Was part of the delay and slow release a technical issue. The probe had to transmit to the orbiter which relayed the data to earth. And the orbiter was on the other side of the planet? Just curious Bill B On Jan 20, 2005, at 8:53 PM, Chuck Hards wrote:
Kim, like you I was annoyed and puzzled at the slow rate that information was being made available at the time of the landing. But ESA is a tiny organization compared to NASA, with a proportionally smaller budget, and is subservient to more than one governement which I'm sure is a bureaucratic nightmare. With a comparatively smaller staff, "first things first" was probably the order of the day at ESA. It's a shame that any dollars going to research have to be spent on any PR at all, it's just a drain on the real work of the institution. If just the burning desire to know the truth isn't enough, if we as a species are dependant on "wow" factors and effective marketing in order to fund scientific research, then we don't deserve to learn of faraway new worlds in the first place. We're just delaying the inevitable end. "Rome" will fall again, for pretty much the same reasons.
Kim wrote:
I was enormously disappointed at the trickle of both real information and images that came from ESA. Despite NASA's many shortcomings, ESA could learn a lot from NASA's public relations team.
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