I have had the privilege of having spent time with NASA's former Chief Scientist, Dr Jim Green, and hearing him call me a friend. (In case you ever read this, thank you for everything Jim! You'll always be our space grandpa <3)
The Office of the Chief Scientist does more than just weigh in. The Planetary Society had been trying for 25+ years to put a mic on Mars. We'd sent cameras to mars, but we'd never sent a mic. It was a combination of denials ("there's no real scientific purpose" was the pushback) and bad luck (the first mission in 1999 crashed so did another - more here, https://www.planetary.org/sci-tech/mars-microphones ).
We finally got a microphone on Mars in 2021 thanks (in part) to the Dr. Jim Green. At the time, he was the head of NASA's Planetary Science Division, and along with his colleagues, he put his weight behind the payload and helped get it past the bureaucracy. His push wasn't the only push. A LOT of people worked on it, but it was an important one.
He is also the reason why NASA got into Planetary Defense. He also pushed for the NEO Observations Program. I remember talking to him about this a few years ago. IIRC, he pushed for the creation of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) to make an explicit Planetary Defense team within NASA.
Every large organisation, every bureaucracy needs someone like Jim to get interesting ideas across the finish line.
Jim consistently did that across his career, and the office of Chief Scientist give him the ability to seriously advocate for "crazy stuff" (not his words) like Martian life and terraforming.
His successor is much the same. I think this closure is a net loss for humanity.
Yes! Mars has enough of an atmosphere for sound to propagate. And sound is incredibly information rich. With sound alone, they're now able to diagnose the state of the rover, extract incredible amounts of information about the martian environment and a bunch of other stuff (see below).
It's kinda like all those clever hacks that use audio to figure out keystrokes.
> the study of sound associated with laser impacts on Martian rocks to better
understand their mechanical properties, the improvement of our knowledge of atmospheric
phenomena at the surface of Mars such as atmospheric turbulence, convective vortices, dust
lifting processes and wind interactions with the rover itself. The microphone also helps our
understanding of the sound signature of the different movements of the rover: operations
of the robotic arm and the mast, driving on the rough surface of Mars, monitoring of the
pumps, etc
There were some scientists who believed that the recordings would be useless. A waste of payload space. The experiment had to be done to demonstrate, with data, just how versatile audio can be.
There's only one The Jim Green, but we need more Jim Greens in the world.
> These goals are in line with the administration’s own stated priorities. Just weeks after shuttering OCS, the White House announced an executive order intended to, in its words, restore scientific integrity policies of federally funded research activities.
I get that they are trying to highlight the administrations hypocrisy, but stronger wording would really be appropriate. That scientific integrity has always just been a fig leaf that should never be taken at face value, a red herring.
I normally leave flippant remarks like this to Reddit, but this make-nasa-space-again b/c earth-science-is-lies narrative is so fucking stupid it deserves a stupid response.
Nickff - Maybe you could have phrased your response a little differently? Highlighting you had trouble following the OPs post because of all the idioms would have been more effect than demanding they change their approach?
Indeed, I’m also surprised. Glad you’re sticking to your guns. I think you hit the nail on the head. Take the criticism with a pinch of salt. Don’t throw in the towel!
(a) None of those are literary devices; they're all common vocabulary items that you'd expect an illiterate person to be familiar with.
(b) If you are a nonnative speaker, what's the difference between looking up an unfamiliar idiom and an unfamiliar word?
(c) Your pulled quote contains only two idioms. My best guess is that you're calling face value an idiom, but it is a transparent construction that means exactly what you'd expect if you knew the words face¹ and value.²
“Face value” is a reference to currency, postage stamps, bank-notes, and stock certificates, which have a value printed on their face, but which are not always actually worth that amount. I am a native speaker, but excessive use of idioms makes it hard to understand what someone is actually trying to say.
...what is your comment supposed to be relevant to? You didn't refute any point.
(a) These are all common vocabulary items;
(b) If you are a native speaker who needs to look up a lot of words, what makes these different? ;
(c) face value is not an idiom. It is compositional.
What would you say if you saw a reference to someone as a "Svengali"? That is a literary allusion. It can't be an idiom because it's only one word long. Do you think it's an idiom anyway? In what sense?
It's possible to understand face value as metaphorically referring to the face value of a coin, or as directly referring to the value that any given object or event appears or purports to have on its face, but in either case it won't be an idiom.
> but excessive use of idioms makes it hard to understand what someone is actually trying to say
This is just false. From a communications or a vocabulary perspective, there is no difference between "idioms" and "words".
The foe against reality now is new and different. We should appreciate & respect how they stand against humanity in new ways, seek to bring ignorance & darkness down upon the world, let us hurt ourselves without attending to or working to improving Spaceship Earth. But this is also what "these people" do, and the ignorance to plunge us down into hell & ruin is something they have brought against mankind, reason & truth for decades. This is not new; this damnation & hell of ignorance and hands-over-the-eyes that these ruiners have been bringing against reality for decades.
This is a long long history of people trying to destroy mankind's understanding.
can someone closer to the action speak about actual issues in that office? As an outsider, it seems like there was some fishy news about the International Space Station, for example...
Not an insider, but I think your comment gets to the core of the issue. One of the pictures used in the story has a Space Shuttle in it, and another has a Vehicle Assembly Building; neither of those have been used (for anything interesting to the public other than tours) for over a decade. NASA has become very constituency-driven, running many small projects which don't drive public support, or do anything visibly useful to the citizenry, which is why it's being cut. Choosing which navel-gazing experiment to fly to an expensive and obsolete space station seems very out-of-touch.
The guys doing the cutting are also the guys responsible for NASA having no other options but to try to keep the ISS going as long as possible with any science that can be performed on it.
Some of them are probably old enough to have been screwing over NASA since the end of Apollo.
Bullshit. It’s always been a constituency-driven jobs program, but that doesn’t meant it still doesn’t do important work. Apollo was incredibly useful to the citizenry and it still wasn’t widely supported.
I have had the privilege of having spent time with NASA's former Chief Scientist, Dr Jim Green, and hearing him call me a friend. (In case you ever read this, thank you for everything Jim! You'll always be our space grandpa <3)
The Office of the Chief Scientist does more than just weigh in. The Planetary Society had been trying for 25+ years to put a mic on Mars. We'd sent cameras to mars, but we'd never sent a mic. It was a combination of denials ("there's no real scientific purpose" was the pushback) and bad luck (the first mission in 1999 crashed so did another - more here, https://www.planetary.org/sci-tech/mars-microphones ).
Here's a Web 1.0 page from the 90's on it, https://research.ssl.berkeley.edu/marsmic/whatisit.html
We finally got a microphone on Mars in 2021 thanks (in part) to the Dr. Jim Green. At the time, he was the head of NASA's Planetary Science Division, and along with his colleagues, he put his weight behind the payload and helped get it past the bureaucracy. His push wasn't the only push. A LOT of people worked on it, but it was an important one.
He is also the reason why NASA got into Planetary Defense. He also pushed for the NEO Observations Program. I remember talking to him about this a few years ago. IIRC, he pushed for the creation of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) to make an explicit Planetary Defense team within NASA.
He also helped refocus NASA on the search for life on Mars. And as Chief Scientist, he started putting his weight behind terraforming Mars, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/science/jim-green-nasa-ma...
Every large organisation, every bureaucracy needs someone like Jim to get interesting ideas across the finish line.
Jim consistently did that across his career, and the office of Chief Scientist give him the ability to seriously advocate for "crazy stuff" (not his words) like Martian life and terraforming.
His successor is much the same. I think this closure is a net loss for humanity.
Why a mic? Is the atmosphere thick enough for sound to travel? Or to hear vibrations in the surface?
Yes! Mars has enough of an atmosphere for sound to propagate. And sound is incredibly information rich. With sound alone, they're now able to diagnose the state of the rover, extract incredible amounts of information about the martian environment and a bunch of other stuff (see below).
It's kinda like all those clever hacks that use audio to figure out keystrokes.
> the study of sound associated with laser impacts on Martian rocks to better understand their mechanical properties, the improvement of our knowledge of atmospheric phenomena at the surface of Mars such as atmospheric turbulence, convective vortices, dust lifting processes and wind interactions with the rover itself. The microphone also helps our understanding of the sound signature of the different movements of the rover: operations of the robotic arm and the mast, driving on the rough surface of Mars, monitoring of the pumps, etc
https://hal.science/hal-03977124/document
There were some scientists who believed that the recordings would be useless. A waste of payload space. The experiment had to be done to demonstrate, with data, just how versatile audio can be.
There's only one The Jim Green, but we need more Jim Greens in the world.
Yep, it is enough to have sound: https://youtu.be/GHenFGnixzU
IIRC we would've actually had audio to accompany video of the skycrane landing, but the mic had an issue at that time.
The only thing the current admin wants is to land on the moon again to beat the Chinese.
I personally like ESA- they are purely in it for the science not flags.
> These goals are in line with the administration’s own stated priorities. Just weeks after shuttering OCS, the White House announced an executive order intended to, in its words, restore scientific integrity policies of federally funded research activities.
I get that they are trying to highlight the administrations hypocrisy, but stronger wording would really be appropriate. That scientific integrity has always just been a fig leaf that should never be taken at face value, a red herring.
Scientific integrity is a red herring?
When you say "scientific integrity" and promote misinformation and lies... yes
What lies did NASA promote?
I never said NASA was lying? They didn't issue the EO.
Moon landing, probably. /s
I normally leave flippant remarks like this to Reddit, but this make-nasa-space-again b/c earth-science-is-lies narrative is so fucking stupid it deserves a stupid response.
[flagged]
This post is bizarre since you've used idioms in your own comments elsewhere in this very post, but you're asking someone else to not use idioms.
I think it's my first time ever seeing anyone online request someone else to not use idioms. Like a teacher correcting an essay or something.
Nickff - Maybe you could have phrased your response a little differently? Highlighting you had trouble following the OPs post because of all the idioms would have been more effect than demanding they change their approach?
Indeed, I’m also surprised. Glad you’re sticking to your guns. I think you hit the nail on the head. Take the criticism with a pinch of salt. Don’t throw in the towel!
(not /s)
If you are not able to parse the high level discourse here then try Reddit.
(a) None of those are literary devices; they're all common vocabulary items that you'd expect an illiterate person to be familiar with.
(b) If you are a nonnative speaker, what's the difference between looking up an unfamiliar idiom and an unfamiliar word?
(c) Your pulled quote contains only two idioms. My best guess is that you're calling face value an idiom, but it is a transparent construction that means exactly what you'd expect if you knew the words face¹ and value.²
¹ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/face noun 5(a)(1)
² https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/value noun 1; 8
“Face value” is a reference to currency, postage stamps, bank-notes, and stock certificates, which have a value printed on their face, but which are not always actually worth that amount. I am a native speaker, but excessive use of idioms makes it hard to understand what someone is actually trying to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_value
...what is your comment supposed to be relevant to? You didn't refute any point.
(a) These are all common vocabulary items;
(b) If you are a native speaker who needs to look up a lot of words, what makes these different? ;
(c) face value is not an idiom. It is compositional.
What would you say if you saw a reference to someone as a "Svengali"? That is a literary allusion. It can't be an idiom because it's only one word long. Do you think it's an idiom anyway? In what sense?
It's possible to understand face value as metaphorically referring to the face value of a coin, or as directly referring to the value that any given object or event appears or purports to have on its face, but in either case it won't be an idiom.
> but excessive use of idioms makes it hard to understand what someone is actually trying to say
This is just false. From a communications or a vocabulary perspective, there is no difference between "idioms" and "words".
Is “confidently wrong” an idiom?
History doesn't repeat but it rhymes isn't close enough to what's happening here.
NASA had its mission statement changed in ~2005 by the Bush administration, to disregard/delete/chainsaw out the mission to observe & understand earth. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/science/nasas-goals-delet...
The foe against reality now is new and different. We should appreciate & respect how they stand against humanity in new ways, seek to bring ignorance & darkness down upon the world, let us hurt ourselves without attending to or working to improving Spaceship Earth. But this is also what "these people" do, and the ignorance to plunge us down into hell & ruin is something they have brought against mankind, reason & truth for decades. This is not new; this damnation & hell of ignorance and hands-over-the-eyes that these ruiners have been bringing against reality for decades.
This is a long long history of people trying to destroy mankind's understanding.
Same happened at many of the FANG companies in the many firing rounds ...
can someone closer to the action speak about actual issues in that office? As an outsider, it seems like there was some fishy news about the International Space Station, for example...
Not an insider, but I think your comment gets to the core of the issue. One of the pictures used in the story has a Space Shuttle in it, and another has a Vehicle Assembly Building; neither of those have been used (for anything interesting to the public other than tours) for over a decade. NASA has become very constituency-driven, running many small projects which don't drive public support, or do anything visibly useful to the citizenry, which is why it's being cut. Choosing which navel-gazing experiment to fly to an expensive and obsolete space station seems very out-of-touch.
The guys doing the cutting are also the guys responsible for NASA having no other options but to try to keep the ISS going as long as possible with any science that can be performed on it.
Some of them are probably old enough to have been screwing over NASA since the end of Apollo.
Bullshit. It’s always been a constituency-driven jobs program, but that doesn’t meant it still doesn’t do important work. Apollo was incredibly useful to the citizenry and it still wasn’t widely supported.