There are so many half truths and lies in this story. I wanted to mention just this one:
"Until now, when NASA wanted to conduct research, they’d collect data and disappear with it for a few months before publishing. But the data from ISEE-3 is going to be available to anyone who wants access to it."
This is grotesquely wrong.
Plenty of space weather data is available in near real time form, as soon as it is received by ground stations. E.g., for relevant imagery, http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/, but many other space weather sources are available. The time stamps on the images at the above link should be only a few hours old. Those are quick look products (jpegs), but the science formats are also available, for free.
Sure, there are other disciplines in which space data are sat on by the PI -- planetary missions, cosmology. The reason is that the data is not well understood and there would be too many bogus results. But even, say, for Mars data, there has been a lot of outreach to make sure both US and international scientists can be part of the team and share in initial results. This slower timeline is special to these disciplines. The article is making a broad statement that is not true.
The team is making space science and technologies accessible and understandable to a wider technical public audience than any previous project. That's the key point that the article tries unsuccessfully to relay. The team calls this "citizen [space] science" in their Education and Public Outreach post. http://spacecollege.org/isee3/education-and-public-outreach-... "Imagine what feats of exploration might be possible if an empowered and engaged citizenry realized that exploring space is really something anyone can do."
Everybody seems unhappy with this article, so we're going to demote it. More neutral, substantive articles on this subject are always welcome. (So are more nkurz submissions!)
And it's not as if this story needs that kind of embellishment anyway. It's seriously cool without the stupid linkbaity title and the false criticism of NASA.
This article made me think about Travis Goodspeed and his "southern appalachian space agency". If you are interested in real DIY-space stuff, you should check it out.
There is propellant left, evidenced by the heating rate of the propellant tanks, but the pressurizing nitrogen has leaked, so it's unusable.
Instead of continuing the mission around the preferred Earth-Sun L1 orbit, they'll collect science data from the Earth-like orbit it's predicted to land in instead.
First, the author makes the claim that the team was given the McDonalds for use for this particular mission but that, as far as I know, is false. They have had the space for some time while they were restoring lunar orbiter images.
Second, the team's/company's news updates show that they had to buy more equipment than an old radio, a mac laptop and some parts to fix a broken tv, specifically, a software defined radio (sdr).
The team bought the old McDonalds for use as a hackerspace, and also to prevent it from being torn down.
Their $159,602 crowdfunding on http://www.rockethub.com/42228 paid for necessary equipment and services, the most expensive being access to large radiotelescopes to transmit commands and receive telemetry.
Do we really need the reddit headline editorialization on HN?
When you're working with NASA, and they officially help you with the encryption, you're not "seizing" anything. This is a very cool and interesting story without the L33T HAXX0R DUD3Z angle being weirdly inserted into it...the McMoon team are heroes many times over and awesome in their own right.
It's the EXACT headline from the article! Maybe HN should penalize people for complaining about the titles of submissions, because it seems like no matter how someone titles their submission, someone is going to have a problem with it. Complaining about "headline editorialization" doesn't do anything to fix the problem.
Downvote and move on. We don't need to have this stupid conversation every time.
The HN guidelines call for using the original title except when it is misleading or linkbait. trackofalljades is right that this one was linkbait, so we changed it to a phrase from the first sentence.
You're also right—complaints about titles are tedious. It astonishes me how much time and energy they take up.
There is a way to complain about titles productively, though: suggest a better one.
"Until now, when NASA wanted to conduct research, they’d collect data and disappear with it for a few months before publishing. But the data from ISEE-3 is going to be available to anyone who wants access to it."
This is grotesquely wrong.
Plenty of space weather data is available in near real time form, as soon as it is received by ground stations. E.g., for relevant imagery, http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/, but many other space weather sources are available. The time stamps on the images at the above link should be only a few hours old. Those are quick look products (jpegs), but the science formats are also available, for free.
Significant Earth science data (https://earthdata.nasa.gov/data/near-real-time-data/rapid-re...) are also available free, within hours of receipt, for anyone, including disaster responders.
Other data is broadcast directly, with open formats, so any ground station underneath can receive it directly. ("Direct Broadcast," http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=565052...).
The people involved in these programs have spent a lot of effort in engaging disaster responders (http://www.nasa.gov/applied-sciences/disasters.html#.U-hc5WK...) to make end to end data services that will actually be useful.
Sure, there are other disciplines in which space data are sat on by the PI -- planetary missions, cosmology. The reason is that the data is not well understood and there would be too many bogus results. But even, say, for Mars data, there has been a lot of outreach to make sure both US and international scientists can be part of the team and share in initial results. This slower timeline is special to these disciplines. The article is making a broad statement that is not true.