Some of them are probably old enough to have been screwing over NASA since the end of Apollo.
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.
IIRC we would've actually had audio to accompany video of the skycrane landing, but the mic had an issue at that time.
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.
I personally like ESA- they are purely in it for the science not flags.
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.
juujian•3mo ago
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.
quantified•3mo ago
bigiain•3mo ago
I good argument can be made for stronger wording than "red herring" too. I would suggest both "politically motivated lie", and "intentionally deceiving propaganda" are very close to the truth.