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Philosophical Question:

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a noise?

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Corollary:

If a man says something in the forest and his wife is not there to hear it, is he still wrong?

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2nd Corollary:

If a scientist says there is global warming and the U.S. Bush Administration refuses to hear it…?

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Herring, David D., 1992: A Study of Stylistic Strategies for Rendering Scientific Texts More Comprehensible. Masters Thesis, East Carolina University

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EOS PSO

Instrument writers/visual.

EOS IDS PIs

DAAC writers DAACs EOSDIS

NASA PAOs

NASA SVS’s

NASA TV Studios

NASA Educational Programs

Instrument writers/visual.

Newspapers

News magazines

Science magazines

TV News

TV documentaries

Web pages

Public school system

Earth System Sciences Program office

NASA HQ

NASA’s Sometimes Lambertian, Sometimes Anisotropic Communication Signal

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Terra Highly decentralized No clearly defined

“gatekeeper(s)” No clearly identified % of $

allocated for outreach Often a “Let’s kill the messenger”

mentality toward Earth scientists from public & government

Stories grow stale quickly, require quicker turnaround

Me* (community lacks clearly defined outreach goals—one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing)

Hubble• Highly centralized under HSTSI—

largely autonomous & apart from NASA

• HSTSI acts as “gatekeeper” to control flow of information b/t PIs & public

• HSTSI has ~10% of total budget allocated for outreach

• No political fallout from HST’s new discoveries

• HSTSI usually sits on stories for up to 1 year before release to public media & it’s still news!

• A dozen or so scientists, visualizers, & writers focused on unified outreach goals

Terra versus Hubble

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Documentation about the Terra and Aqua missions and “in-reach info”

• Terra home page (http://terra.nasa.gov)• Aqua home page (http://aqua.nasa.gov)

Provide the EOS & ESE science community a “direct-to-info-consumer” communications gateway

• Earth Observatory (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov) Provide the news media and other communications

partners a one-stop shopping resource for publication-quality images & data visualizations

• Visible Earth (http://visibleearth.nasa.gov)• Earth Observatory “Natural Hazards” section

(http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards) Build communities of interested stakeholders

• Image Composite Editor (or ICE, at http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~tomw/ice/examples/)

Overview of PR Strategy

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Terra & Aqua Home Pages

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Over 27K subscribers Just under 1 million page

views per month worldwide

Content increasingly syndicated by NASA & public sites

An unmediated conduit b/t science community & general public

Let us know when you have a “new science result,” a feature story idea, or an interesting image

Mainstream media get story ideas from our site; &/or use it to research a topic

“Direct-to-consumer” gateway

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This new section provides timely, hi-res images over significant Earth events for news media

E-mail “Playlist” near-daily report ongoing to stimulate flow of timely images

Now setting up media database to begin daily e-mail notification of new images

Timely, newsworthy images

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Becoming the one-stop shopping, superset of NASA’s Earth images, animations, & data visualizations for public release

Now harvesting global 8-day & monthly composites at up to 0.1-degree resolution for our communications partners (e.g., museums)

Will seek to combine all image repositories into our fully searchable database

Will provide tool for distributing ingest responsibility

The Visible Earth

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GeoCosmos in Tokyo Science Museum

A roughly 20’ sphere shoing Terra MOPITT carbon monoxide data animated for a ~ 1-year period. Reds show high values, greens are medium- range values & blues are low values

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Begin teaching the basics of the art & science of remote sensing

Begin building the Amateur Earth Observation Network (AEON)

Must think about viable ways to subset and serve data sets to non-traditional data user communities

Image Composite Editor (ICE)

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NASA does Earth science• We are as important as those “other” Enterprises, even more so !• NASA plays a lead role in extending understanding of our planet

NASA collects, processes, & distributes unique data sets• We share many of these data almost freely

NASA satellites are the best &/or only viable means of collecting our data sets

• Supported by intensive surface- and air-based field studies• We develop new technologies, many of which become operational

standards &/or spin off commercial products

NASA contributes to commercial, operational, & humanitarian research applications

• We help mitigate natural & human-induced disasters• We participate in many partnerships that stimulate R&D• We facilitate development of new products & services for business

Our message: “…as only NASA can.”