Note to readers: I have yet to proofread this, but I wanted to get it up. I wish I had an editor for that.
If you know me, you know how much I’m into science and how much I care about how the public perceive it and its interplay with the public opinion of science. I think it’s imperative to foster good PR for science. Our society is built upon a foundation of technology, and since we have a public that basically dictates science policy through who they vote for, we need a scientifically literate public. We don’t have that right now, hence George W. Bush. But to get a scientifically literate public, you have to do more than feed them facts in school. You need to inspire.
NASA is very good at the whole inspiration game. The moon landings, though perhaps not the most scientifically intensive mission they’ve performed, really caught the public’s imagination, and more recently, with the Mars Phoenix lander, they utilized Web 2.0 resources to give the mission a unique (and cutely whimsical) personality and have reached out to the science and technology community on the internet. This isn’t necessarily the most wide-reaching public galvanization that needs to happen, but it’s certainly a start.
Here’s a picture of Phoenix:
The Mars Phoenix Lander
Phoenix did a lot of fantastic science: it took the high resolution stereoscopic images of Mars, found water ice on the surface of the planet, and determined the composition of the Martian soil, and through good luck, its mission lasted for a fair amount longer than NASA expected it to. I followed the discoveries with great excitement, and I’m looking forward to what we find out as NASA continues to crunch the data over the next few years.
Almost as exciting as the new science that Phoenix brought us is the new PR that NASA has been trying out recently. Just go look at Phoenix’s Twitter feed. Phoenix spoke its first words on May 7th: “Less than 20 days till I land on Mars!” It’s clear that Phoenix is speaking, which is a clever twist—in lieu of manned spaceflight, let’s personify our robots! I know that I got quite attached to the little machine for the short time I was following it. Whoever was updating it gave it quite a personality. Look at these tweets, from the nerve-wracking landing (only half of all attempted Mars landings have succeeded):
Peak heating will hit in 40 seconds. The heat and energy generated during atmospheric entry would be enough to power 280,000 homes 4:47 PM May 25th
parachute must open next. my signal still getting to Earth which is AWESOME! 4:49 PM May 25th
parachute opening is scariest part for the team. 4:49 PM May 25th
parachute is open!!!!! 4:50 PM May 25th
come on rocketssssss!!!!! 4:53 PM May 25th
I’ve landed!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4:54 PM May 25th
Cheers! Tears!! I’m here! 4:55 PM May 25th
Now.. I still have some other milestones ahead. Solar panels will open in 15 minutes after the dust has settled here. 4:56 PM May 25th
EDL went better than anyone expected. The team trains for the worst and then hopes for the best. This was better than BEST! It was perfect. 5:14 PM May 25th
Mission leaders are meeting with press right now.. very happy.. and taking all the credit
of a fantastic landing 5:51 PM May 25th
Phoenix also frequently linked to pictures from the mission, webcasts, articles, and so on, and actually replied to questions from Twitter users (including me once! I was so excited). It worked excellently. NASA set just the right tone, and drew ordinary web users into the mission. The outreach wasn’t limited to Twitter, either. Phoenix wrote four posts as a guest editor on Gizmodo and Diana Blaney of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory conducted interviews on the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast both at the start and the end of the mission.
I know that NASA is sorta of preaching to the choir with those kinds of media outlets—Gizmodo’s readers and SGU’s listeners already are probably already into science and space exploration, but it’s still nice to read about what our tax dollars are doing at NASA, and if NASA wants to keep their funding (it’s imperative that they do keep it) they need to keep the public interested. This Web 2.0 stuff has so much more personality than the old paradigm. Go look at the Phoenix lander’s website. It’s got some interesting sections, but on the whole, it’s a little boring. It’s the kind of website you visit when you have an assignment for your high school science class. There is minimal content which isn’t frequently updated and has little to keep people coming back. With Twitter, NASA has found a way to inform the public of just how much science gets done by these missions, and it does so in a way which is future-proof: the populace will only get more computer-savvy, so these methods will only become more effective.
Let’s hope this isn’t a one-off. Science education in the States really sucks at the whole “inspiration” thing and a more visible NASA would work wonders. And indeed, our prayers may not go unanswered by the space-gods. Since the Phoenix twitter account came online on May 7th, the Cassini mission orbiting Saturn got one (on July 11th), then the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity (on August 29th) and most recently the forthcoming Mars Science Lab (on November 18th). It looks like someone saw how successful the Phoenix PR campaign was and had the good idea to take it to other missions, and I, for one, am insanely excited.
Ok, one last thing. Mars Phoenix’s last words were “01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3,” posted at 1:12 PM on November 10th. That translates to “Triumph <3.” How touching! I felt for the little guy, up there on the pole of Mars, the ice encroaching and his power running low.
