications ability, they know so little about the program that they do not develop a meaningful narrative. This, in my view, is why they have failed to communicate the program.

  3. hikingmike says:
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    There are lots of photos on that ISS page you linked. Maybe not all, and not as recent. I don’t follow them on Twitter. Do you mean that they post way more photos there than show up on the NASA sites? Hopefully these show up on the NASA ISS Expedition 42 image gallery too because they are good ones. They probably have zillions of great photos though and don’t know what to do with them all.

  4. supermonkey says:
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    It might not be as easily accessible as you’d like, but all of the Earth imagery is published on the JSC Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit’s web page: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/

    • dogstar29 says:
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      To be clear, these are photographs taken by the astronauts. Another post gives a link to GOES geosynchronous weather satellite imagery. There are numerous other sources of Earth imagery.

  5. shuttlepuppy says:
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    Didn’t NASA close down the Media Resources Office at JSC? That’s where the photos taken on human spaceflights, including ISS, would be captioned and archived, usually within a few days.

    Rumor has it that JSC was told either be the JSC Media Resource Center or NASA TV would need to be shut down. Glad they kept NASA TV, but journalists and the public need to know in the new commercial space environment, live and immediate coverage is not necessarily a given any more.

    • Littrow says:
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      I don’t believe this. The media resource center was 3 people. NASA TV is dozens of people spread across multiple centers. The Media Resource Center was not the way only function shut down. They also closed the Digital Learning Center simultaneously. This was another half dozen people laid off.

  6. Neal Aldin says:
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    I think the entire effort is so ineffective because, as one can see by the lengthy list of different URLs hidden in different places, shown in this blog, many of which do not work, it is impossible to decipher where things are or how to find what you need in a reasonable amount of time. Shuttlepuppy is right, at least the media resources office was an internal search service that NASA offered, but now that is gone. The idea that NASA could not afford those 3 people, when they have a veritable division performing other functions that are hard to justify, is a result of poor organization and nonexistent management.

  7. dogstar29 says:
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    Links to the Landsat image archive:
    http://landsat.usgs.gov/Lan

    Astronaut photography of Earth (inc. ISS):
    http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/

    GOES geosychronous weather satellite images:
    http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.go