Hacker News Reader

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.

"This just in -- exciting news about the Mars Rover -- more at 11"

From the article:

"This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good..."

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.)

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.

It cannot find any kind of life we can realistically expect to find (given past data).

You hurt me. Don’t be so mean.

SPOILER WARNING

There's life everywhere... we just haven't found it yet.

I think we've all recognized the lack of context this actually provides. Something for a scientist's history books could mean jack to the general public.

Well, if you have news, but can't talk about it, you don't have any news. So why say anything about it at all - unless you want some PR?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

$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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

Not with SAM. The best its 2 spectrometers and chromatographer will do is tell you chemical makeup.

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.

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?

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.

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/

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.