Me: I manage.

Spectral: “And, what the heck, I’m still going to rate this as the “worst” as I don’t think much will be learned from it.”

Me: What the heck. I’ll still dismiss your “rating” a flop. “Rating” a science experiment (or an artwork for that matter) is an evaluation based on nothing but personal taste as calibrated by a reference to potential monetary worth. It’s mere marketing analysis, score-keeping. Like film ratings. Top 10 listings. Flavor-of-the-month stuff. And I remain confident that plenty of science will be learned from LCROSS.

Spectral: “Nonetheless, it was a Simpson’s reference (I get the sense you dont watch much TV).”

Me: Nope. Is there any compelling reason to? Like obtaining quickie quotes from that awesome bastion of collective wisdom we call tv-land? You know, original stuff like from the Simpsons you can utilize to become that riot at parties?

Spectral: “NASA (and you for that matter) have always been tone-deaf in matters of public involvement. That post impact news conference needed a “Hollywoodized” director.”

Me: Well, see, there is a big difference between a news conference (with a freshly-formed dubious cloud hovering over it) and a well-polished package of canned production. (Even you may be able to tell the difference, I trust). I have worked for BOTH NASA and in the film and television industry, and it is abundantly clear to me that much of the “public outreach” efforts of NASA (and many large-scale scientific instituions and universities) which have been fashionably adopted over the last 20-odd years, in which they so strenuously grope to apply the “principles” of success which they borrow from the marketing strategies employed by Hollywood, are often so abominally obnoxious, preposterous and cheesy it is a wonder that they haven’t noticed how often they backfire. Nobody suggests NASA has a duty to inform the public, but it isn’t their job to package their message for a “market”. Hype has no business in that business, and the news media that amplifies everything NASA hypes up to begin with can’t be expected to provide much of a corrective force, can it?

Spectral: “You clearly have a passion for science education. I suggest you meet the rest of us “fools” half-way if you want to share it.”

Me: No thanks. I reserve the right to pursue the evidence gleaned from my 35-year experience within the science educational arena before I jump on the tired and rickety bandwagon of your stripe. There are a number of legitimate ways to educate people, and there are a as many ways to gratify them. The first involves serious communication and the latter consists largely of tickling their expectations. Take your pick.

As for how easily you identify yourself with a wrong-headed consensus, I might point out that your estimation proves my remarks. The “REST” of US are busy doing the actual work of helping to inspire the public without recourse to the false devices of gimmick and hype.

Sent twice two tons of massy metal,
To feel out lunar soil’s fettle.
And also careful cameras set,
To record impact on lunar rill,
Ensure the wants of public met,
Make time long record of the thrill,
Assure sunny days for budget till.

But, oh! When stopwatch ended countdown,
To indicate the mighty crashdown,
Appeared no hint of fiery flash down,
There on Selene’s apparition.
Were the cameras to be faulted,
For missing flash on Moon assaulted?
Or had some Lunar Politician,
Told a junior lab technician,
Strip down that leftover techy thing,
From building that new Saturn ring,
Set a force field strong and watchful,
Stop this arrogant Earthly mission,
Enough of supine swallowing guff,
Set a force field strong enough,
Halt this impudent Terrine bull,
Teach those Earthlings they’re not hot stuff!

Indeed I am aware of the other artificial moon impacts and the science obtained from them (seismic and so forth). And, what the heck, I’m still going to rate this as the “worst” as I don’t think much will be learned from it.

Nonetheless, it was a Simpson’s reference (I get the sense you dont watch much TV). NASA (and you for that matter) have always been tone-deaf in matters of public involvement. That post impact news conference needed a “Hollywoodized” director.

You clearly have a passion for science education. I suggest you meet the rest of us “fools” half-way if you want to share it.

John

@ 80. Anchor Says: (October 9th, 2009 at 5:45 pm)

Very true & well said.

The rest of us who actually bother to deliberate seriously on composing a response figure it should remain a Good Thing that fools remain in the minority.

Fools in a minority? If only ..

Mind you, while I understand your reply & broadly agree with your sentiments there, I do
think you might be over-reacting to what’s just a joke there.

Haven’t you ever seen the Simpsons and heard Comic Book Guy’s catch-phrase?

(& btw. no, there’s NO connection betwen ‘spectral’ & me.)

LRO (Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter) will continue to observe the Moon for the next year or so, so hang in there.

John — Moon Atlas, Poster, Globes

Even a negative result is a result and helps our understanding.

We need to keep this in mind and I conclude LCROSS was indeed a success. I look forward to reading the papers & hearing the later more carefully thought through and studied results.

… That said, yeah its a bit of an anti-climax and its not great PR that the public missed an immediate spectacle. I hope people are good enough and understand enough to appreciate that this isn’t NASA’s fault and there’s more to these mission than spectacular explosions -but I’m not holding my breath. No one has ever lost money by underestimating people’s stupidity sadly.
_________________

PS. Uh, BA nothing from you on the Phoebe ring discovery yet? Please can you post your take on that for us all? Pretty please with a Saturnian icecube on top?

“No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There’s always a boom tomorrow.” — Susan Ivanova

Boom! Boom!

Or are you so incredibly dense as to imagine that an important scientific experiment exists primarily to gratify your sense of entertainment, or your evidently preponderant need to cleave your facsimile Hollywoodized expectations to a model of actual reality?

You DO realize, I trust, that sounding exactly like a first-order fool won’t much enamour readers to your way of, uh, “thinking”…

The rest of us who actually bother to deliberate seriously on composing a response figure it should remain a Good Thing that fools remain in the minority.

Perhaps you might disagree with that.

I don’t care.

I agree, had more people paid more attention to news straight from NASA (I think that’s what you were getting at), far less people would have been so negative about the mission.

It’s really funny how many people I saw on Facebook whining about “the money they wasted on this mission.” They need to see what the other government agencies are doing with their money…

KICK

ASS

I mean, good idea. Long overdue.

Up with alternative but recognizable worlds, down with fantasy which is nothing but an imagination who wishes a reader to join her[m].

Woosh…nothing much there.

But anybody who can destroy the entrenched stereotype of the geeky scientist in a single sentence is to be unequivocally supported.

If you do it I PROMISE to be a devoted reader.

And why is it so bad that NASA worked to get everyone involved? Isn’t that what it should do, promote science in the US, make it available to the public? Seems to me some people would not be happy unless everything went 100% correctly no matter how things were handled.

[IMG]http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/1222/mymoontatxk6.jpg[/IMG]

It is incredibly depressing that a major news organization (and it isn’t alone!) treats science and discovery with such unabashed contempt and cynicism. It’s as if the news media cultures that have emerged over the last 25 to 30 years have placed a premium on the kind of behavior typified by dull-witted schoolyard bullies who seek out “geeks” to chastise them for knowing a hell of a lot more than they do, for personal gain…that the whole business of acquiring knowledge is something that no “normal” person would ever be engaged in.

Indeed it is, as you say, a SHAME SHAME SHAME!!! A total reversal of virtue.

The LCROSS mission was dedicated by its team members to an illustrious journalist who well understood the intrinsic value of space science, and who bothered to learn as much as he could as he reported on them: Walter Cronkite.

Where are the Walter Cronkites at CNN? Why are “science journalists” in news media firms sequestered within “science divisions”? Why aren’t these people given greater weight than many newspapers lend to their astrology divisions or their “personal interest” divisions or their “comics” divisions?

CNN (and FOX News and a host of other pop-news concerns that make all kinds of “journalistic” noises) all follow along a bandwagon trajectory that regards excellence with a cynicism guaranteed to kill the essential child-like curiosity we should all hope to sustain in our adult population.

To paraphrase Cronkite, “That’s the way it once was”.

There WAS a time, within the living memory of those under a half century old, when a scientific development was unequivocally deemed a vitally important and positive to the greater good of the people. Of the citizenry of the nation. Of the vitality of the economy. As an INSPIRATION to the American people, unmatched by any other cultural phenomenon INCLUDING whether a favorie team won the friggin’ Super Bowl. (NO, I’m NOT talking about the various TECHNOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS of such scientific knowledge, some of which have certainly compromised our mutual safety – but then, one cannot blame science where government, corporate and military decisions hold sway.).

Unfortunately, this has been replaced with a pervasive marketing mindset that has traded and otherwise eroded and chiseled away at journalistic integrity in favor of the PROPHET. Oops, I meant to say “PROFIT”.

One thing is quite clear: those “anchors” before the cameras at CNN who so confidently expose their ignorant snidery on the air will never ever be remembered for their “contributions” to broadcast journalistic excellence. Cronkite and Murrow and Huntley and Brinkely and many others of yesteryear they are certainly not. Being schoolyard bullies, they will never amount to that class.

First, expectation was wildly over-inflated by the experience of the Deep Impact mission, which struck a much smaller target as well as one that is known to be rich in water and other volatiles: a comet nucleus. Furthermore, the viewing geometry presented to the Deep Impact mother craft while receding from the target was further aided by sunlight scattered FORWARD through the ejecta plume toward the mother craft cameras, substantially enhancing its brightness. Also, the plume was very long-lived since it was easily ejected at escape velocity and no doubt augmented by sustained outgassing.

But the Moon’s regolith has a much lower albedo, the sun-target-spacecraft viewing geometry presented to Earth-based observers (including HST and other space-based but still near-earth instruments) was greater than 90 degrees, the plume at its earliest and potential brightest was in shadow – un-illuminated by sunlight most of the time it existed – and it was necessarily short-lived by the Moon’s much greater gravitational field. Even the flash of the impact itself was blocked by the crater rim.

It should come as no surprise that very little visible indication of the impacts would have been visible to Earth-based observatories, let alone amateur instruments. The predictions of a 9 to 12th-magnitude plume were wildly optimistic. Only LRO and LCROSS itself would have been in a position to unambiguously observe a visible-light plume signal. I suspect they will eventually coax that out of the raw images. Whether a visible plume is detected or not, LCROSS is still an exceptionally valuable mission that will yield a great dividend of data, where it counts: spectroscopic detection of water or no. It is a brilliant experiment that has been successfully performed at very low cost. Now patience must prevail while the data is examined.

The moral of this story (once again) is that skepticism often trumps the bandwagon effect, especially when it comes to the slippery business of prediction or building conceptual models of reality.

It’s a lesson we may well apply to many another issue! I personally found the looming lunar surface to be as exciting as when I first saw the Lunar Ranger probes doing the same in the mid-sixties!

The funny thing is, the absence of any plume is as interesting as a big giant mushroom in the lunar sky…

“With budgets on their way down, NASA can ill afford a PR nightmare like this.”

That’s one reason why it’s fallacious for NASA to think it needs as much PR as it seeks. It plays both ways: When publicity is good, it’s good, but when it’s bad, it’s bad. There’s no good reason for NASA to be endlessly on everyone’s lips. There are numerous other federal agencies, chartered for public service, none of which seem to hunger so gawdawfully badly for praise like NASA does year after year.