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NEAR Miss? NASA TV and the Politics of Human vs. Robotic
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET
21 February 2001
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nasa_near_tv_010216 When mission specialists at Johns Hopkins University decided to land the NEAR Shoemaker probe on Asteroid 433 Eros, they knew it would not be easy. The car-sized probe was never designed to make a landing. It had no legs. It had no parachute. When the robotic craft touched down, signaling Earth that it was still "alive," a party broke out at mission control. NASA chief Dan Goldin knew the landing was a huge publicity opportunity. Goldin seized the moment. He said he was "overwhelmed with the courage and talent" that made the asteroid landing possible. So overwhelmed that, despite a tight budget, he approved a 10-day extension of the mission so researchers could continue studying the asteroid. A strong vote of support, from the top, for robotic space exploration. But five days before these events, officials at the space agency had announced a decision to carry a spacewalk by shuttle Atlantis astronauts instead of the asteroid landing on the primary NASA TV satellite channel. The NEAR landing was covered on a separate channel, as well as on a live Webcast. One small step for man, one giant snub for robots? "I think it was a big mistake," said Alan Binder, who ran the Lunar Prospector mission that made a similar controlled crash landing on the Moon in 1999. "I was very disappointed." Binder, also a veteran of NASA's successful robotic Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s, said he had tried "very hard" to get NASA to televise Lunar Prospector events, especially the crash landing. NASA declined. Binder accuses the Johnson Space Center (JSC), which controls television output, of favoring coverage of their own missions. JSC typically manages NASA's manned missions.
Click on pictures to see larger images of NEAR's historic landing. 
1,150 meters
(3,773 Feet) | | 
700 meters
(2,300 Feet) | Top left -- The image is 177 feet (54 meters) across. The large rock at lower left is 24 feet (7.4 meters) across. Top right -- The image is 108 feet (33 meters) across. The large, oblong rock casting a big shadow measures 24 feet (7.4 meters) across.
But on Feb. 12, said Binder and other space scientists we talked to, the nation wanted to watch the Eros landing, and NASA would have been wise to give it priority. The next days' newspapers agreed, splashing coverage of the landing on their front pages while stuffing the spacewalk next to the department store ads. "NASA always seems to make the wrong decision in terms of PR," said Binder, who is founder and director of the Lunar Research Institute in Arizona, which espouses the goal of putting colonists on the Moon. "I fail to understand what drives them. I'm really mystified." | 
Astronaut Robert Curbeam floats
out of the airlock to begin the
second spacewalk of STS-98 on
February 12, 2001.
| NASA public affairs officer Don Savage said the asteroid landing was not given short shrift. The agency knew that both events would be newsworthy, and while the spacewalk was televised over the main NASA TV satellite channel, a separate satellite was rented temporarily to handle the NEAR landing. But anyone who gets the regular NASA TV feed -- either via their own backyard dish, through a cable network or by institutional feed -- would have had to tune in to the separate feed, or use the Internet, to watch NEAR. Savage said NASA did its best, via a press release, to make this information available to the news media. The agency also put a link to a live Webcast of the NEAR landing on their main NASA TV Web page. "We certainly made it as well-known as we could," Savage said in an interview. "We made the feed available to anybody who could pick up the satellite, and also to the news media, who covered it extensively." (NASA also made personal contact with SPACE.com and other news outlets to ensure coverage.) The separate feed was essentially the same as the main signal, but "for the sake of clarity we did not want to call that NASA TV," Savage said. "In a perfect world, it would have been great if we could have had these [two events occurring separately] so that we could have had the Eros events on NASA TV." | 
Curbeam is pictured by Atlantis'
robot arm during the spacewalk.
The docking adaptor is seen in
the foreground, now attached to
the Destiny science laboratory.
| Savage agreed that JSC does in fact fund and control the main NASA TV channel. This is partly for safety reasons, he said: Mission managers need to watch the live feed whenever astronauts are making spacewalks. The NASA TV channel is in fact an operational asset of the agency's space shuttle program office. It exists to enable flight directors to keep tabs on astronaut crews in orbit. The feed serves as a prime "real-time" monitoring device for the flight controllers and engineers responsible for overseeing the safety of astronauts making excursions into the deadly vacuum of space. Switching the satellite feed to NEAR would have effectively blinded flight controllers and mission managers monitoring the spacewalk from locations outside the agency's Mission Control room at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Still, NASA's decision disappointed many in the space community, and puzzled some who think the future of the space program relies on feeding the public's Survivor-like appetite for drama, discovery and something new and different at every turn. In this case, Binder and others say, the robot should have won, hands down.
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