It is very cool that EarthScope has been selected as the #1 most epic science project at Popular Science Magazine/Website. They have an article in the August 2011 issue entitled: Big Science: The Universe's Ten Most Epic Projects. It is impressive to have that rating against some other big and exciting science projects, including the Large Hadron Collider and the International Space Station. They used some quantitative ratings and also some qualitative ones such as: What's in it for me? Wow factor, and Scientific Utility on all of which it received a 10. I think that the sense of EarthScope's practicality and its cost to size (variably measured) ratio help boost it. The write up is nice and generally gets the high points given its brevity.
This kind of coverage is really helpful for a program such as EarthScope in terms of visibility. It is the only earth science activity on the list (there is Neptune--ocean science observatory). We can put a lot of energy into outreach, but the readership of something like PopSci will simply dwarf anything we might do...
Since May, we (Matt Fouch, Ed Garnero, Steve Semken, Wendy Taylor, and I) have been leading the EarthScope National Office and I have been the Chair of the EarthScope Steering Committee, so this is very good news and due to the efforts of the prior ESNO staff at Oregon State University.
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