• Question: What do you think the biggest scientific disaster/ let down is (e.g. there were big hope for something and it didn't happen/ it failed)?

    Asked by imogen98 to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 13 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Shawn Domagal-Goldman

      Shawn Domagal-Goldman answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      For me, this would be a mission NASA recently launched called “Glory.” It was meant to be a satellite that orbited around Earth and looked back down. Then it would study the clouds and dust floating in the air. That’s something VERY important because if we want to get better at predicting climate change, we need to know a lot more about the clouds and dust and other things Glory was going to look at.

      Sadly, when we launched the satellite with a rocket, it didn’t detach from the rocket well… and ended up crashing. So we aren’t going to get the data we need. I was at NASA Headquarters the day it happened – it was a very sad day. 🙁

    • Photo: Amy Tyndall

      Amy Tyndall answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      I wouldn’t say it’s the biggest, but the one that most stands out in my mind was when a group of British scientists tried to send a rover called Beagle 2 to search for life on Mars. It was supposed to have entered orbit there on Christmas Day 2003, but they lost contact with it a few days before. They still had a live-stream on Christmas Day in the hopes that they would pick up some signal again, but sadly they didn’t. I just remember the extreme looks of disappointment on all their faces! I’m not sure they ever figured out what happened to it, as they originally thought it had crash-landed, but later inspection of the area didn’t find anything…

      Apparently, out of 38 launch attempts (up to 2010) to reach Mars only 19 have succeeded…

    • Photo: Grant Kennedy

      Grant Kennedy answered on 16 Mar 2013:

      The disasters I can think of are almost all related to space missions, since those are really hard to get right. There were the two Space Shuttle disasters that killed all the crew each time, which I think will be remembered for a long time.

      I think the question of which science was expected to be great but wasn’t is an excellent one, but don’t have too many examples. The whole genetically modified crops thing was a science communications disaster, some people still think that somehow genetically modified foods must be bad, but we’ve been modifying food with selective breeding for centuries and it hasn’t harmed us at all (for example, the original wheat was nowhere near as good or easy to grow as what we use now).

      There have been disappointments in how hard it has been to find cures for things like cancer and AIDS. A lot of people thought we’d have detected gravity waves by now, but we haven’t. Because the biggest experiments are commonly very expensive, they have a lot of checks in place to ensure that they aren’t a total waste of time, even in the worst case scenario. That means that it’s more common for things to work OK, but not be quite as good expected, rather than be a total let down.

      g

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