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By Emily Lakdawalla

Doug Ellison at Europlanet 2008: To reach out, let people in

Sep. 24, 2008 | 17:13 PDT | Sep. 25 00:13 UTC

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All this week, Doug Ellison will be filing reports from the third European Planetary Science Congress, also known as Europlanet, taking place in Münster, Germany. Doug is the dictator-for-life of the online forum unmannedspaceflight.com. Thanks, Doug! --ESL

by Doug Ellison

Wednesday is outreach day here in Münster, which means I was giving my oral presentation "Bootleg Postcards: The unofficial biographies of Spirit and Opportunity". For reasons I will explain below, I ended up giving it twice.

The outreach sessions started with another great overview of the CASSIE Web-based application. Now on version 2, it lets you ride along with Cassini, explore the spacecraft and the main moons of the Saturnian system. It is fantastic to see the pitching, rolling, and yawing the spacecraft goes through to switch from taking observations, to transmitting to Earth and so on. I could spend hours (in fact, I just did!) watching the extended tour unfold. Go and try it, and imagine the same technology applying to future missions. The potential is enormous, and Alice Wessen's Cassini outreach office should be credited for seeing the potential and letting Kevin Hussey and his team develop a tool like this.

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Cassini at Saturn Interactive Explorer (CASSIE)
Using "Cassini at Saturn Interactive Explorer" (CASSIE) you can observe or ride along with the Cassini spacecraft as it explores Saturn and its moons using real mission data. Credit: NASA / JPL

Kevin was followed by Mike Evans who spoke about the UK involvement in the Cassini Scientist for a Day program. About twice a year, school children are challenged to write compelling scientific cases to decide between several options for Cassini observations (the observations are required for navigation anyway). This seems a superb way to give young people a taste of some of the decision-making processes and challenges that real scientists have to go through, and some students have already started out on career paths that involved planetary science as a result. When I see programs like that, I wish I was 20 years younger.

Jane Houston-Jones moved the proceedings along by discussing the Saturn Observation Campaign, a network of more than 400 amateur astronomers from 54 countries around the world who organize Saturn observing evenings for the general public. I was surprised to see reports of star parties around the entire globe - India, Benin, Vietnam and even Iraq. If you've never seen Saturn through a telescope, find an event and go and do it, because it really is an awe-inspiring sight. Don't let the imagery from Cassini lull you into thinking you've seen all Saturn has to offer; it's something special even through a modest telescope with your own eyes.

Next up, Veronica McGregor from Media Relations at JPL discussed new media. For more than 35,000 people, Veronica is the voice of the Phoenix Mars lander via the MarsPhoenix Twitter page -- I hope I don't shatter any illusions in telling people that it's not actually the spacecraft writing these updates. Veronica writes them in the first person simply because "I did..." takes fewer of the 140-character Twitter limit than "The spacecraft was commanded to...". With circulation of traditional print media and viewership of television news down, people are getting their news in other ways. It started out as an experiment in keeping 3,000 or so people informed about the Phoenix landing via Twitter's SMS service. Now with more than ten times that, it's the sixth most popular Twitter feed in the world, and still growing at an impressive rate. What Veronica has discovered is that Twitter works best as a dialogue. She takes feedback from other Twitterers, and answers popular questions in the form of Twitter feeds, giving a roughly 50/50 ratio of ‘news' and ‘answers'. It may have developed by accident, but this means of engaging with the public is both highly effective, and low on time required.

After Veronica, my talk was moved up from an after-lunch session to tack onto the end of the morning session. Some people arrived after lunch expecting to see my talk, and so chatting to Mike Evans in the foyer of the venue, I was hunted down by Jean-Pierre Lebreton who asked if I would briefly give it again. Some might call it an administrative oversight; I'd prefer to consider it an encore.

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Doug Ellison
Doug Ellison presents on "Bootleg Postcards: The unofficial biographies of Spirit and Opportunity" at the European Planetary Science Congress in Münster, Germany, on September 24, 2008. Credit: Daniel Fischer

Last year at Europlanet, I briefly covered the creativity of the unmannedspaceflight.com community with Mars Exploration Rover, Cassini-Huygens, and New Horizons mission data. This time I focused entirely on the rovers, as it is entirely accurate to say that they have set the new benchmark for how outreach should be done, and have acted as a catalyst in encouraging other missions to do the same (the most recent of which being the Mars Express VMC).

You will have seen many of the forum members' creations posted by Emily here, and the very fact that she thinks that a worthwhile thing to do justifies that policy of releasing the raw imagery so that people can produce the mosaics, animations and other products that people seem to enjoy. After highlighting some of the creations (including the brilliant Midnight Mars Browser), I posted one line of text in the middle of an empty slide:

What good is all this?

Seriously, what good is a bunch of space geeks going nuts for a bunch of raw imagery and talking about it amongst themselves?

When New Scientist posted a news item about a science paper suggesting an open puddle of water on the surface of Mars those enthusiasts recognized the image, provided a calibrated color version, put it into context and demonstrated the reasons why that paper was wrong, rapidly, clearly, fully, and without NASA / JPL having to get involved.

When the news media posted a story about the little Yeti-like-rock that Spirit saw at the edge of Home Plate, it was an enthusiast who provided the perfect antidote in the form of a large image highlighting all the other little rocks that looked like one thing or the other.

When Aviation Week magazine needed a cover image to highlight Spirit reaching the summit of Husband hill, a group of enthusiasts produced a striking Navcam mosaic that wasn't a scientifically accurate product, but it was an artistic, enticing visualization that told the story, an image that then went on (like many other amateur products) to be featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day, and was reproduced in New Scientist, a newspaper from Belgium, and more.

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Spirit's view from the Husband Hill summit, sol 618
This panorama was produced by an international team of four amateurs from Navcam images captured by Spirit from the summit of Husband Hill. An original grayscale mosaic was built by Marco Di Lorenzo, which was edited by Doug Ellison using bits from both right and left Navcam images to patch obvious image seams in the foreground. The resulting mosaic was artificially colored by Bernhard Braun, and was published on the cover of the November 14, 2005 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology. The panorama exemplifies the new opportunities that exist for amateurs to participate in space exploration because of the availability of the rovers' entire image catalogue on JPL's website. Credit: Aviation Week / Marco Di Lorenzo, Doug Ellison, Bernhard Braun, and Kenneth Kremer, from NASA / JPL images

When the New Horizons team were planning their Jupiter flyby, enthusiasts identified and suggested ‘Kodak moments', four of which made it into the sequence of observations, and became the signature images of that great flyby.

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Europa rises
In this dramatic shot from the New Horizons flyby of Jupiter, it observed Europa, the smallest of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, rising above the vast limb of Jupiter. This was one of seven observations made by New Horizons for primarily aesthetic rather than scientific reasons. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI

When Mars Express had its little Visual Monitoring Camera turned back on, enthusiasts produced the software to process it that ESA didn't have the resources to do, then went on to produce color animations and mosaics and even to identify and measure interesting features such as high-altitude clouds. These features have, as a direct result, been seen by science team members who are looking at how to investigate them further and possibly even give the VMC camera more observation time.

Putting those images out there, giving people access to information about the missions from the first person perspective rather than relying on news media to relay events to the public, has turned the game on its head. And you know what? I think Europe is finally beginning to get it. I think key figures within ESA are realizing the potential benefits of letting people see space exploration unfold in real time, and see it for the difficult, challenging and rewarding process that it is. They may not have the resources to do everything they might like to, but they are beginning to get the message that to do good outreach, you have to let people in.

Random paper of the day: "Hubble Space Telescope and New-Horizons simultaneous observations: Evidence of particle acceleration in the Jovian magnetotail"

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