Kepler: lookin' good

A large moon to Tres-2? or perhaps a system with several transiting super earths? Is that a ninja knocking on my door?

Steinn, I love these hints! Thank you!

Although I've asked you this question before, and you kindly tried hard to answer me, I still don't understand the ninjas' motivation. The Kepler investigators are in the perfect position to avoid getting scooped while sharing preliminary information. They won't embarrass themselves by speculating -- that's their job! The public is quite able handle the ambiguity of competing theories - it happens all the time in forensic investigations, including mysterious airplane crashes. I can't see why the Kepler investigators wouldn't want to invite the public (which paid for Kepler) to enjoy the drama of an unfolding story. NASA would stimulate more interest and support atht way, than with with a few one-off big announcements.

I would never want to annoy extrasolar planet hunters (they are my heroes!), but I can't help but wonder what the NASA ninjas would do if they were presented with a Freedom Of Information Act request. It sure would be interesting to read the executive summaries that the Kepler investigators are giving to the higher-ups.

Well, as I understand it, the principal investigators want to make sure they understand both the observational errors and limits, and, more critically, any systematic errors.

What they do NOT want to do is to make announcements or claims and then have to retract because they hadn't spotted a 3 micromagnitude systematic long period photometric oscillation.

FOIA requests would lead to two things: administrative delays in processing the request until any proprietary period had expired, and the waste of time of scientists.
ALL NASA data is public, but much of it has a fixed propietary period for calibration, first look and analysis and publication - it is the reward system for the people who spent half their working life on the project.

Memos to higher ups will not be very exciting: mostly they'd include statements about nominal performance, electron counts, thermal stability, detector readnoise, antenna gain and photometric errors.
Not gonna be any hints in the summaries.

How about releasing a light curve of a random star - variable or not - in the field to show the world how good Kepler's photometry actually is? The CoRoT project had some proof of its capabilities out pretty early, without compromising any later discoveries.

It seems to me that it will be about a year before they will have statistically meaningful data such that they can talk about a trend. I think the first announcements will be in the spring or summer of next year.

The statistics of planet masses and period distribution will take a year or more.
But Kepler is sensitive to short orbital periods, and may have exquisite photometric sensitivity for the brighter stars.
I think there will be some announcement this summer, or early autumn, unless there are subtle calibration issues they haven't spotted yet.
Commissioning data, by all accounts, looks very good.

Speaking as someone who works on another soon-to-launch NASA mission, I can tell you why we're so careful not to speculate. As Stein said, it looks really, really bad to draw an incorrect conclusion and have to retract - that just damages our credibility. Scientists are by nature a cautious and skeptical bunch; would you expect any less? It would be terrible for the Kepler team to cry wolf.

Also, the proprietary data period is another BIG issue. I only have a very short time (~1 year) to have first crack at the data before any other scientists get it. Considering that I've worked on my project for about 7 years now, I'd say that's a small price for the public to pay for my years of service. It's why I was willing to work on the project in the first place! I need to be sure I get at least a couple of good papers out of it before the feeding frenzy begins. :)

Dear Random NASA scientist,

As you know, science is a process, not a set of conclusions. It should not damage your credibility at all to speculate openly, draw the "incorrect" conclusion, then rethink the data and come up with a different conclusion, and so forth. It should not be terrible at all for the Kepler team to cry wolf -- presented properly, with due attention to teaching the public about science, it would be wonderful. As an example, here's Mike Brown's explanation of the difficulties he encountered during a recent attempt to watch the dwarf planet Haumea pass in front of one of its satellites.
http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2009/06/homeward-bound.html
Mike Brown was open about his degree of uncertainty, and this made his blog post fascinating. Caution and skepticism are quite compatible with being open about the state of an investigation.

As for the reward system, as I said above, folks like you are my heroes, and I want you to be richly rewarded. If money would do the trick, I'd be in favor of paying you more. But what reward do you really want? Do you want the intrinsic reward of being first? Or do you want the prestige and career advancement that comes with being first? If you are simply in it for the thrill of knowing something noone else knows, I'd say that you are being selfish at my expense, and the right thing to do would be to share publicly-funded data & results as quickly as possible. But I'm guessing that's not your motivation, since you said you wouldn't have worked on your project if you couldn't get a few good papers out of it. If you need to advance your career, that's completely understandable, and it is a pity that universities and organizations like NASA don't reward scientists for openly communicating the results of an investigation.

I think the reward system should be changed for publicly-funded investigations.
Perhaps the problem is that the people gathering the data are the same people who want to trumpet the exciting conclusions. Perhaps for publicly-funded missions, there should be data-gathering people who get prestige and career-advancement solely by making data public as quickly as possible, rather than being given the opportunity to sit on the data until they can tease out a rock-solid conclusion. Maybe there is some other solution -- the only thing I'm sure of is that there must be a better reward system than one which would encourage scientists to keep exciting (albeit tentative) results secret to the point where you can make jokes about ninjas.

I worry that by criticizing this way, I'll discourage Steinn and others from sharing fun little hints, but the thing is, as a taxpayer, I think Kepler is my mission too. Many of members of the public want to be included, and I'd like to figure out a system which would create an incentive for including us at every step along the way.

Hi,
I think the Kepler scientist could allow the public to access a database like the near earth objects db.
That way we would get a grasp of the science results coming out and at the same time no public announcement would be required until they refine and verify their data.