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E-book ESA Science Programme Missions : Contributions and Exploitation

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Penilaian

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This work started by trying to answer the question “how do you evaluate thescientific performance of the ESA Science Programme’s missions?” For many yearsthe decision makers responsible for the content of the ESA Science Programmehave been provided with information for each mission including the number ofpublications, the number of these that are highly cited, the total number of citations,various statistical metrics and the number of unique author names. However, thisreporting only provided snapshots of the situation and was not widely distributed.Here we report on a systematic study of these metrics and their evolution withtime to provide insights into mission successes and the communities exploiting thedata provided by the Science Programme’s missions. An obvious highlight is theoutstanding success of the Gaia mission with over 1600 refereed publications peryear for the last three years—indeed precision astrometry is a field that Europe hasmade its own. However, it is important to remember that the continuing scientificlegacy of “older” missions such as IUE and Hipparcos, both of which have around5000 annual citations some 25 years after operations ceased.In addition, it was realized that examining the outcomes of the regular announce-ments of observing opportunities for ESA’s observatory missions, INTEGRAL,Herschel and XMM-Newton could provide further insights. In particular, INTE-GRAL and XMM-Newton have been operating for over 20 years allowing theevolution of their user communities to be investigated. The question “can youevaluate how well an ESA Time Allocation Committees have awarded observingtime?” was posed. This is a complex issue as what does “well” mean especially asyou will never know the outcome if a different observation was to be approved—the missed observation could be the one that leads to a major breakthrough! A wayof investigating the performance of a Time Allocation Committee is to search forbiases in the outcomes. These could take the form of favouring a particular gender,age group, or countries.The third pillar of this study is to examine the provision of payload elements forthe ESA Science Directorate’s missions. Generally, such contributions are directlyfunded by ESA Members State funding entities and so ESA does not have details ofcosts; these are anyway difficult to compare between countries. Instead the numbers of principal and co-principal investigators from each of the ESA Member Statesare used as proxies for the costs in order to investigate the provision of payloadelements. A comparison of publications and payload contributions gives insightsinto how different countries are exploiting the results and opportunities coming fromESA’s missions compared to their direct contributions to payloads.We are not aware of any similar systematic study that covers an interval of 40years and an evolving community of users and contributors. It is our expectation thatthe results presented here will be invaluable in helping increase the effectiveness ofthe Science Programme.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

629.1 PAR e

Penerbit

Switzerland : Springer Nature., 2025

Deskripsi Fisik

207 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783031690044

Klasifikasi

629.1

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Aerospace Engineering

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

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