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Can I just for a moment question their PR strategy here? Them saying they have found something big leads to speculation, speculation that might paint the image

by arrrg 14y ago

Can I just for a moment question their PR strategy here? Them saying they have found something big leads to speculation, speculation that might paint the image of an discovery much bigger than what was actually discovered. Scientists are understandably enthusiastic about this, but they also have to keep in mind that when they just use words to describe the importance of the discovery without naming the discovery itself, it’s easy for them to get it very, very wrong. Something for the history books for them might well be something most people really couldn’t care less about. I think the adult thing of saying that it is possible you discovered x but you still need confirmation may well work, if you know how to frame it correctly. But whatever you do, don’t say anything about history books, not before you are really sure. Alternatively you shut up and say nothing to the public until you are sure. This whole “We have discovered something huge but we can’t tell you what until we are really sure!” seems very misguided to me. I think this is just a case of bad PR, not bad science reporting or anything like that.

sv123 14y ago
I heard this on the way in this morning, pretty much the only conclusion I have now is that they found life.
- rwitoff 14y ago
  Not with SAM. The best its 2 spectrometers and chromatographer will do is tell you chemical makeup.
  - chucknelson 14y ago
    It's probably traces of certain elements that mean something about the possibility for past life on Mars (but not proof of life)...which won't be too exciting for the general public.
  - stephengillie 14y ago
    Which has the best resolution of all the Rover's tools? Obviously we didn't send a tunneling electron microscope to Mars, so what scale of objects can we detect? Bacteria-sized objects?
    - InclinedPlane 14y ago
      It's not like that. The rover has several imagers including a microscopic(ish) imager, but it can't see things as small as cells. Almost all of the instruments are designed around determining the mineral composition of rocks or the chemical composition of samples. If there are signs of life on Mars it's unlikely that we'll be able to see it with any imager on the rover, but we might be able to detect its chemical signature. The sample analysis instrument is a gas chromatograph connected to a laser spectrometer and a mass spectrometer. What happens is that a sample will be vaporized and then pushed through a long column. The column is designed so that different molecules will have a different speed through the column and thus will come out at different times. Then each of those parts of the sample (which should be comprised primarily of one molecule) is passed into the spectrometers, which can identify its molecular structure. This can determine the chemical makeup of minerals, but it can also identify complex organic molecules such as the components of cells or perhaps things like cellulose or lignin and so forth.
  - Daniel_Newby 14y ago
    One of SAM's gas chromatograph columns is chiral: it can separate left-handed molecules from right-handed ones. Terrestrial life uses amino acids that almost all one handedness, while Earthly sugars are mostly the other. Finding a similar pattern on Mars would be a smoking gun demonstration of extraterrestrial life. http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/SAM/ http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/SAM/
    - possibilistic 14y ago
      Exactly this. We'd expect for random abiotic organic chemistry to yield racemic mixtures of chiralities. Detection of one enantimer at higher levels than another typically calls for enzymes.
andrewheins 14y ago
This kind of thing happens often, where you've got "news", but can't disclose until it's final. In these situations it can be helpful to use some kind of scale or domain reference. "We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, and we think it could change the world" vs "We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, that should really fire up geologists" vs "We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, that gets us closer to understanding the history of Mars" Set a level of expectation.
- stephengillie 14y ago
  "This just in -- exciting news about the Mars Rover -- more at 11"
- zacharypinter 14y ago
  From the article: "This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good..."
  - arrrg 14y ago
    The existence of any kind of life (past or present) would be something for the history books. Only Curiosity pretty much cannot find life, only hints that life exists or existed. Maybe this is about something else, but if this is only about hints that life exists or existed, then it isn’t really something for the history books. Most people would be bored by news like that. (I personally would find it very exciting, but I’m far from typical.)
    - rymith 14y ago
      re: Only Curiosity pretty much cannot find life What? A martian running in front of the camera would work. A rover not sent by earth. A little house on the... sand. Big ol skeleton of a unicorn... Seriously, you have no imagination.
      - arrrg 14y ago
        It cannot find any kind of life we can realistically expect to find (given past data). You hurt me. Don’t be so mean.
kordless 14y ago
It could be strategic PR. NPR appears to have an exclusive on the story for the moment. That's good for NPR and serves the purpose of working the rest of the press into a froth. It would be exactly what you want when you know what you know is true, and might leak anyways, but you are stuck doing the work to add a sigma to the results.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > NPR appears to have an exclusive on the story for the moment. Unlikely. Scientists don't normally work this way (not to say "never"). If true it would in essence grant an exclusive right to follow a non-story. But I doubt that NPR actually has any kind of exclusive. It's more likely that only NPR is willing to publish what is in essence a background on a story, not a story per se. For comparison, consider what happened before the Higgs announcement last summer. Because the circumstances were very different and the stakes much higher, everyone was publishing speculations about what would be announced, in advance of knowing anything at all. In that case also, there was no exclusive, but the level of publishing enthusiasm was higher.
rwitoff 14y ago
Totally agree. The PR team is usually much more careful than this. This reads like a case of an excited scientist over indulging a friendly journalist.
sixbrx 14y ago
I agree, big news to most people from mars would be the discovery of non-microbial life or a big ass monolith with strange writing on it. Big news to a scientist is that some rock formation shows evidence that there probably was water on the planet in the distant past.
- richardjordan 14y ago
  Right. By making this fuss on NPR they encourage pseudo-scientific predictions by laypersons of what this big discover is, that are almost always fantastical and far in excess of anything that is really likely to be discovered by such a mission. This mis-setting of expectations then undermines the actual discovery, particularly as the overall level of scientific ignorance in the media is pathetically high.
znowi 14y ago
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif
tsieling 14y ago
They've pulled this headline baiting before. Remember the 'upcoming announcement with big implications for extraterrestrial life' that turned out to be a methane-breathing lifeform that then ended up maybe not breathing methane? It's hard not to let some hope and excitement in when reading these, but their PR strategy has made a daily bread of raising expectations.
nikcub 14y ago
NASA need to justify each of their missions and the money they spend as they are already on a tight budget and being closely monitored by congress. The 'results' from missions are stories such as this one and other discoveries. It is in NASA's interest to overplay and overvalue the importance of discoveries from each of these missions. It is sad that NASA has to play this game, since discovering nothing with Mars Pathfinder would be just as interesting to science as discovering something, but it wouldn't make the mission easy to justify the next time they go and ask for a billion dollars.
- tjic 14y ago
  > as they are already on a tight budget They are NOT on a tight budget - even with the entire shuttle fleet shut down, they're spending more than they have in all but a few years since 1970. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA $17 BILLION may not sound like much in the insane scale of other federal spending, but it's a vast amount by any other scale.
ISL 14y ago
Sometimes with collaborations like these, there's a leak. When the leak makes it to the press, then the press calls up the collaboration. If the spokesman for the collaboration can't say, "Nope, we haven't seen anything interesting. It's all boring, please go home.", then the journalists know that something's up and the hoopla starts. Scientists like to talk. It's our job. Collaborations are only partially optimized to contain leaks. I sincerely doubt that any part of the rover team would like to stir up hoopla when they aren't certain about results.

by arrrg 14y ago

sv123 14y ago

I heard this on the way in this morning, pretty much the only conclusion I have now is that they found life.

rwitoff 14y ago
Not with SAM. The best its 2 spectrometers and chromatographer will do is tell you chemical makeup.
- chucknelson 14y ago
  It's probably traces of certain elements that mean something about the possibility for past life on Mars (but not proof of life)...which won't be too exciting for the general public.
- stephengillie 14y ago
  Which has the best resolution of all the Rover's tools? Obviously we didn't send a tunneling electron microscope to Mars, so what scale of objects can we detect? Bacteria-sized objects?
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    It's not like that. The rover has several imagers including a microscopic(ish) imager, but it can't see things as small as cells. Almost all of the instruments are designed around determining the mineral composition of rocks or the chemical composition of samples. If there are signs of life on Mars it's unlikely that we'll be able to see it with any imager on the rover, but we might be able to detect its chemical signature. The sample analysis instrument is a gas chromatograph connected to a laser spectrometer and a mass spectrometer. What happens is that a sample will be vaporized and then pushed through a long column. The column is designed so that different molecules will have a different speed through the column and thus will come out at different times. Then each of those parts of the sample (which should be comprised primarily of one molecule) is passed into the spectrometers, which can identify its molecular structure. This can determine the chemical makeup of minerals, but it can also identify complex organic molecules such as the components of cells or perhaps things like cellulose or lignin and so forth.
- Daniel_Newby 14y ago
  One of SAM's gas chromatograph columns is chiral: it can separate left-handed molecules from right-handed ones. Terrestrial life uses amino acids that almost all one handedness, while Earthly sugars are mostly the other. Finding a similar pattern on Mars would be a smoking gun demonstration of extraterrestrial life. http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/SAM/ http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/SAM/
  - possibilistic 14y ago
    Exactly this. We'd expect for random abiotic organic chemistry to yield racemic mixtures of chiralities. Detection of one enantimer at higher levels than another typically calls for enzymes.

andrewheins 14y ago

This kind of thing happens often, where you've got "news", but can't disclose until it's final. In these situations it can be helpful to use some kind of scale or domain reference. "We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, and we think it could change the world" vs "We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, that should really fire up geologists" vs "We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, that gets us closer to understanding the history of Mars" Set a level of expectation.

stephengillie 14y ago
"This just in -- exciting news about the Mars Rover -- more at 11"
zacharypinter 14y ago
From the article: "This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good..."
- arrrg 14y ago
  The existence of any kind of life (past or present) would be something for the history books. Only Curiosity pretty much cannot find life, only hints that life exists or existed. Maybe this is about something else, but if this is only about hints that life exists or existed, then it isn’t really something for the history books. Most people would be bored by news like that. (I personally would find it very exciting, but I’m far from typical.)
  - rymith 14y ago
    re: Only Curiosity pretty much cannot find life What? A martian running in front of the camera would work. A rover not sent by earth. A little house on the... sand. Big ol skeleton of a unicorn... Seriously, you have no imagination.
    - arrrg 14y ago
      It cannot find any kind of life we can realistically expect to find (given past data). You hurt me. Don’t be so mean.

kordless 14y ago

It could be strategic PR. NPR appears to have an exclusive on the story for the moment. That's good for NPR and serves the purpose of working the rest of the press into a froth. It would be exactly what you want when you know what you know is true, and might leak anyways, but you are stuck doing the work to add a sigma to the results.

lutusp 14y ago
> NPR appears to have an exclusive on the story for the moment. Unlikely. Scientists don't normally work this way (not to say "never"). If true it would in essence grant an exclusive right to follow a non-story. But I doubt that NPR actually has any kind of exclusive. It's more likely that only NPR is willing to publish what is in essence a background on a story, not a story per se. For comparison, consider what happened before the Higgs announcement last summer. Because the circumstances were very different and the stakes much higher, everyone was publishing speculations about what would be announced, in advance of knowing anything at all. In that case also, there was no exclusive, but the level of publishing enthusiasm was higher.

rwitoff 14y ago

Totally agree. The PR team is usually much more careful than this. This reads like a case of an excited scientist over indulging a friendly journalist.

sixbrx 14y ago

I agree, big news to most people from mars would be the discovery of non-microbial life or a big ass monolith with strange writing on it. Big news to a scientist is that some rock formation shows evidence that there probably was water on the planet in the distant past.

richardjordan 14y ago
Right. By making this fuss on NPR they encourage pseudo-scientific predictions by laypersons of what this big discover is, that are almost always fantastical and far in excess of anything that is really likely to be discovered by such a mission. This mis-setting of expectations then undermines the actual discovery, particularly as the overall level of scientific ignorance in the media is pathetically high.

znowi 14y ago

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif

tsieling 14y ago

They've pulled this headline baiting before. Remember the 'upcoming announcement with big implications for extraterrestrial life' that turned out to be a methane-breathing lifeform that then ended up maybe not breathing methane? It's hard not to let some hope and excitement in when reading these, but their PR strategy has made a daily bread of raising expectations.

nikcub 14y ago

NASA need to justify each of their missions and the money they spend as they are already on a tight budget and being closely monitored by congress. The 'results' from missions are stories such as this one and other discoveries. It is in NASA's interest to overplay and overvalue the importance of discoveries from each of these missions. It is sad that NASA has to play this game, since discovering nothing with Mars Pathfinder would be just as interesting to science as discovering something, but it wouldn't make the mission easy to justify the next time they go and ask for a billion dollars.

tjic 14y ago
> as they are already on a tight budget They are NOT on a tight budget - even with the entire shuttle fleet shut down, they're spending more than they have in all but a few years since 1970. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA $17 BILLION may not sound like much in the insane scale of other federal spending, but it's a vast amount by any other scale.

ISL 14y ago

Sometimes with collaborations like these, there's a leak. When the leak makes it to the press, then the press calls up the collaboration. If the spokesman for the collaboration can't say, "Nope, we haven't seen anything interesting. It's all boring, please go home.", then the journalists know that something's up and the hoopla starts. Scientists like to talk. It's our job. Collaborations are only partially optimized to contain leaks. I sincerely doubt that any part of the rover team would like to stir up hoopla when they aren't certain about results.