From: hal@finney.org
Date: Sat Dec 04 1999 - 09:23:26 MST
I was trying to follow the progress of the mission on the
two "official" web sites I knew about, www.marspolarlander.com
(operated by UCLA which will be in charge of the lander mission) and
http://polarlander.jpl.nasa.gov/, from JPL.
How frustrating! These sites were hours and hours out of date. The JPL
site at 6 PM Friday had only an update from 1 PM saying that the first
window had been silent, no mention of the second one even though it
was three hours old. And the UCLA site had no mention whatsoever of
mission status.
Similar lapses occured with the Leonid meteor "storm" last month, the
Leonid sites were typically 2 to 5 hours out of date in reporting
activity levels. They would go many hours between updates.
It's great that these groups run web sites, but I wish they would
devote more resources to keeping them updated. Sure, the scientists
are busy, but there should be media people whose job it is to put out
timely information. I don't want to have to turn on the TV or radio to
get the latest news about the Mars lander, I want to be ahead of the TV
people by getting it straight from the web.
Hal
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