[troutman]

The Curiosity Kerfuffle: the big (and increasing) difference between data and discovery


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This morning, there was a much-anticipated press briefing featuring the latest results from Curiosity. The news is simultaneously exciting and dull.

What's exciting: Curiosity's incredibly sophisticated SAM instrument is returning good-looking data; repeated analyses of the same material are producing the same beautiful results. It's the last of Curiosity's science instruments to be fully checked out, and with the exception of one damaged sensor on one instrument (a wind speed sensor), the whole scientific instrument package is working absolutely perfectly. When the scientists finally get a chance to start selecting interesting materials to study, the data set is going to be very rich, providing fodder for years and years of work.

What's kind of dull: Their analyses were of a "typical, ordinary" Martian soil, and in general, the Rocknest soil does appear to be typical and ordinary (keeping in mind, of course, that we're talking about what's "ordinary" on the surface of another freaking planet). There are tantalizing hints of some interesting chemistry, but it's too early to be certain if the organic compounds they detected got their carbon from Mars, from meteorites, or from Earth. Stay tuned. I will explain what SAM did find in a later post. But there's something else I need to get off my chest first.

Everybody involved in the Curiosity mission is glad that this morning's press briefing is behind them. It has been a nutty couple of weeks, because of an unguarded comment by John Grotzinger in front of NPR science correspondent Joe Palca. At the moment of the interview, Grotzinger was reviewing the data from SAM's second analysis of Martian soil, and seeing for the first time how well it matched the first analysis. He knew at that moment that Curiosity would be able to do all the science that he had been dreaming of for so many years of hard work developing the mission. That was the context for his comment to Palca that "This data is going to be one for the history books. It’s looking really good." Not that the specific data that he was looking at contained any surprising discovery; just that the quality of the data demonstrated that the capacity for discovery is there. Curiosity's capacity for discovery is greater than any mission ever sent to the surface of Mars. It's going to be a fun few years. We're not there yet though.