http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1351

Three Separate Spacecraft Have Detected Significant Water On the Moon: Why Has NASA Waited So Long To Say So?

Scientists often sit on data they don't understand. How long is too long? This lunar water thing doesn’t make a lot of sense: Did they not publish because it may have jeopardized future missions with the express purpose of finding these traces of water? Was the information collected by Cassini inconclusive, or just difficult to accept?

There was a lot of data collected in the flyby of Phoebe four years ago. There will not be another pass. We know that a lot was learned about the regoth of Phoebe, but precious little has been released. Likewise - why so little public dissemination on the composition of the leading hemisphere of Iapetus? Why is the information on the composition of Saturn’s moons so slow in forthcoming, in being published? Where’s the beef?

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

I suppose that a case could be made for "conspiracy" here, however I just don't see how this is any different from any, "how I would run the railroad" argument.

Jerry...if you have any actual evidence that NASA is withholding (and I do mean withholding) information from the public, then present it...however, if this thread is going to be about how you would do "things" differently than NASA has, then I'm really not interested.

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

Good questions, Jerry.

It seems rapid dissemination of data could only accelerate discovery and change, but science guards its secrets closely.

More fodder for CTs, and rightly so!

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Keith "Hyperbole" Cowing... I'll await the facts without his "insights".

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Meet the OOONG TOE.

I don't see where Jerry is claiming any conspiracy. In fact, I agree with his statement that scientists don't always release findings they don't fully understand or haven't yet confirmed. Those aren't cases of science "guarding its secrets closely." Instead it's science declining to behave irresponsibly.

Reading Keith Cowling's article, I don't see where he has made any effort to discover what reason NASA may have given for not releasing findings based on 1999 data. He simply seems to take NASA to task for not conforming to his personal schedule. As such I'm not impressed with his analysis of the circumstances.

I can immediately think of one possible reason why findings based on 1999 data may only now be released: the findings themselves weren't determined until assisted by information and understanding gleaned from subsequent efforts.

This falls into my own experience as a researcher in a private company. In analyzing data obtained through the company's research project, I and my colleagues discovered a certain new hierarchy in the data. It revealed a trend hitherto unknown to science. Now since the data were obtained privately and were the property of that company, we could not publish our results in academic literature. However, we knew of other data sets that had been part of previous academic research, that were similar to what we had obtained. When we used the same analysis methods on that data, we discovered the same hierarchy and trend. We were able to publish new findings based on 7-year-old data. It's not because we sat on those results for seven years. It's because we required subsequent knowledge to discover and confirm those findings.

Naturally I can't be sure that's what happened here. But there are plenty of reasonable alternatives to Cowling's insinuation that NASA has behaved secretively or irresponsibly. Cowling needs to prove his case with some actual evidence, not just handwaving.

Non-scientists tend wrongly to believe that data-collection methods simply give you the answers that you're looking for. Sorry, but there's no "Water" light that illuminates on the console for some space probe when it sees certain things. Often providing defensible findings for some data set requires painstaking and time-consuming analysis, and may be uncertain enough that publication ought to wait for confirmation. Science is hard work.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Does that answer why?

From what I read on the BBC website it appears that is the case with regards to Cassini; they went back after getting the new data and found that the 1999 readings did indeed support the latest findings. The data was there all along but it just hadn't been analyzed for this purpose.

Perhaps they weren’t certain of their results previously.

If you pull a coin from your pocket and flip it 5 times and it comes up heads 4 times, do you announce to the world you have a coin that will give you heads 80% of the time? Or would you flip it a few more times?

And NASA scientists are wise to remember the example of meteorite ALH84001. In 1996 NASA's announcement strongly suggested they had found life on Mars. Various key scientific figures weighed in, apparently eager to believe the findings.

However now we understand that the interpretation of the structures in the meteorite as the residue of life is probably not well supported. And NASA's conclusions of life on Mars in 1996 are seen as having been prematurely drawn.

Hence I would caution Keith Cowling not to accuse anyone of suppression or inappropriate withholding without first determining the scientific circumstances.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Cowling says that himself on his site. From:

http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/20..._is_a_lot.html

That update puts a bit of a different spin on the article (this wasn't in the spaceref version of the article).

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Let's say they knew for sure they had an O-H bond detection in their spectra ten years ago (and I'm not even sure that's the case). Had they published with a conclusion of water from a single data point from a probe not even designed to look for signs of trace water on the moon, it would have been a crappy paper. Now when you take Cassini, Deep Impact, and Lunar Prospector together and look at the sum of the results you start to have a more convincing picture, but only if the spectra are good. How good are they? I don't know, I haven't seen them, but I'm guessing it took this latest mission to really be sure they weren't just detecting traces of hydroxyl instead of traces of water embedded in the soil. Had they concluded and published that it was water prematurely, it would have reflected poorly on their scientific rigor. As a scientist in training myself, I can tell you I'm sitting on data right now that simply doesn't have enough supporting evidence to draw the conclusion it points to. To publish it prematurely would be analogous to Chuck Shramek erroneously concluding a "saturn-like object" was trailing Hale-Bopp based on a single data point (different field though).

Well, that's Cowing. Whenever something's up at NASA he's totally prepared to always assume the worst possible motive. I used to frequent spaceref.com a lot, since he is often well informed and does present a lot of information, but eventually I got tired of his incessant accusing tone. Besides, if it's important, it's on BAUT too

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

So now does that change anything as far as nasa returning to the moon.
It was said somewhere( don't remember at this point) that Nasa has no interest in returning to the moon.

Are there any good estimate's as to how much water is there on the moon.
A bucketful, olympic size pool or maybe a small lake ?

I know the article mentioned something like drop's in a certain volume.

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it shows you how much i know....not much i guess----"sohhfly"

(Shifts large rock sohh_fly has been under)

Serioulsy? I don't know what to say (other than my attempt at humor above) to this statement. Much of the debate over the Ares and Constellation programs revolves around how best to get NASA and humans back to moon, sooner rather than later. The main point of LRO is to reconnoiter the Moon for human missons. Have you really not noticed this?

CJSF

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See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
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-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

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Ahh, beaten to it again! I vividly recall the 'Life on Mars' debacle, and the way the media ran (wild) with it. I can also remeber being rather angry with the scientists for releasing what appeared - even to uninformed little me - to be highly speculative and pretty much unsupported conclusions, after I read the actual details.

There are many examples of this - another (ok, somewhat unrelated, but it's the ... vibe!) that immediately springs to mind is the common 'beat up' that occurs for astronomical events. Anyone remember Kohoutek in '73, Halley in '86? There was a great deal of inflated speculation, which resulted in a great deal of disappointment for Joe Average when they took the family out at night to see the 'amazing' sights.. Similar things still happen with meteor showers, conjunctions, etc. Thank God for the occasional McNaught! (I live down under..)

Sure, the media can be blamed, but surely the folks who are presenting their opinions KNOW what will happen if they exaggerate or over-speculate.

Here's an article explaining it.

From the article:

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Plan as though you will live forever, but live as though you may die tomorrow.

I believe they stated there were calibration issues. Everything is coated with water upon blast off to the extent that a false signal is a real possibility until a good calibration is performed.

When all these results converged, it appears there is some water on the moon after all. There may be competing ideas that are non-exclusive that might account for the water.

The image I found compelling was the water and hydroxyl signature about an impact crater. They don't extend over the same range. If the water and hydroxyl was brought in by the impactor that was detroyed upon impact, why would there be such spatial variation between the two signals? This seems to imply that one or both were already present in the subsurface and were dredged up by the impact much like the new MRO releases that show recent impacts dregding up frozen water ice on Mars.

Subsurface presence of such volatiles as water on the moon will question the validity of the Giant Impact theory of formation of the moon that requires the evaporation of these volatiles as part of the event. Alternative scenarios may need to be explored if the moon is too "wet".

yes serious brain cramp on my part.
I think I really meant that the urgency was not there to get it done soon.
I was also thinking that they might want to bypass the moon and head str8 for Mars if A exotic plan arises.

When the space in your head allow's nothing more than space itself, then sometimes you get spaced, I guess I just got Space-eed.

Note to self: Ouch that hurt's

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it shows you how much i know....not much i guess----"sohhfly"

I don't remember much hype over Halley's comet except about the historical nature. Of course, I was young and might have missed it. I have to say, though, that one of the things I dislike most about the new site for the renaissance faire I go to every August is that there's nowhere to lie back and watch the Perseids, and it's too bright anyway.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Rapid dissemination of data once verified accelerates discovery and change, running with rumors slows it down and can destroy a career forever.

It's a balancing act and hindsight, especially uninformed hindsight based on popularist media's version of how things happen, always looks clearer.

The Pons and Fleischmann debacle is just one example of scientists getting things ruined by premature publication.

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If you can call what they did publication. P&F are a prime example of what can happen when one reports results through press releases rather than the normal channel of conferences and papers. As far as I know they never did publish a peer reviewed paper on their experiment. Of course by the time they might have the well was far too poisoned for one of their papers to have been approved by any reasonable journal.

As a counter example, there's the flurry that followed the discovery of high Tc superconductors about the same time as P&F. This work went straight from discovery, to confirmation, and publication (and eventual Nobel Prize) in a very rapid progression. It helped that the results were correct and, in this case, easily replicable. Of course if you believed the press releases of the day we'd all be getting power through power lines made of high temperature superconductors and riding maglev trains with magnets made of the same material. Press releases are a necessary evil, but one needs to ignore the hype and go to the original papers for the real science.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

Nice Castle reference, Chrisz!

There was a lot of hype over here. I worked at a public access observatory at the time and we had near full houses night after night for a couple of weeks, largely driven by media attention (not that we were complaining!)

Unfortunately, a lot of people were expecting... something more spectacular... than the smudge they saw.

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"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

Interesting contrasts.

Withholding information retards the learning process, and I think that is wrong. If NASA would have published the Earth fly-by anomalies or the Pioneer Anomalies as soon as they were discovered, we would likely/maybe have engineered probes like Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons to take a harder look at gravity.

What if NASA would have sat on the images showing bizarre braiding and spokes in Saturns rings (first observed by the Viking probes) and waited ten years before publishing? Would the Cassini probe have even been launched to Saturn by now? We saw Saturns ring phenomenon in real time, and it fired the imagination of the scientific community -t housands of head starting working the physics right away, not just one or two.

It sounds like the Cassini water-on-the-moon data was is solid as it is surprising. I suspect Cassini's IR spectra of Phoebe are just as surprising as the water on the moon. If we have to wait for collaboration before we see papers on Phoebe, many of us will be dead. I have to wonder if they would still be sitting on the Enceladus plume data if amatuers hadn't started talking about 'look what we think we found'.

Putting an embargo on data until agreeing upon a publishing date is not a conspiracy. But putting an embargo on data for ten years before publishing would definitely be conspiracy. Sitting on data because you have low confidence simply because the results are unexpected, and waiting for confirmation is chicken.

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

Considering the kind of scrutiny and opinions science has to withstand, it was probably the most prudent decision. I'm also pretty confident that the data withheld was in capable hands throughout that time.

Science has to shoulder a considerable amount of responsibility to be reliable.

Accuracy is the absolute, unequalable axiom of science.

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Cowling has an update here:

http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/20...con_notes.html

There are a few interesting tidbits. Apparently, the Cassini calibration for this took from 2004 to 2008, so you wouldn't have seen this before 2008 at best. He still apparently thinks it should have been made public before now, though. Someone in comments pointed out the confirmation issue, and there is a bit of debate back and forth on that, similar to posts in this discussion.

Oh, well. I'm just happy that things are looking more promising on the lunar water issue.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Yes, I remember the hype around both of those. The funny one was Comet West. I don't remember that getting much attention, but it was far better than either of those.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

I meant more that the news, at least in Los Angeles, seemed to make it clear that the view wouldn't be as impressive as the history was.

Yeah, that was true anyway. People, huh?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Thanx. I wondered if anyone would get it, or whether it would just go straight to the pool room, unnoticed.. (O;

For anyone who doesn't have a clue what this is about, "The Castle" was a very quirky Australian film - essential viewing for anyone who wishes to (try to) understand the Oz sense of humour - and it contained many comedic lines that are now firmly embedded into our language. And to keep this on topic, it was made by the same folks who made "The Dish" which was a somewhat fictionalised depiction of the Parkes radio telescope's role in the Apollo 11 mission. Both films are very much worth seeing..

Yes, indeed - perhaps it didn't get picked up by other countries media quite as much - a slow news week/month in Australia, perhaps? Anyway, I was particularly stung by this because it was at a time when I was really getting into astronomy and I got a little swept up in the hype and invited some of my extended family for a star gazing night, with Halley as the centre piece. I had made the mistake of not actually checking for myself how dim it was, before making the arrangements.

The night was not a total failure, as thankfully I had a coupla half decent scopes and binoculars so we looked at other stuff as well, but Halley was rather dismal compared to what the media (and some quite well-known astronomers) had hinted at... I know that guessing a comet's brightness is a bit hit and miss, but I wish they had erred on the dim side..

Anyway, Comet McNaught MORE than made up for it - what a show that was down here!! Sorry this is mostly drifting off-topic. But.. here's a .. err.. rather different picture of McNaught, as an attempt to make up for it!

http://www.geocities.com/chrlzs/mcnaught_unfiltered.jpg

cheers all

1. The Cassini data was NOT withheld - it was just for calibration during the cruise to Saturn and was released, with the first batch of main Science data form Saturn - in 2005. http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data...ssini_orbiter/ and http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data...0/covims_0001/.

2. The Deep Impact data was for calibration of an extended mission and I would expect it to be released with the primary science data of that mission, which is yet to occur at the comet next year.

3. M3 has only JUST finished its mission. Its data will be published to the PDS in the normal fashion.

Nothing has been 'withheld'

Ditto Phoebe and Iapetus - it's all out there. If you actually gave a damn about the data, Jerry, you would go and look at it. And it has been processed by science teams and published. It's out there. But it contradicts what you WANT to hear, so you ignore it and simply claim it's not been released. This is you being intentionally misleading. All you ACTUALLY want, quite transparently, is someone to try and tell you your ATM gravitational theory is right.

Incidentally, the Viking probes never saw Saturns rings - that was Voyager. Please get the very very basic facts right.

I will say the concept of embargo for scientific publication is very flawed, but I can see the purpose.