After 9 Years In Space New Horizons Mission Still Has No Image Release Policy
Keith’s note: At a NASA press event today, the New Horizons team decided to make their mission less accessible to the public in real time. New Horizons was supposed to be an open mission where everything is shared with everyone as soon as it arrives on Earth. Not any more. They changed their mind and have reversed previous public statements. Just watch as these images will be leaked to selected media first as has been the case with other mission news. What is really baffling is the TBD nature of image release policy. This mission left Earth 9 years ago and basic things such as the overall image release policy are still TBD? #FAIL
Stern: Will share LORRI images to NASA websites. Plans TBD. Won't be instantaneous but will be as fast as we can; team wants to look first.
— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) April 14, 2015
I happened to be watching the event when this came up and was surprised as well. Stern siad they were working on it while NASA was quick to say images would be available on the NASA, but didn’t say when.
Isn’t this the same data release policy of every mission ever? The team leading the mission gets first crack at it before releasing anything to the public.
And still MERs, Curiosity and Cassini release everything to the public, right? And I am told that (in so called pre-internet era) special TV screens were built so people were able to watch Voyager Neptune flyby in real time.
As it’s mentioned in this post, the team promised real-time imagery. And now they’re breaking their promise. Which is a shame.
We live in awesome times. A new planet is about to be photographed for a first time and images are going to be distributed amongst selected fews.
Even for the pictures from the Mars rovers, there is often a few days between downlink to Earth and their being posted online.
If you read the referred to link, the team said they’d try to get pictures to the public within 24 hours, if possible.
Actually in this specific case they said that they will publish images within 24 hours starting this month (April).
So far, the lastest LORRI images we have are from January.
JANUARY!
Has LORRI taken any noteworthy images??
Who knows? 🙂
I was at a Voyager Saturn encounter and we watched everything come in live.
No, these days most missions push out raw, unprocessed images as soon as they get them. There are restrictions on scientific use of those images, but I know of Cassini images an amateur processed and put on utube before the imaging team could get a press release together.
What is your definition of “most”?? It’s certainly not the practice for the ESA or China.
The only missions that even try to do this, so far as I know, are the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers on Mars. That’s only for the raw pictures (other scientific data is kept by the science teams and is only released once or twice a year), and there is often a few days between downlink to Earth and their being posted online.
Well, I did mention Cassini. I believe Messenger has/had a similar policy and Juno does although it hasn’t started prime mission yet. But you are correct that, by “most”, I ment most NASA missions in the moderately recent past. The only ESA example I can think of is Huygens, which matched the Cassini policy of putting out raw.images as soon as they could.
Rosetta has a dinosaur publishing policy when it comes to releasing OSIRIS images. However when there are high expectations from the mission, certain changes are possible. During approach Navcam images were released within 24 hours, and nowadays they’re released within a week. Yes, they’re NAVCAMs and we badly miss OSIRIS.
It will be a great shame if the public won’t be allowed to see how Pluto gets bigger and bigger. This has to change. And I do hope that this debacle won’t go unnoticed. Usually after such public disaster things are quickly corrected.
No astrophysics mission I am aware of does that. All images go through at least a brief period of embargo for data quality checking before public release. And really crappy data (for example, due to solar storm radiation hits) is never released at all. Most of the hubbub is over whether there should be proprietary periods, and how long (typically 1 year vs. zero). I mean, truly raw detector data is unintelligible gibberish most of the time. It has to be depacketized, calibrated, etc.
That’s getting into what “truly raw” means. What planetary missions push out almost immediately is, of course, depacketized. But they aren’t calibrated. Most of the time, the contrast is poor and you can’t see much without doing some processing yourself. This isn’t necessarily useful. It’s a response to a public desire to see something at once (i.e. a mission’s way so saying, “See? We aren’t holding anything back.”
For astrophysics, I’m most familiar with HST. For those data, the investigators can opt to have no proprietary period (and, I think, are encouraged to do so.) In that case, anyone can get the data almost immediately, but it does go through the pipeline processing and calibration.
Its what they have been saying up until now and how they changed their mind that has people annoyed.
It looks like it’s still “as soon as we can” ?
I am a “stockholder” for this mission (aka “taxpayer”). I am “buying” these pictures, so let’s share them now!
Well, if someone else processes it, and it ends up on a web site and getting a whole lot of attention, that could cause a problem. Journals like Science and Nature won’t accept papers on previously published/released results. They’re insistent that press releases may not come out before they publish the paper. I could see them refusing to take a paper, if it’s based on an image that already showed up on the net and went viral.
I’m sorry, but this has already been debunked numerous times. It has been explained that the release can be done in a way that does not threaten the science – release raw/uncalibrated data, no geometric data, no vehicle context data. Plus, as it’s the case with Cassini, it hasn’t stop Science from using images on the cover of the magazine. And photographs are rarely included in a paper anyway.
Everything else is a very poor justification. Apparently some people are greedy and that’s it.
Oh, it can certainly be done in a way that avoids problems. Images can also be made public in a way that does _not_ avoid problems with journal policies. If the images are available to the public, the investigators have no way of knowing (or controlling) how a talented amateur will release processed images. Personally, I don’t see that as a big problem: It does mean the published paper would have to go beyond the image itself, with good interpretation and analysis (i.e. the image itself couldn’t be the new result.) But some people disagree.
I like the fact the Curiosity (JPL Site) shows the unprocessed and released images on the same site as they come in. Why can’t we do this????
Agree. I would add that it involves ego as well. They want the fanfare of a press conference to “reveal” the images to feel important. Sorry, the general public, who’s tax dollars fund these programs, want to see the images and could care less who the scientists are.
It’s not just NH… Dawn started taking new pics on the 10th.. 3 days later, we get colorized photos from the previous photoshoot, along with this sentence:
The next optical navigation images of Ceres will be taken on April 10 and April 14, and are expected to be available online after initial analysis by the science team.
Hmph.. guess they want to be sure the shinys seen in previous photos aren’t a crashed alien spacecraft.