Today is a big day. From 500 million km above the Earth, we are making history. OK, it’s not really “we”; it’s just a bunch of scientists who are encountering another world, quite literally. If all goes well, today we are landing on a comet for the first time ever. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission is remotely sending down a collection of delicate and creatively named* scientific instruments to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (we’ll just go with 67P).
The Rosetta spacecraft travelled for over 10 years and 6 billion km to reach 67P, with the overall project running up a bill of €1.4 billion involving some 2,000 people. All this so that scientists can have a digitally mediated look at the dust and rocks 67P is made of and see it develop a tail as the Sun melts its icy surface when the comet is back in our solar neighborhood in 2015. As comets are ancient leftovers from the Solar System formation, looking closely at them should give us clues to how our planetary system evolved. In other words, this mission is part of our (never-ending?) quest to find out from where we all came. So, yes, these are exhilarating times.
But there is controversy surrounding the new grounds in science that Rosetta is making. After an insider leaked comet images in July 2014, space fans criticised ESA for not sharing its toys, arguing that it probably should share this wealth of information with the public. Although ESA and its partner institutes are mostly government-subsidised, the data gathered is carefully guarded for at least 6 months for the exclusive use of selected researchers. It’s called “proprietary period” because (duh!) science is the property of its maker.
Scientists need time to examine and publish their findings and if outsiders can access precious data, they might steal the glory by publishing first. Certain scholarly phobias are ingrained so deeply that at first it might be hard to respond to such claims. But not only are there rational arguments for sharing with the public (from “yo, I paid for that” through fundraising for further research to sustaining public engagement), real-time publication of scientific information is doable and has been done before.
Viewed from another angle, ESA’s policy is part of a mainstream rhetoric of separating the scientist and the general public into a hierarchy, with the former standing on a pedestal as ‘the expert’ in possession of the ‘truth.’ And as the leaked Rosetta images showed, not even the insiders are uniformly happy about this setup. Research institutions, such as the ESA, wield immense power by controlling the knowledge-making process and access to the resulting ‘facts’. By exploiting assertions for publishing rights and conjuring up the tragic ruination of scientific careers, it is this power structure that is being concealed.
* That is to say, SESAME (Surface Electrical Sounding and Acoustic Monitoring Experiment), MIDAS (Micro-Imaging Dust Analysis System), and OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System)? You couldn’t make this stuff up!
You can follow Rosetta at http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta and https://twitter.com/ESA_Rosetta.
Tamara Szűcs
Gender
Hungary
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