The proprietary period is generally one year. Mike Brown had definitely exceeded his proprietary period , according to the scuttlebutt I heard from the AAO astronomers.Turin wrote:Sorry to come into this late, but another reason is discussed on Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy page (an awesome resource for a lot of anti-psuedoscience stuff related to space, by the way). If scientists didn't have exclusive access to their data for a reasonable period of time, in order to analyze it, then it would remove the incentive for researchers to go through the lengthy proposal process in the first place - someone could just come along and swoop up on their data if they were better prepared to process it. More on why Hubble data is withheld for one year.GrandMasterTerwynn wrote:You can take off the tinfoil hat now. For a body that far out, you need at least a couple years of observation and analysis to determine if you really have something there, since the orbital period of such a body is measured in centuries.
Most 'blue-sky' research lies behind incredibly lax security, for most people have no reason to hack it, as it would be useless for anyone who doesn't have specialist technical knowledge. As for information theft from rival groups, I've never actually heard of anyone stooping that low; most scientists don't go into the profession for the glory.