The Good and Bad of NASA Publishing Spacecraft Images Online

This was my second blog post for Swift, published late last week:

You wouldn’t know it by listening to many conspiracy theorists, but NASA is by far the most open space agency in the world when it comes to publishing data from spacecraft. By law, the teams that built and run the instruments on these missions must publish their data within six months of it being taken, except in rare cases when an additional six-month extension can be granted.

Contrast that with the Chinese and Indian space agencies, which still haven’t openly published data from missions that completed several years ago. Japan is better, as is the European Space Agency (ESA), but neither of them supply data as readily and easily as NASA.

In addition to the rules for depositing the raw, unprocessed data, NASA’s PR department, along with the PR arms of most missions, publish some of the data online almost as soon as it’s taken. This is great for the public; it’s also terrible for skeptics.

Allow me to explain by way of example: The LCROSS mission. This was the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite that infamously sparked conspiracies that NASA was “bombing” the moon. The mission was to launch a projectile at the lunar south pole where there are permanently shadowed regions, and have the spacecraft fly through the plume formed by the projectile’s impact to try to detect water. If water were found, it would be a boon for crewed missions to the moon because astronauts could mine the water there instead of bringing their own.

The big event took place the night (in the US) of October 9, 2009. Within just a few days, photographs taken by the spacecraft were published by NASA online.

This was really good for the public. We got to see early results of what had been a very hyped event with observing parties taking place across the nation, including at the White House. It helped keep public interest longer than just one evening. It shared data with the people who paid for it: taxpayers.

LCROSS Landing Site

So what’s the problem? These images show several things: The most basic of photographic processing without things like dust on the camera removed (which is always done for science images), color (the camera was black-and-white, so the color is completely an artifact of the press release image), brightness enhanced a lot such that most of the surface is white, and the PR release image is a JPG file format, meaning that there are JPG compression artifacts that manifest as blocky blobs.

For most of us, that doesn’t matter. We get the point that this is showing a bright glow caused by the impact of the spacecraft’s projectile. In NASA’s before shots, that bright glow is not present. A tiny flash of light that the world was watching for, with tens of thousands of people across the night side of the Earth staring upwards. (Unfortunately, it was cloudy where I was.)

Pseudscientists, on the other hand, don’t get that. There exists a large group of space anomalists that look for anything in a space photograph that they don’t immediately understand and use that to claim fill-in-the-blank. One of the most prolifically published modern people who practice this is Richard C. Hoagland. He took the NASA press release, increased the brightness even more, and claimed that the rectilinear, colored structures, were in reality infrastructure (tubes and pipes) by the “secret space program” and that the public space program had bombed them because the folks at NASA had finally found out about the secret bases on the Moon.

NASA Image PIA10214 with a Close-Up of “BigFoot”

This will seem absurd to most people. But not to some. And, this is just one example; innumerable others exist. Every image published online in the easy-to-access public websites of the Mars rovers are poured over by anomaly hunters in the same way. Among other things, they search for rocks that are then said to look like apartment complexes, fossils, Bigfoot, all kinds of terrestrial and aqueous animal life, boots, a pump, and very recently, a water shut-off valve (to just name a few). Most of these are basic examples of pareidolia (creating a pattern in otherwise random data), or imprints actually caused by the rover equipment, but these are usually facilitated by the low-resolution and highly compressed JPG image format.

Do I think that NASA should stop being so open? No. I think that people are always going to find ways to find anomalies in images and claim it means something special. It’s the nature of the phenomenon, and pseudoscientists are always going to find something anomalous with something. And, the moment that NASA starts to restrict access to data, claims of censorship and hiding things will become even louder than they currently are.

I’m part of the planning team for the New Horizons mission that will reach Pluto in July of 2015. When the PI (Principle Investigator) of the mission, Alan Stern, announced that some of the data would be released on the web as low-resolution JPG images as soon as we get them, I have to admit I cringed just a little bit. And I felt bad for doing it. Dr. Stern has the absolute best of intentions, and he wants to keep people interested in the mission and share the data and let people see results from what is probably a once-in-a-lifetime mission, especially since the data downlink to Earth is going to be done over several weeks (due to the craft’s vast distance from Earth).

But, he will be making it very easy for anomaly hunters to find anomalies made by an intelligence — just not understanding that that intelligence was the software that produced the image.

Going forward, I don’t think there’s any good solution. But, this is something the skeptical community should be aware of, and it shows that there’s always a downside to things, even when you think there isn’t.

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The Peer-Review of Bigfoot

Introduction

Today, after a very long-awaited process, forensic DNA analyst Melba Ketchum released the results of her work that allegedly proves Bigfoot exists, being a species roughly 15,000 years old, and having resulted from the interbreeding of a human with an unknown primate at that time.

There are numerous people talking about this in the skeptical underworld … I recommend the Doubtful News story, JREF forum thread, and/or MonsterTalk Facebook page.

Clearly from the title of this blog, I am not a biologist, forensic anthropologist, geneticist, nor any other thing related. And people on those threads I just linked to are covering details of this such that much of anything I say would just be redundant. However, I have talked about the peer-review process on this blog before (mainly here, but also here, here, here, here, and here). And Melba Ketchum’s “publication” of her results is another good example to illustrate the purpose of peer-review and point out the fact that all because someone publishes something in a “science journal,” it does not mean it’s good science.

Edited to Add (2/14/2013): Some zoologists who have read the paper have chimed in, indicating that this paper is not of good quality nor up to general academic standards.

The Requisite Background

To make a long story short that you can read in much more detail at any of those first three links, Dr. Melba Ketchum received several samples of biological material (hairs mostly, I think), several years ago. After alleged detailed DNA analysis, they proved to themselves it was Bigfoot material. They wrote up a paper for a scientific journal – which is what you’re supposed to do in mainstream science – and submitted it for peer review (the process where people who do similar types of work look over the paper and try to figure out if there are problems with it).

As the story goes in this drastically shortened narrative, this was all under wraps until November of 2012 when it was leaked out by some overseas colleague (I want to say Russian? but I don’t entirely remember). This forced Dr. Ketchum to go somewhat public with it and face intense media scrutiny.

I listened to her for a full Coast to Coast AM show back on December 23, 2012, where she was on the defensive and offensive. In listening to her, I actually felt sorry for her and decided to reserve judgement to see what would happen if her results were actually published.

And that’s what happened today.

Publication

The problem is, it’s not in a typical peer-reviewed journal. It’s not even in a science journal that has any track record. She published in the “DeNovo Scientific Journal. Sounds okay at first …

… except that the domain was purchased anonymously 9 days ago for a period of one year. And this is the only paper that the journal has put out. And in fact, they admit that when other journals would not publish their results, they went out, bought a journal, renamed it, and published their paper.

That is not peer-review. This is like a case where your spouse won’t do something you want them to do so you go and build a robot spouse that you program yourself to do that something.

As I said, I felt sorry for her and I was willing to give Melba the benefit of the doubt. This, however, removes all pretense of an attempt at having people look at this work and judge it objectively and go back and fix mistakes that were pointed out.

She also apparently does not understand the concept of “open access” (meaning free) because it costs $30 to view the paper.

Other Signs

There are many other signs of a lack of any validity here. One is that, earlier today, the journal’s website was using stock photos from websites without any of the required attribution. Those photos are gone now, a few hours later, but other stock photos are present still without attribution (though maybe these were paid for, but most licenses still require posting attribution).

Another is that on the Contact Us page, the name “Robin Haynes” appeared earlier today, but it’s missing now (but visible at the moment in Google’s cached version). There is fairly good evidence that this is the renamed Robin Lynn Pheifer, who has gone by a few different names, and is a woman in Michigan who claimed to have 10 bigfoots on her 10-acre property to whom she would repeatedly feed blueberry bagels.

Another is that people have started to contact the co-authors to see if they actually participated in the paper. Of the two who have responded, one said that he did no analysis nor writing of the paper (though was aware of it), while another hasn’t seen any recent version and could not extract any DNA from the samples he had tested.

Final Thoughts

I’m sure this is going to continue to get very detailed scrutiny over the next several days. The problem is that at this point, almost regardless of what is determined, this move to create one’s own journal and call it peer-reviewed (and scientific — after all, “Scientific” is in the title!) is a gross violation of the terms and process. It’s worse than Answers in Genesis having their own “Creation” journal because at least they are clear about what it really is. And it uses stock images with proper attribution.

Peer-review is not a perfect process. But it’s the best we have. Invoking the Galileo complex (which she did) and then making your own publication only serves to further polarize people: Detractors will use this as fodder to point out that you’ve got nothin’, and people who already supported you already think there’s a vast conspiracy to keep them down.