If you've enjoyed the press conference and mission status updates and commentary that I've been hastily almost-transcribing, do take some time to tune in to NASA TV and catch some of the replays and excerpts. Right now they're playing various high-impact excerpts from the first press conference and it's just a blast to watch these guys smile, to see the joy they're experiencing on that first night.
On another note, do most not-science reporters just suck horribly at reporting on this kind of stuff or am I getting a bad sample? Tonight, driving home from work listening to the radio, some reporter came on with a 2-minute piece about the doom and gloom around a "what-if" posed at this morning's news conference. I can't remember who asked the question but it was basically "what if you can't cut the securing cables that free the rover from the lander" and the answer was a pretty vehement "These are high-reliability devices. They're extremely reliable. It takes a lot going right to make this work but we don't anticipate any problems with the pyro cutters." Well, this guy on the radio didn't seem to care about that part of the response and just quoted Steve Squyres saying (from memory, sorry) "We'd turn from a rover mission to a lander mission. We wouldn't be able to complete most of the science mission. We could still pancam but you can pancam 'till the cows come home and the scenery isn't gonna change."
Now, a responsible reporter would not only have mentioned that the mission team clearly thinks that this particular device (the pyro cutter) is highly reliable, but he should have also made it clear that the mission team didn't just shout "hey, we're worried about this problem", they were responding to a question that was clearly phrased as a "I know it's unlikely but what if..."
This mission is going just about picture perfect so far, but if this guy's report was the only news you got on the Spirit mission, you'd probably walk away thinking that it was all about to fall apart. It's either incompetence or sensationalism (or maybe both).
It's too bad that most people don't have time to really follow a news topic closely. I'm sure glad I don't rely on woefully inadequate news outlets for my space news.
