NASA's Curiosity rover discovers a surprise in a Martian rock
jpl.nasa.gov
jpl.nasa.gov
Getting public engagement is a part of how they defend (and increase) their budget, so it makes sense that they would be more likely to use click-baity headlines. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The public, for the most part, stopped caring about NASA after the US stopped going to the moon. Most of the rest believe NASA is hiding aliens or controlling the weather or some such nonsense.
Do you have evidence to the contrary you could share?
https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget#:~:text=N....
Many people have also written quite a lot about how the race to the moon was primarily funded because it was a military domination competition. Once the USSR decisively lost, the US stopped doing that expensive science. A good overview of the geopolitics of space exploration and research is the book Dark Skies by Daniel Deudney [2].
[1] Combination of ethical reasons and having to do security checks and your freedoms somewhat restricted.
[2] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/dark-skies-978019090...
There is also a difference between a clickbait headline and a headline that genuinely engages someone. Something like "Unexpected discovery of sulphur crystals provides hints about Martian past" provides vastly more useful information and will probably be more appealing to people who have at least some interest in science. (Or at least rock collecting!)
At least in my case, I decided to read the comments here before even considering a look at the article. Not only did the idea of a "surprise" leave me thoroughly disinterested, but I have been bitten by NASA's hyperbole often enough to be hesitant about pursuing a clickbait link. Which is sad, because planetary science is interesting and the article itself wasn't that bad for something directed towards a general audience.
Personally, I find clickbait titles lends an air of tabloidness to a publication. I wouldn't be surprised if that is a common feeling. I will also actively avoid, clickbait titles even from trusted sources, simply because it would be detrimental in the long term. Granted, I suspect the active avoidance part is an unusual behaviour.
I don't like watering down the defition of clickbait to mean any headline that gets the reader to click on it. That sort of definition is mostly an excuse for bad behaviour (e.g. misleading the reader).
Meanwhile the miracle that was the asteroid hunter probe got an easily-overlooked station with an actual sample it brought back from Bennu in an inadequate magnifying display case.
But two days later she'll mention to either me or another space nut like me "Hey, what was that surprise that NASA found on Mars?". And the conversation that sparks will be engaging and interesting for her.
At a minimum, there are tradeoffs involved.
To this end it might make sense for a company/website paid based on click through engagement, but you will notice that most of those institutions are generally despised by the public.
I don't think being annoyed by clickbait is unique to nerds or such a sophisticated concept that the General Public can't comprehend it.
It's not like when NASA comes up for Budget approval being known as the agency that creates shitty clickbait articles will help them. In fact, I think it is exactly the kind of brand that they wouldn't want to build
If NASA gets more people reading and learning about space, maybe more people will think it's a priority. It's not exactly rocket science.
The issue isn't tolerating behavior, the issue is incentivizing it
Surprise? Well, I was already pretty sure if it was water or life they'd have said so, but now I'm intrigued. I clicked and now I know why the find is actually pretty interesting after all.
If anything the article actually understates how wild it is to not only find this but that many of the surrounding rocks also show the same.
This region is believed to have been formed predominantly by erosion from flows of water or landslides. Native sulfur really only comes from 3 things:
1. Geothermal environments (ex: volcanos)
2. Hydrothermal environments (ex: hotsprings, geysers, etc).
3. Reduction of sulfates into sulfides by bacteria under specific conditions that result in the production of elemental sulfur as a byproduct.
Given that none of these 3 were expected from this area, that leaves a pretty substantial question of how it got there, how it was produced, and if it wasn't produced locally, where it came from.
So again I'm not really sure if it was clickbait by any means.
Calling it "clickbait" here doesn't mean it's a worthless article. It just means that the title is vague in an obviously needless way.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity/location-map/
It struck me that I have no idea how curiosity is instructed to move
I suspect someone can't be sitting in front of a computer with a joystick, moving a foot, waiting for curiosity to move a foot, then move another foot...
My next thought is nasa creates a route based on the map and then provides route data to curiosity. But there's no GPS (again, I assume). So is it all dead-reckoning? NASA somehow calculates 'move 100 ft forward, turn left 80 degrees, move 10 ft forward", etc?
(I am also assuming NASA uses metric)
OR does curiosity make its own decisions somehow?
I gotta go google some stuff now
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/learn/video/mars-in-a-minute-ho...
The last time that I looked at a map of Curiosity's location it was somewhere around Darwin and I suppose Cooperstown hadn't been named yet. And the map was certainly not interactive.
I have no idea. But I'd always thought it looked so homogeneous from the photos. But maybe it's just that the dust covers everything?
Without plants, mountains and valleys etc. would be shaped a little differently, as opposed to "exactly the same but without green on top."
What hubris. “We didn’t expect it to be there,” or similar would be more appropriate. I really would like to see more uncertainty and humility from scientists that base their work on theory.