Bold claims in the introduction need citations

[ayshih]

At the time of writing, the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory consists of
18 missions with nearly 200 different instruments.

Okay, I can count 18 missions (https://smd-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/science-red/s3fs-public/atoms/files/hso_fleet_chart_april_2019.pdf), but I'm skeptical about "nearly 200" instruments. Which spacecrafts have 10+ instruments on them? Is there a source that backs up that number?

These core packages [NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and pandas] form the backbone
for hundreds of thousands of additional scientific Python packages.

Is there a source that backs up "hundreds of thousands"? Even if it's technically true, would any reader care about more than an extremely small number (say, ten) of these packages?

[mbobra]

I made these bold claims.

The NASA HSO missions in prime and extended operations include 129 instruments. They are enumerated below. Some of these are turned off but functional (e.g. SoHO/MDI), some are partly functional (e.g. SDO/EVE takes data, but SAM+MEGS-A are longer working), and some are lost (e.g. STEREO-B). You're right -- nearly 200 is an exaggeration. I had included Cluster in my previous count, which added 44 instruments.

Mission	Instruments
Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE)	9
Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM)	3
Geotail	5
Gold	1
Hinode	3
Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) (pair of spacecraft)	1 x 2
Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS)	1
Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) (4 spacecraft)	10 x 4
Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)	3
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SoHO)	12
Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) (pair of spacecraft)	4 x 2
Parker Solar Probe	5
THEMIS + ARTEMIS	7 x 2
Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED)	4
The Van Allen Probes (pair of spacecraft)	5 x 2
Voyager 1 and 2	9 combined

Regarding the phrase "hundreds of thousands of packages": PyPI currently lists 186,374 projects with 1,376,343 releases. I certainly use more than 10 in my analysis -- mpld3, pygal, bokeh, seaborn, scikit-learn, lime, tensorflow, torch, keras, dask, scikit-image, opencv, and simplecv to name a few. PyHC lists 54 projects. So the relevant number is bigger than 10.

[ehsteve]

@mbobra thanks for this great list!

sounds like we should be less bold with these claims and say "over 100 instruments" and "hundreds of packages"?

[mbobra]

Addressed by #111