I am still new to SatNOGS but I am starting to be comfortable scheduling and reviewing observations.
I have a question that I would like to get community guidance on relating to deleting observations. The question is: when should I delete an observation?
There are three possible cases I have come across so far where deleting might be considered. They are:
Accidental scheduling of an observation. Since there is no “Undo” functionality, this is the only way, I think to cancel it. I’ve accidentally scheduled a bunch of observations before when I set too wide a time interval then hit the Schedule button. Perhaps a warning such as “Do you really want to schedule 982 observations?” could be useful in this situation
Incorrect Vetting of an observation. I recently incorrectly vetted an observation as “Good” when it is clearly “Bad”. https://network.satnogs.org/observations/181671/ In fact, we don’t yet have any valid observations for this sat, so it is quite misleading. Is deleting this observation the right thing to do to get rid of this incorrect vetting?
An observation that didn’t work. This could be vetted as “Bad” or “Failed”. I suspect that these observations should not be deleted, as it provides useful information either about the satellite or the ground station.
What do others think? Are there other cases I’m not thinking of?
Another case for deletion: We have a few users (like yourself) who keep stations scheduled for the upcoming day. This is great, its currently the only way we have for keeping the network “busy”. As a station owner and dev however, I run across times when I may need to test something against a pass that has a conflicting pass pre-scheduled. I’ll just go in and delete the conflicting pass and schedule what I need to in its place.
About accidental scheduling, yes the only way for now to fix it is by deleting the observation. Maybe in the future we could add a cancel status and add a cancel button.
Bad vs Failed vetting:
Bad is when we know, as far as we can, that station works fine and we see no signal from the satellite. This could be because satellite stopped transmitting or because station didn’t receive the satellite, for example in a low pass.
Failed is when either the station hasn’t returned something after at least 1 day or what it returned was a failure, for example a full noise observation or a black one or one with zero size audio file.
Vetting is still an open discussion with several aspects, for example you can see a signal from the satellite but not from the scheduled transmitter, for now this is vet as good but should it be like that? Also there were some discussion about multivetting so more than one people could vet an observation.
Please share any ideas or suggestions about vetting.
Last but no least, one more case for deleting an observation is when start time and end time are not right. Before the recent changes there was a bug that allow you to schedule observation with 0 or some seconds duration. This seems to be solved, however with the changes a new bug appeared that sometimes schedules an observation where start time is after end time, until this is also solved we are going to delete these observations.
