More evidence that NASA has fallen into the grip of PR spruikers who lie about its history is apparent in its slick and much-televised video about the arrival of the Juno probe near the giant gaseous planet later today.
Looking like bit part players in a second-rate horror movie, NASA officials say the probe will bring mankind closer to Jupiter than ever before.
This is willful lie. When NASA’s Galileo orbiter reached Jupiter in December 1995 it said it came to within 1000 kilometres of the cloud tops of the solar system’s largest planet, compared to a claim that Juno would approached to within 5000 kilometres.
It then released a probe that plunged into the Jovian atmosphere while transmitting for 57 minutes before the pressure and temperatures it encountered crushed its instruments.
The main Galileo spacecraft continued to orbit Jupiter and conduct close-up studies of its four large moons, and pass near one of its smaller moons, until it entered the atmosphere and was destroyed in September 2003.
The critical question is one of credibility: why would a massively funded and resourced scientific body like NASA lie about its history to hype a new mission, which is undoubtedly of major scientific value and in no need of being misrepresented?
The consequent question is why does the mainstream media (and even the so called specialist astronomy media) fail to recognise the prior history of planetary exploration?
Is science media also dying?
That video is clearly professional in its standards, with participants reading from scripts and delivering professional actor standards of diction and facial emphasis to bring elements of suspense or drama to the presentation.
Someone has also gone to exceptional lengths to edit out much of the previous information about the Galileo mission and its entry probe from sources like Wikipedia.
This is about as much about the Galileo probe as can be currently found on Wikipedia at 9.20am, Australian eastern time, on July 5, 2016.
“The Galileo Probe was an atmospheric-entry probe carried by the main Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter. It separated from the main spacecraft in July 1995, five months before its rendezvous with the planet on 7 December. After a rough deceleration, the Descent Module started to return data to the main spacecraft hovering high above Jupiter. The 339-kilogram (747 lb) probe was built by Hughes Aircraft Company at its El Segundo, California plant, measured about 1.3 meters (4.3 ft) across. Inside the probe’s heat shield, the Descent Module with its scientific instruments were protected from extreme heat and pressure during its high-speed journey into the Jovian atmosphere, entering at 47.8 kilometers (29.7 mi) per second.
“During the 57 minutes of data collecting, the Galileo probe returned some surprising data on Jupiter’s atmospheric conditions and composition and also some new discoveries.”
This makes a complete nonsense of the expensive NASA Juno preview video. It’s a premeditated level of dishonesty that is highly damaging to NASA.
*This article was originally published at Plane Talking
“why would a massively funded and resourced scientific body like NASA lie …”
NASA: Never a Straight Answer
NASA purports to be civilian but is probably a cover for military missions.
“probably“?! You mean like the military shuttles that continued in service long after the scientific ones were grounded? Of which we hear nothing.
your link to the Wikipedia article has a small piece on Galileo, it is true but it also has a link to the considerable large article DEDICATED to Galileo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Probe
Furthermore, the statement “Someone has also gone to exceptional lengths to edit out much of the previous information about the Galileo mission and its entry probe from sources like Wikipedia.” is a bit ridiculous, as all of the edits on Wikipedia are visible – it’s Wikipedia’s raison d’etre. If you look in the edit history you can see the followign annotation for the edit, viz,
(cur | prev) 15:27, 30 April 2015 Fotaun (talk | contribs) . . (62,558 bytes) (-7,744) . . (→Galileo Probe: moved to Galileo Probe) (undo)
So the substantial editing was done in April last year, and left a complete track for others to follow.
Shouldn’t your links be checked before publication for more than 404s?
You appear to have missed the main point. NASA scripted the Galileo mission out of its video and made patently false statement about Juno making the closest approach to Jupiter’s cloud tops. The Galileo descent probe didn’t just go close to the cloud tops, it went through them and under them, and it transmitted from there for 57 minutes. For NASA to script such an outrageous rewriting of history, and obviously go to considerable pains to do so, is disrespectful of the NASA team that worked so hard, and achieved so much, with the Galileo mission and its descent probe all those years ago.
They couldn’t be that dumb as to have made a simple mistake. This was willful and very wrong. Juno itself is a fantastic venture and let’s hope for great success and many discoveries. But with the infantile standard of PR seen at NASA, the Juno team might have grounds to doubt how safe their own historical legacy will be if this abuse of its own records of achievement continues.
You’re using the Wikipedia edit as further evidence that “someone” is editing Galileo out of history, when what really happened was they moved the section on the probe to its own article. It hasn’t been edited out, and it’s hardly the obfuscation you’re implying.
Regardless of anything else, the state of knowledge presented in Wikipedia presents the opposite point to that which you made. The details are all there. You claimed they had been excised. Your reply does not address that.
“They couldn’t be that dumb as to have made a simple mistake. ”
A simpler explanation is that it’s PR hyperbole.
I’m sorry but your article is indeed complete non-sense. Anyone who relies on Wiki as a creditable scientific source has, in my view, little understanding of the scientific process.
There are literally hundreds of articles in the literature that describe, in detail, previous missions.
The first spacecraft to visit Jupiter was Pioneer 10 in 1973, followed a year later by Pioneer 11. Aside from taking the first close-up pictures of the planet, the probes discovered its magnetosphere and its largely fluid interior. The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes visited the planet in 1979, and studied its moons and the ring system, discovering the volcanic activity of Io and the presence of water ice on the surface of Europa. Ulysses further studied Jupiter’s magnetosphere in 1992 and then again in 2000. The Cassini probe approached the planet in 2000 and took very detailed images of its atmosphere. The New Horizons spacecraft passed by Jupiter in 2007 and made improved measurements of its and its satellites’ parameters.
Now we have Juno orbiting Jupiter and it is hoped that this will further our understanding of our solar system’s planetary giant.
Andrew,
Similarly I’m sorry you have a dismal capacity to read and understand. The story is about NASA disowning its own history and, in a scripted video, telling lies. We don’t need Wiki entries to face up to that.
It reminds me of the media accepting claims earlier this year that Tim Peake was the first Briton in space, when in fact it was Helen Sharman, in 1991. (An error that was only grudgingly corrected later in the day.)
You seem to have drifted off subject.
NASA certainly have NOT disowned their own history. There are dozens of articles on the NASA website detailing previous missions to Jupiter and beyond.
Diarmuid Pigott has already pointed out that your assertions about the editing of Wikipedia are completely false.
It seems that you have been shown to make false statements without carefully checking your assertions. And for that reason alone, I think we can disregard your strange conspiracy like theories.
That’s the main point? All you’ve proven with your main point as stated above is that you yourself are perpetuating to mascara der as a science reporter here and failed to grasp the differences between the two missions.
It may be a as simple as picking up a dictionary and clarifying semantics. A planetary probe that falls an hour and sends out some blips of information is just not a spacecraft. We drop things all the time. The Galileo spacecraft orbited Jupiter at a safe height of around 30,000kms. It didn’t need much protection. The Juno spacecraft in contrast is inserted in an orbit bringing it within less than 5000kms from Jupiter. No other spacecraft has been this close to Jupiter. That’s what the NASA press release says and that’s simply the truth.
It may not be how you intended but your article does indeed display an excellent example for how dangerous poorly researched science reporting can be.
And who on Earth saw it fit to move this from the blogs section!?
This article is nonsense. The Galileo probe hit Jupiter in an uninteresting zone between two cloud streams. So uninteresting that the results offered little insights and were a giant letdown. Stop pushing your pro-Greens, anti-science agenda.
“… reading from scripts and delivering professional actor standards of diction and facial emphasis to bring elements of suspense or drama to the presentation.”
I am so tired of these obviously acting script readers who often bring the wrong kind of drama and needless and inappropriate suspense to what they are saying. I would much rather hear an honest and straightforward scientist telling us what they understand about the data they are showing us.
How about some honesty: that most of science is hit and miss, and doesn’t always go to plan but even then can be useful, so why not turn it into a dramatic tale of struggle and determination, they could have had their slick production with stretching the truth…