ESA Unintentionally Reminds Us Why We Need
More Skepticism in Science Reporting

(If this article is too long for you, make sure you nevertheless flip through the snapshotted quotes in the image gallery!)

The engineering accomplishments over the past week with the first-ever recorded landing on a comet by the European Space Agency (ESA) is undoubtedly a historic event.  Nobody can take that accomplishment away from them, and it's a spectacular achievement for all of mankind.

But, we'd be wise to distinguish this engineering success from the ESA's treatment thus far of the Rosetta mission's data -- which, by contrast, has failed to impress.  Although the science fumbles we've thus far seen truthfully exhibit a lengthy history, the ESA's response to the ongoing failures of the dirty snowball hypothesis are actually adding confusion to what was already a very confusing and embarrassing situation in the planetary sciences.

If that statement strikes you as extreme, stop reading this article right now and review the numerous quote snapshots I've attached to this article.  The history of comets is undoubtedly a history marked by repeated failures to predict observations.

By most accounts that matter, Whipple's dirty snowball model has been an absolute failure.  For example, it's been known since the ESA's Giotto spacecraft took the first close photographs of a comet nucleus (Halley) in March of 1986 that comets appear to have a rocky surface.  Rosetta has made this situation that much more obvious.  The response to this unsettling observation was to re-write cometary theory to place the ice inside of the rock -- raising serious questions about what sort of process might actually create such a situation.

More recently, it's been observed that the lunar water signal is quite possibly the result of an electrochemical reaction that has little to do with our typical conception of water.  From http://www.universetoday.com/97997/the-moons-water-comes-from-the-sun/ ...

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“We found that the ‘water’ component, the hydroxyl, in the lunar regolith is mostly from solar wind implantation of protons, which locally combined with oxygen to form hydroxyls that moved into the interior of glasses by impact melting ,” said Youxue Zhang, Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Michigan.

Hydroxyl is the pairing of a single oxygen atom to a single hydrogen atom (OH). Each molecule of water contains two hydroxyl groups.

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In other words, given that what we see on 67P's surface is quite plainly rock, there appears to be the distinct possibility that the cometary water is produced in much the same way.  However, thus far, not a single science reporter nor Rosetta mission scientist has pointed to this possibility for 67P.  This is a curious omission which raises very serious questions about the role of reporters in this story.

A very confusing November 12th media briefing appears to have been just the start of a series of confusing announcements.  Dr. Jean Pierre Bibrig, who has studied both the inferred water features and mineralogy of Mars, produced a bewildering answer to what was in truth a very straightforward question by reporter Eric Hand about what we were seeing on 67P.

Pointing to 67P's apparent density, the scientist insisted that what we see on the surface cannot possibly represent what is beneath -- apparently skipping over any possibility that 67P might simply be hollow like some geodes, thunder eggs and large terrestrial concretions, and absolutely refusing to consider any interpretation which involves an altered G.  Nobody seems too concerned that of all of the "constants", G remains the hardest to pin down (see attached snapshotted quotes).

More recent MUPUS data from Rosetta's Philae lander has suggested that 67P's crust "has a tensile strength similar to sandstone" -- yet, the researchers continue to assert "There's no way the thing's made of rock" due to the comet's overall apparent density (quotes from http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30097648).

Yet, when the Philae attempted to hammer the surface with an instrument originally designed with ice in mind, the instrument was unable to make more than a few millimeters of progress at the hammer motor's highest power level.  The response?  Well, it depends upon what source you are reading.  If you are reading the ESA's official press release, the answer is definitively "mechanically strong ice."

(that comes from http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/18/philae-settles-in-dust-covered-ice/)

But, if you are reading the BBC report referenced above, also from today (11/18/2014), we are warned that "You can't rule out rock."

Um, okay.

The Rosetta team admittedly has a very tough job.  But, their legacy might turn out a bit different than it seems to us today. What if humans have sent a probe 310 million miles from Earth to land on a comet only to impose the textbook theory upon whatever data the probe sent back?

In the event that something more than just a historic engineering feat was transpiring here -- in the event that the data was trying to tell us that there is something about our conception of the universe which is fundamentally in error -- it appears almost certain by now that the ESA will do its best to point us back to the troubled textbook theory.

But, if they do, it would certainly not be the first time.

#67P   #rosettamission   #67pchuryumovgerasimenko