This is an archive of past discussions about Curiosity (rover). Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Where should the data (and hypotheses to be tested) go?
Looking at this, I think it's important to settle on where all the data (and hypotheses to be tested) should go. For example, right now I'm looking at a NASA slideshow about how Gale Crater was, it is hypothesized, completely filled up over 2 billion years by water- and then wind-mediated mechanisms, then re-excavated leaving only a little (huge) mountain in the middle. [1] Curiosity will presumably be testing this, starting with those lowest water-influenced layers. Now I'm thinking that probably the best thing is to put it all in Gale Crater itself, and only use a pretty brief summary of that here on the rover article and also on the MSL article. Does that seem right to you? Wnt (talk) 14:53, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
Yes, some information on the geology of Gale Crater should be mentioned here, as it is the main subject of study for this mission. As the mission develops, we may add a section here on the rover's most outstanding planetary science results (maybe with a link to the appropriate section in the Gale Crater article). If/when that section grows in significant content, we may want to create its own article, we'll have to see how the discoveries & article evolve. Cheers, BatteryIncluded (talk) 15:03, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
I concur. Seems like Gale Crater is the great place to start, for the detail, while of course this article would clearly want to list/summarize and link to the detail. Also agree that it will evolve in a bottom-up way as the data and science results emerge. N2e (talk) 18:00, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
I concur. IMHO, we should not make (have made) the Curiosity rover page be the site collecting the science results of the mission, especially not as they drizzle in. That should go in a separate Results Of The Mars Science Laboratory Mission page or at least in such a section. Details that are relevant to this mission but really regard some fundamental data (like, for example, the diameter of Gale, or a measure of the sulfur content at the landing site) should go to the article describing the “owning entity” of that property (in the example case, Gale Crater), since the diamater of Gale, and the chemical composition of it's soil is a property of Gale, and not the rover. In fact, readers understand that, and will navigate accordingly naturally. It might be ok if it's just a quick fact in some prose (e. g. (obviously) “Curiosity landed within a 20 km ellipse inside the 154 km Gale Crater, on Mars”). Indeed, I do think that this article has become too broad a subject already if we stick to it covering the whole surface mission. I strongly believe that it would be quite beneficial to spit this into an Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) Surface Mission article covering the mission timeline, events, and results, and this Curiosity Rover article covering the rover as the robot object it is, thus referring (and sticking) mostly it's technical properties, and technical events directly related to it like the time of deployment of the high gain antenna. Both pages should link each other in the summary, I'd say, being to aspects of a greater whole. Let's all try to be pretty judicious as to what bits of information are rover mission (science) things (like events, or discoveries made utilizing it), and what's rover (engineering) stuff (like it's instruments and how they work). Flexx (talk) 18:21, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
