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By Emily Lakdawalla

Giving Away the Data

Aug. 25, 2006 | 12:54 PDT | 19:54 UTC

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by Jim Bell

When I was a graduate student studying planetary science in the 1980s, there were very few active space missions to the planets. The Viking Orbiters and Landers had finished their work at Mars. The Soviet Union had sent orbiters and probes/landers to Venus and were turning their sights back to Mars and Phobos. They and the Europeans and the Japanese were sending probes to rendezvous with Halley's comet. The U.S. Halley observational space mission, and indeed most of the American space exploration program, was crippled with the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and her crew in 1986 (also delaying the shuttle-launched Galileo mission to Jupiter, which wasn't launched until three years later). It was a difficult and "data lean" time for space exploration. It was no wonder my thesis research was based on telescopic observations, rather than space mission data.

I had been lucky enough as a student to be invited to participate in the Voyager 2 encounters of Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989 (the former, as an undergrad at Caltech by my research supervisor Ed Danielson, and the latter, as a grad student at University of Hawaii by one of my mentors, Fraser Fanale). "Participate" is a generous term. I was really just a gopher -- running errands, making copies, going on late-night pizza runs for science team members -- but it was still an incredible thrill just being there and watching the images come down, one by one, as each planet got bigger and bigger in the windshield. Of course, there was no "internet"; a small number of people were the only ones to see all the images as they came in, and the media were given hardcopies of some of the greatest hits for the newspapers and the evening news.

Click to enlarge >

Crescent Uranus
This view of Uranus was recorded by Voyager 2 on January 25, l986, as the spacecraft left the planet behind and set forth on the cruise to Neptune. Voyager was 1 million kilometers (about 600,000 miles) from Uranus when it acquired this wide-angle view. The picture -- a color composite of blue, green and orange frames -- has a resolution of 140 kilometers (90 miles) per pixel. Credit: NASA / JPL

For me, it was an amazing and inspiring experience to be part of, even just as an observer. However, I also experienced for the first time some much less inspirational and sometimes downright depressing examples of human behavior and team/media interactions. As a naïve young student, I was not prepared to see scientists be greedy, secretive, angry, and just plain nasty about access to, sharing of, and publication of, their data. Many team members had worked for years (some, decades) helping to get the mission approved, then built, tested, and launched, and then it had taken 7 and 10 years to get to Uranus and Neptune, respectively. It was a long wait during this data-lean time. There were historic discoveries and first-authored Science and Nature papers ripe for the picking in those images, and new Ph.D. theses waiting to be born. Some people felt a sense of personal ownership of the data, which was embargoed for public release as "proprietary" by NASA. Using "someone else's" data for a publication or even showing a certain picture to a member of the media without permission could get a person in a lot of trouble. To be fair, most of the people that I met on the Voyager team were not like this (quite the contrary, in fact), but still the bad apples gave the whole experience a sort of sour aftertaste. I vowed to remember and learn from this experience. There must be a better way.

Well, I grew up, graduated, and before I knew it found myself in charge of the high-tech Pancam color cameras on two rovers being sent to Mars. Remembering my Voyager experience, I had a talk one day with rover science team leader and Cornell colleague Steve Squyres about the whole issue of "sharing the data." I had strong opinions about what we should do with the Pancam images, and I was bracing for a possible fight with Steve about my proposal. However, Steve told me that he had had a somewhat similar experience to mine on a different mission early in his career, and it had left him with a similar bad aftertaste. It turned out we were on the same page. We both wanted to give all the images away, sharing them in as close to "real time" as we possibly could. No restrictions, embargoes, or proprietary data periods. Happily, most of the rest of the rover science team felt similarly.

It was actually a bit challenging working with the JPL team to implement this. Many peoples' first reaction was sort of disbelief, based on previous mission experience and the expectation that we would probably want to horde the data close to our chests, slowly leaking out a greatest hits image here and there but saving the best for press conferences or splashy science papers. No, we said, what we want is that when the images are decoded at JPL from the radio signals the rovers send from Mars, a computer program should automatically generate a JPEG version of every image, and then post those immediately on a publicly-accessible web site. Well, that's exactly what they did at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit.html and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity.html. The JPL folks tell us that millions of people, from around the world, have been accessing and downloading these and other images that we've posted on the rover's main web site, and we post "near real time" color images from the Pancams on our own Cornell site. Spectacular!

The Mars rovers aren't the only space missions sharing their images like this. The Cassini orbiter imaging team is doing it too with images of Saturn and its moons. Both the rovers and Cassini have expanded on the data-sharing efforts of previous investigations and teams, like the prolific Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera team at Malin Space Science Systems, who have been posting a spectacular "Picture of the Day" (with a caption!) from Mars for years, and, previously, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Multispectral Imager team, who posted an asteroid 433 Eros Image of the Day from 2000 to 2002. Maybe this is a new trend: Share all your pictures. I think it's unfortunate that some missions, like the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Mars Express orbiter, don't share all their data as quickly. Heck, it's (partly) my tax dollars at work, too... Maybe they can be talked into joining the fun.

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Saturn and Tethys
Tethys floats above Saturn's rings. The rings cast wispy shadows across Saturn's northern hemisphere. Created on June 10, 2005. Credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute

Some of our colleagues think we're fools to be posting all the rover images online in real time ("You're giving your data away!"). It is true that we have been "scooped" a few times on scientific papers or media stories by some scientists who use these instant images to get a quick result in press. It's not the worst thing in the world, and anyway we're collecting the data for everyone, not just ourselves. Indeed, getting scooped by a colleague now and again is a small price to pay to allow so many others-kids, teachers, bloggers and other space enthusiasts, laypeople, even members of Congress -- to be able to follow along in near-real-time and to be a part of this amazing, continuing (today is Spirit sol 939, Opportunity sol 919) Martian adventure. I feel that all of us involved in space exploration are privileged to have been entrusted with taxpayer dollars to do the best possible science. We have an obligation to share both our successes and failures openly and honestly with the general public.

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