If you would like a chatty, brilliantly clear, and expertly detailed and illustrated explanation in plain English of the discovery and nature of Saturn’s largest ring, a wispy donut of gas and dust far from the main ring system and signature of the orbit of a little moon named Phoebe, lo0k no further:
Planetary Society What We Do Blog – Emily Lakdawalla: The Phoebe Ring ;
That ran more than a year and a half ago, after Nature published a paper – and its authors amplified on it at a meeting – describing a ghostly halo shed by one moon of Saturn (and whose fallout paints one side of another, naturally pale moon nearly black). It took immense effort and a special space telescope, the Spitzer, even to see it. Lakdawalla, a planetary geologist by training, a writer, and the Planetary Society’s Science and Technology Coordinator traced the investigation and discovery beautifully. The Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society just announced her and her story as winner of the third Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award – named for the poetic, late musician-science writer for Science News magazine. Previous winners were George Musser of Scientific American, and J. Kelly Beatty of Sky & Telescope.
The email announcement today of the prize winner gave me a moment’s pause. I remembered, vaguely, the news but not this story. So I missed it. I posted on it here, listing stories including one by the man now on Eberhard’s old beat at Science News, and I whined that this object is not a ring, it is a belt, or a ghost torus, but not a ring like we think of a ring. That’s not my point though, it is that I failed to notice her story.
There is a reason, one that illustrates how the word “journalist” has changed. If I did see it, I am confident that I scrolled right on past. A Planetary Society blog, by an employee? That’s probably not journalism – it is likely part of the society’s public out reach, more like p.r. I don’t remember thinking that, it’s just what I think would have flitted through my frontal lobes. Plus if I’d read it, I might still have passed, although I am uncertain. It is unconventional journalism – no quotes from anybody, little setting of the scene, just lucid explanation of what scientists did and excerpts from published papers.
Yet it is journalism of the new kind. Flackery it is not – among the Planetary Society’s main aims is to further the field by encouraging better budgets for NASA and NSF and other agencies important to the science. She blogs about discoveries in planetary science but, far as I can tell, without policy ham handedness.
Again, congratulations. She even gets to go to France to receive the award in October. I’ll try to remember to look for her stories from now on.
Grist for the Mill: Planetary Society Blog What We Do (scroll down an item to read Lakdawalla’s own reaction to the announcement.
– Charlie Petit
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