ESA make NASA look user friendly

I was getting used to having to find Mars images at
qt.exploratorium.edu/mars because NASA couldn't be bothered to hire
people to upload images at the weekend ( or provide more than the
occasional comment on their very crappy, confused, Flashy website )
but with Huygens, ESA have managed to make NASA look organised and on
the ball.

A lo-res Real-Media broadcast, without commentary ( of a mission they
describe, as "historic" ), with tens of minutes of nothing but
background chatter and tacky NASA-like woops and tears, then political
civil servants saying nothing but what makes themselves seem
important, then speakers in German and French with no translation,
then idiots intruding with political and nationalistic comments on
what they are trying to portray as an important international,
scientific occasion. It's as if Neil Armstrong was asked to take the
step again but this time to do a Southern accent.
Whoever ran this needs to resign, then look back at the Spaceship One
coverage to see how professionals organise this sort of thing.

Now this publicly-funded mission is offering their public THREE
lo-res, over-compressed images, and goodnight. ( I suppose we, the
people, should at least be grateful that they aren't the pseudo-colour
3-D bull**** Mars images ESA has been distributing as public science
of late. )


ESA needs to cut the crap.
ESA needs to sack the career diplomatic euro-quota lackies and hire
staff based on their talent and independent of their nationality, sex
or seniority.
ESA needs to give the raw data to the people who payed for it: Me,
you, us, them, EVERYBODY!


It's a shame all the above-mentioned **** was sitting on top of what
one could just about detect was an amazing, historic event, made
possible by brilliant engineers from all over this temperate little
planet.


Groutch

Jeffrey Bell wrote a good op-ed on this over at spacedaily:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-05g.html

I agree with the sentiment. ESA does some incredible science, but they
really need to shape up when it comes to communicating with the public.

Neil Halelamien wrote:
Jeffrey Bell wrote a good op-ed on this over at spacedaily:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-05g.html

I agree with the sentiment. ESA does some incredible science, but
they
really need to shape up when it comes to communicating with the
public.

There is link in the above link to a site with raw images. Woo-hoo!!!!
Yes, ESA blew it big time by not having this on _their_ website.

The images are spectacular, like hitching a ride down with Huygens.

For raw images in a more downloadable form (if anyone wants to do any
image processing or animations), check he
http://spacescience.ca/titan/raw/

This project is a tremendous success. That you find the webcast
insufficiently entertaining is of little consequence.

curlyQlink wrote:
This project is a tremendous success. That you find the webcast
insufficiently entertaining is of little consequence.

Nobody is debating that the project is a tremdendous engineering and
scientific success. The issue is that the public may not appreciate it
as much as it would otherwise, due to ESA's poor PR skills.

curlyQlink wrote:

This project is a tremendous success. That you find the webcast
insufficiently entertaining is of little consequence.



How Soviet of you.

--
It Came From C. L. Smith's Unclaimed Mysteries.
http://www.unclaimedmysteries.net

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
-Albert Einstein, authority

"curlyQlink" writes:

This project is a tremendous success. That you find the webcast
insufficiently entertaining is of little consequence.

If enough people find the webcast insufficiently entertaining, or
more importantly, excessively annoying, this project may be the
last project.

Killing the ESA's planetary science budget would be a thing of
more than a little consequence. There's enough inertia in the
system that the Huygens webcast can't do that, but it could be
sympotmatic of underlying problems that can.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-718-0955 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *

This project is a tremendous success.

Yes, that is why I wrote "an amazing, historic event, made
possible by brilliant engineers from all over this temperate little
planet."

The mishandling by ESA PR of the data that the European and American
public have paid for makes that public less likely to support future
expenditure on similar missions.
There was a window when the eyes of the world were on this mission and
the data had to come out then to make maximum impact. ESA chose not to
put the images out in the best form possible, as soon as possible, and
chose not to put out the raw data so news sites could make their own
high-quality images.
Dribbling out bad images ( viz today's panaroma, which is a TIF of an
overly, lossy-compressed image:
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...d/Picture3.tif
and all of the Mars Express images ) instead of good ones means that
brilliant engineers will be less likely to be working on Huygens 2 any
time soon.

On the bright side, maybe they'll lay off some PR people first.

Groutch