Imagine it’s the soccer World Cup final, but you can’t watch it live on TV. The sport’s governing body has decided that all but a few sample photos of it will be embargoed for half a year, and that all decisions by the referee will have to be reviewed by experts over the coming months before a winner can be announced.

Sounds silly? This is pretty much how many space enthusiasts experienced the countdown to the final phase of Europe’s much-anticipated Rosetta mission.

Rosetta has been travelling to its target – the comet – for 10 years. Last month, after the probe had covered more than 6 billion kilometres, the comet was looming larger by the day in the field of view of Rosetta’s main , yet sample images from this camera were only released to the public weekly, with the latest examples unveiled today. There was no way to “ride along” with the mission to one of the oldest objects in our solar system and feel the excitement as a new frontier unfolded far from Earth.

Rubber-duck nucleus

Then on 15 July something unexpected happened: perhaps by accident, perhaps in a moment of revolutionary fervour after Bastille Day, someone at the French space agency CNES made public of the comet’s icy core. They showed that the nucleus is in two parts, with a shape far weirder than any seen before – now nicknamed the .

Curious nucleus (Image: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team/MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA)

CNES swiftly tried to withdraw the rogue press release, but the images had taken the internet by storm. Many who saw them marvelled, including space aficionados who were incredulous that the discovery was supposed to be under wraps until the next scheduled weekly briefing.

A debate erupted on social media, and a group of German space enthusiasts sent an to the authorities involved, calling for full access to all images from Rosetta, a mission that is costing European taxpayers €1.3 billion. The European Space Agency, which operates the craft, all such demands and insisted on a six-month moratorium on circulating mission data, images included. It said these rights had been granted to the teams which designed and built the scientific instruments.

Rules like this are accepted as the norm for ground and space-based astronomical observatories and some interplanetary missions, mainly those performing in-depth mapping of planets that have been visited before.

Visceral engagement

But a spacecraft approaching a world for the first time is an entirely different story. When exploration of this sort takes place it engages us in an almost visceral way – but only when access to the adventure is granted in a reasonable manner.

In more than 25 years of reporting on space missions I’ve had the privilege of joining in on some of the best “rides” into the solar system’s depths. In the 1980s came NASA’s Voyager encounters with the gas giants: cameras fed material live into the agency’s own public TV channel for days on end. The public could see these worlds up close at the same time as the scientists, share their excitement and puzzle over unexplained features with them.

There were also the encounters of ESA’s Giotto probe with comet Halley, in 1986, and with comet Grigg-Skjellerup, in 1992: in both cases, data was broadcast live to the world.

Since the turn of the century we’ve had several NASA Mars landings, where the nerve-jangling excitement of touchdown and early manoeuvres were available live to anyone with a TV or computer screen. Fairly raw images from cameras on the Mars rovers are posted online for the world to enjoy and image-processing wizards to work on. The same holds for Cassini, a joint NASA-ESA mission, which has been in orbit around Saturn for 10 years.

Outdoing the pros?

Sadly ESA has been less open on other occasions, for example with the landing by its Huygens probe on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2005. And it was criticised for sitting on stunning images taken by the Mars Express orbiter in 2004. ESA counters that someone could steal the science teams’ thunder if they share too much data, perhaps by publishing research papers based on raw images in the public domain faster than the researchers themselves can manage.

But this never came to pass when NASA chose to share its Mars rover and Cassini orbiter images. Instead the public appreciated the chance to share in the missions and had a go at processing the images, often outdoing the pros in complex tasks such as stitching together chaotic picture sequences taken by descent cameras. Some of the results were so good that the mission teams used them in their publications. But as for the public besting the scientists in getting published in refereed journals, that never happened.

Best practice

While the row over images from Rosetta’s main camera system rumbles on, ESA has changed its tune over images from the craft’s second camera, which takes images for navigation purposes. ESA was initially reluctant to share these pictures, with a resolution one-fifth that of the main system, because the main camera’s research teams might not approve. But on 24 July it made the , perhaps swayed by the leak from CNES and subsequent pleas, that one navigation image would be published daily.

It’s a start. And Rosetta fans can kind of “join the ride”, at least until its arrival at the comet next week. What happens after that is up to the camera scientists from five countries – led by Germany – and ESA. They will have to figure out what publicity strategy to adopt during the year-long orbital phase, especially in November, when Philae, a probe piggybacking on Rosetta, will attempt to land on the comet. Examples of best practice are out there.

It’s Europe’s time to shine – and even set a fresh precedent for public access to data. For next year two NASA spacecraft will again be encountering new worlds up close for the first time: the dwarf planets Ceres (in March) and (July). We still live in an exciting era of space exploration – that is, if we are allowed to share in the fun.

Leader: ““Snap-happy space fans deserve quick pics”“

Time to ditch the black armbands and look beyond low Earth orbit again. The shuttle’s passing marks the start of an exciting new era

AND then there were none. A profound feeling of emptiness struck many space aficionados in the US and beyond last month after Atlantis touched down for the last time, the 133rd and final return of a space shuttle orbiter.

It’s the end of space flight, the end of NASA, the end of space exploration… the lament was widespread, from Twitter to the mainstream press, yet nothing could be further from the truth.

Yes, it is bewildering that there will be no “next shuttle launch date” as there has been for most of the past 30 years, but let’s admit it, the loss now felt is more a visceral reaction than a rational assessment of where the space programme of the US and the rest of the world actually stands – and where it’s headed.

In fact, little that the $200 billion shuttle programme accomplished had a direct bearing on space exploration. The orbiters went round and round in low Earth orbit (LEO), technically in the upper atmosphere, mainly delivering 230 tonnes of deployed satellites and the same mass in parts for the International Space Station .

“Little that the shuttle programme accomplished had a direct bearing on space exploration”

But they did so at a cost literally orders of magnitude beyond what was . For decades their consistently high budget prevented any serious progress in spaceflight beyond LEO where, as practically everyone agrees, exploration in its true sense begins.

Humankind’s brief venture to the moon just before the shuttle era has morphed into an almost mythical story, and feeble attempts to revive the old boldness in 1989 and 2004, by US presidents George Bush senior and his son, quickly fell victim to fiscal realities.

In spite of the budgetary black holes of the shuttle and the later space-station programme, another kind of space exploration existed in its shadow. All , from Mercury to Saturn, have had, have or will soon have robotic satellites not just flying by, but remaining in orbit around them, and successful landings have been performed repeatedly on Venus and Mars.

Currently only Jupiter is without an orbiter, but this will change in 2016 when NASA’s Juno mission, launched this month in the post-shuttle malaise, arrives at its destination, equipped to look deeper into the gas giant’s interior than ever before.

In September two GRAIL lunar orbiters will launch, and in November the most sophisticated of all Mars rovers, Curiosity, will blast off. And even while the final shuttle was still in space, the first orbiter arrived between Mars and Jupiter at a big asteroid called Vesta; the Dawn spacecraft has already turned it into a little world of wonder and will move on next year to Ceres, making it the first dwarf planet to be orbited.

Are these any lesser space adventures than crewed flights in LEO? Robots they may be, but it is human curiosity alone that pushes these probes to the corners of the solar system and vastly extends our horizons.

What’s more, no longer do you have to wait for an age to see the bewitching vistas these space probes send home. With the web as the backbone and social media as the carrier, these images now reach millions as close to real time as the policy of a mission permits.

And some missions do open a firehose of raw imagery, eagerly ingested by a highly committed fandom of image-processing specialists who turn the bits into marvellous products, often better and faster than the actual mission team is able to.

The daily image downloads from the Mars rover Opportunity – yes, it’s still driving around the Red Planet after more than seven years – and the Saturn orbiter Cassini have been so warmly welcomed that missions with less open policies, such as NASA’s current Mercury and Vesta orbiters, let alone the European Space Agency’s Venus and Mars orbiters, are often subject to harsh criticism.

Some old-school planetary scientists still fear that someone will abuse “their” data, but the Mars rover missions have demonstrated that sharing raw images is a win-win situation, as those who work with such images are also the best PR people a mission can wish for. British amateur astronomer , for example, has become the best source by far on Opportunity’s progress.

The most visible symbol of this new way of doing things is the optical camera on the Juno mission: its contribution to science is seemingly nil; it flies solely for public entertainment.

So the robots will rule again for a decade or more. But what about the future of crewed flight? Few realise that the US has two crewed programmes on its books rather than one. There is the NASA-supported mini “space race” between private companies that want to offer cheap access to the space station in addition to the Russian ferry service. Then there’s NASA’s new focus on spaceships and huge rockets permitting human travel beyond the moon, with a visit to a near-Earth asteroid in the mid-2020s as the first big goal. Harsh political struggles on how best to move forward and escalating fiscal uncertainties aside, this plan enjoys substantial support and promises as much drama as the Apollo landings.

With constant progress in virtual-presence technology, driven in part by the gaming industry, this mission will come to living rooms around the world as none before.

So too will the follow-up, set to go all the way to Mars in the 2030s. Then it may well be the astronauts in the planet’s orbit who run avatar-like robots on its surface and experience near-perfect telepresence with sub-second lag time, while Earth tunes in to the experience. The end of space exploration? Surely not.