This is the week where spacEurope completes a year of activity and I have invited some people I really admire to give us their insights regarding what might we witness during the year that has just began and that is, also, this blog’s second year of activity.

So expect to count with different perspectives during this and the upcoming week regarding our common passion, space exploration.

Speaking of passion...my first guest is a man who is able to put in words like few what space means to us, a man to whom the word Onward really makes sense and a battle worth fighting for.
With you, directly from Cumbria’s sky, the Astronomy Author, Outreach Educator and a dear friend, Stuart Atkinson:

Spotlight on ESA

I’ve been asked by Rui to write something about what the average, non-expert space enthusiast is looking forward to – and expecting – from ESA in the year ahead. And that is certainly me. I’m definitely a non-expert. My interest is strictly amateur; I’m an unashamed lifelong “space cadet” who devours anything and everything about space that comes my way, or that I can track down.

Well, I say everything. Actually, although I recognise the value and importance of the hard science returned by space probes and missions – the squiggly-lined graphs, Powerpoint charts and bizarre, Rorschach test-like splodges of chemical composition and spectroscopy readings - my passion is for images, or “pretty pictures” as they’re often dismissed as. I think this is because of my background as an amateur astronomer, children’s astronomy writer and Outreach worker. I enjoy standing in a muddy or frosty field on a dark night and looking up at the stars, bathing in the light of the Milky Way as it arches overhead. I love staring into the eyepiece of my small but trusty 4.5” reflecting telescope and seeing Saturn’s rings, the Moon’s craters and Jupiter’s four largest moons for myself. I delight in standing in front of a room full of people, young or old, and showing them pictures of Valles Marineris, the icy landscape of Titan or the Earth rising above the charcoal-black limb of the Moon. I’m a visual person, guilty as charged. I’m sure others go all weak at the knees when they see a graph or a chart but for me a picture is worth a million graphs or charts, never mind a thousand words.

And I’m not alone feeling that way. There are millions of people just like me “out here”, and more ‘space enthusiasts’ taking part in the exploration of space from their school desks, office chairs or bedrooms every week, via the internet.

With that in mind, I have both praise and criticism to fire at ESA as 2007 falls behind us like a discarded Ariane booster. First of all, let me state here very clearly, so no-one flames me this early on, that I am very proud of the European space program and all it has achieved. I’ve grown up with the successes of Hubble, Huygens, Mars Express, Rosetta and Giotto. They’re all fantastic achievements, and have given space science just as much as NASA’s possibly more-famous flagship missions such as Cassini, Voyager and the MERs. In the year ahead we’ll be reading a lot about COROT, Rosetta’s encounter with an asteroid, the Herschel Telescope and much, much more, and I’ll feel a warm glow of pride each time I do.

But I have a problem with ESA that I have to get off my chest, and – wisely or otherwise! - Rui’s given me the perfect opportunity to do just that here. So, taking a deep breath, and in the hope that maybe someone with influence and power will read this, and take it as constructive criticism and not a rant, here goes…

New Year is famously a time to take stock of what has gone before and plan how to change things for the better in the future. Well, ESA’s New Year’s Resolution should be, in my opinion, to make 2008 the year it finally got a real grip on Outreach, because it really, really needs to do better.

I know, I know, ESA has nowhere near the Outreach resources NASA does, and I’m not suggesting it tries to catch up. What I am suggesting is that they do better with what they have, and at least try to make sure people “out here” are more involved in their space missions and are allowed to see the results of the programs they have paid for. To put it plainly, ESA needs to become more approachable and more interactive, because – in my opinion - at the moment it comes across as slightly cold and detached from the people who fund and support it.

What do I mean by this? Well, for one thing… possibly the most important thing… ESA has to become more aware of the importance and value of releasing images into the public domain as quickly, and as freely, as possible. ESA – like NASA – has countless websites, and those websites frequently display images taken by space-probes during encounters and fly-bys etc, and when they appear they’re always gorgeous and brilliant and right-click saveable. But it seems to me – and others – that compared to NASA, ESA seems to drip feed the public, and the media, its images, almost as if it begrudges sharing them sometimes.

Now before anyone shouts “Rubbish!” at me I am the first to admit that there have been exceptions: the ESA Bulletin is a superb publication which I always enjoy reading, and the Huygens images made it online with remarkable speed. Likewise, the recent Rosetta fly-past of Earth was covered brilliantly, especially the wonderful Blog that Daniel Scuka and others worked on, answering questions and queries from people like myself almost in real-time as Rosetta sped past Earth on that memorable night, which made the event so much more exciting and enjoyable. But other missions have been, or are, virtually invisible (mentioning no names… cough cough, VENUS EXPRESS… oops, sorry, that just slipped out…) and there are many images that people like me want to see (and have a right to see, because we paid for them to be taken after all) hidden away on computer hard drives deep in ESA’s dungeons somewhere, which in this information age simply isn’t good enough, and has to change.

Take the aforementioned VENUS EXPRESS for example. Very few people outside of ESA and the space enthusiast community even know Europe HAS a space-probe orbiting Venus, because it has been operating almost in “stealth mode”, with data and images trickling back from it like reports from a spy in enemy territory. I give public talks about astronomy and science very often, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve mentioned VENUS EXPRESS and been told afterwards by one of the audience that they had no idea it exists. That can’t be right, surely…

MARS EXPRESS is a much more visible probe, and many utterly stunning images have been released onto the web for people like myself to enjoy and drool over, but why aren’t those same images being splashed across the pages of newspapers and magazines too? They should be as familiar to the people of Europe as the smiling faces of Paris Hilton or David Beckham, yet they’re not. Something is definitely wrong there…

Again, I know that ESA has only limited Outreach and press resources, but they’re not – in my opinion, and in the opinion of many other space enthusiasts – making the most of what they have. For me, absolute proof of this came when Rosetta flew past Mars.

Before the fly-by, ESA rightly trumpeted the amazing images the probe would be taking, describing in detail what we would be able to see during and after the encounter. One of the images due to be taken, and highlighted as a “Kodak Moment” to use the now popular space enthusiast term, was of Mars as a crescent as Rosetta sped away after its closet approach, and as a lifelong Mars nut I was almost weeing myself with excitement as I waited for that image to appear on the website…

But it never did. I emailed people within ESA, asking where it was, and eventually was told – paraphrasing here - that the image hadn’t been of high enough quality to release. Well, I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong. Actually, not only is it wrong, it's stupid, for the following reasons, which concern me as both a European and a member of the space exploration advocate community.

1. They spent European citizens’ hard-earned money designing, building, launching and operating Rosetta, getting it to Mars to take those pictures. Now, I don’t begrudge them that money, far from it, but I’m not happy to see it wasted or, worse, just taken for granted like that. If we don't get to share all the things that come out of missions well, our contributions are *this* close to being... well... a tax...

2. At a time when space exploration budgets are under strain, and ESA faces a very serious challenge in securing the money necessary to meet its long term plans and goals, it needs all the friends - political and public - it can get. One way of keeping the friends it already has, and making new friends, is to show everyone - show the world - what it can accomplish, given the appropriate funding and support. ESA needs to be coming out into the political and public arenas guns blazing, bragging about what they've done, showing off, and driving home the point that, given more resources, more money, they could achieve even more. Now, if that was YOUR job, raising that profile internationally, in political and public circles, and you had jaw-dropping images in your possession that would be guaranteed to be splashed across the pages of newspapers not just across Europe but across the world, and would be featured on web sites within an hour of them being released, would you 1) sit on them, keeping them locked up in that hard drive dungeon, or 2) release them with a deafening fanfare and bask in the goodwill and glory that would follow?

3. ESA's development and indeed survival will depend, as NASA's has done, on successful and effective Outreach. People have it rammed down their throats by the media, day in and day out, about how much space exploration costs, about what else could be done with the money. And as much as it sticks in the throats of those people who have little time for pretty pictures, and prefer to concentrate on hard science instead - the graphs, charts and measurements - it's the pretty pictures that grab people's attention and make them feel part of the whole space exploration "adventure", and have a chance of convincing them that space exploration actually is a good use of their wages. People need educating about the value of space exploration, about how it aids the development of terrestrial technology, how it drives industry and research, how it helps us understand how Earth "works" etc etc. And as worthy as plasma measurements and wind speed recordings etc are, they're no substitute for a jaw-dropping picture of a great gaping maw of a crater on Mars taken by a plucky little rover, or a portrait of immense towers of gas and dust taken by a space telescope.

Again, I have to stress that I have no bad will towards ESA, far from it; I know from the email correspondence I enjoy with many ESA scientists that they are hard working, dedicated and enthusiastic people. But there is a serious problem somewhere that needs addressing. And that problem seems to me to be that the people in charge of ESA’s press and Outreach efforts don’t “get it” that space science isn’t just for space scientists, it’s fascinating to a growing number of ordinary people too, and these are the same people who fund ESA’s ambitious and successful – and unsuccessful – missions through their taxes. I think 2008 has to be the year that this changes.
And it has to change, because not just the pro-space community but the world has changed. I’m not sure if ESA’s Powers That Be even know this, but Out Here there is now an energetic and thriving community of space enthusiasts who have amazing image manipulation talents and skills, who will happily spend hours and hours taking the raw images returned by space probes and, by enhancing them, adding colour, stitching them together and generally tweaking them, turn them into quite amazing celestial portraits. NASA openly encourages this practice by posting these raw images online as soon as they can, and are happy, for the most part, for these image magicians to create new and beautiful works of art for everyone to enjoy. ESA needs to embrace this sharing approach and philosophy in 2008 if it is to connect better with the public.

As a space enthusiast and member of that public I don't ask for much. I don’t want to sit in on planning or funding or engineering meetings, or be sent thousand page reports or technical papers, or vote on spending and funding. But I want to see ALL the pictures I've contributed to financially, after they've been taken. Personally I don't think that's unreasonable, is it?

Which is why, all these months after Rosetta flew past Mars, the missing “Mars crescent” image still bugs the hell out of me. So what if it was a bit blurry, or out of focus, or over/under exposed? I don’t care. I still want to see it! Whoever decided it wasn’t of good enough quality to release was missing the point. Some of the most memorable images in the history of space exploration have been of frankly rubbish quality – the first image of an erupting volcano on Io and Neil Armstrong descending Eagle’s ladder immediately spring to mind – but they’re burned into our consciousness anyway. I can’t help thinking – melodramatically, I know – that by keeping back images like it does, ESA's behaving like a photographer that was paid – very well - in advance for photographing a wedding, used that money to buy the most expensive camera he could find and spent hours taking pictures only to hand over a handful of prints instead of the full album he promised, before walking away with the camera too…

That might sound selfish, me just wanting to see a picture of my favourite planet, and that’s a fair point. But there’s a bigger picture here. It's not just about me, it’s not even about us, the current space enthusiasts - it's about the next “us". Every time I give a talk in a school I try fan the flames of the kids' interest in the hope that I'll inspire one of them to go grab a book off a shelf and learn a bit more after I've gone. I've been giving school talks for (oh my god!!!) almost 20 years now, must have talked to many thousands of kids in that time, and hopefully some of them have gone on to study and work in science, maybe even space exploration, I don't know. But it's such a visual topic, space exploration, that it's absolutely essential to have the latest pics to show the kids, or they won't believe that space exploration is going on NOW, and wasn't all finished in the days of Apollo, as they're taught in history, I can't stress that enough.

Steve Squyres, the man behind the fantastically successful Mars rovers, has said that he was inspired to enter a career as a space scientist by those famous Viking images of Mars. The same thing happened to me, only in my case the images were in a paint-stained copy of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC tossed into a corner of my art class and forgotten about until an inquisitive 16yr old found it and... um... sneaked it home to look at it in private. I've still got it, over there on the "Mars" shelf of my bookcase. I guess it's why I'm writing about space here on spacEurope today. Who knows how many kids might have been inspired by a blurred image of a crescent Mars..?

Pictures are important. They speak to us. An amazing image – of anything, a crying child, a beautiful sunset, Mars seen by a passing space-probe - can reach out of our computer and TV screens, and up off our newspaper and magazine pages, and bury itself into our brains and hearts and never leave. ESA has to realise that the images it takes are treasures to be shared with everyone, as quickly and as fully as possible, not just because they have an obligation to let the people who paid for those images to be taken see them, but because they have a chance to inspire and educate people with them too. I’m seriously not sure that the Outreach potential of ESA’s images is fully appreciated yet. 2008 should – has to be – the year that changes.

I know that the situation within ESA regarding image release is slightly more complicated than it is in NASA, i.e. ESA mission scientists are not obliged to share their data in the same way, and prefer to withhold it from the public and the media until it has been analysed to within an inch of its life, but this attitude has to change, and the scientists and researchers involved in missions need to be made aware of how important image release is. And ESA has an opportunity to do just that later this year, when Rosetta will fly past asteroid Steins. When it does, let’s see web-pages with raw images, like those we see on the CASSINI and MER sites, so people in Europe and around the world can follow the encounter as it happens. Give Daniel Scuka and his team more resources to develop their fantastic blog, with more interactive web features. Give the Press Office more funding, and more people, to allow them to show just how hard-working and successful the men and women behind the scenes at ESA are.

One word sums it up, really: share. ESA needs to share what it does with the world better; if you put more images out more quickly, you can then just sit back and bask in the glow as the fruits of ESA’s labours are enjoyed, and celebrated, all around the globe. It’s not, um, rocket science.

ESA is a space agency to be proud of, and I am, but to be honest I don’t feel a part of it. I actually feel more a part of NASA’s programs. I would really, really like that to change this year. And I think that just by being a bit more approachable and a bit more sharing, ESA will make many people like me even more proud of it than we already are.

And by the way, I still want to see that crescent Mars image someday, if someone can find it…

Stuart Atkinson