There may still be a few particle physicists out there who insist their grad students participate in every stage of an experiment from proposal to publication before they get their degree, but if so they're a justifiably endangered species. In fact the first experiment I worked on in my second postdoc was proposed before the experiment I got my doctoral degree on was. Proposal to publication was circa 15 years. That's atypically long of the medium energy experiments I've been working on; our newest publication is from an experiment proposed in 2000. But in the big collider physics collaborations, I think it's pretty much true that the people who design and build the apparatus have a fairly small overlap with the people who analyze the data.
The difference with space probes is, of course, that particle physics apparatus doesn't tend to abruptly disappear without a trace just before the experiment begins. Though we did have a detector explode once.
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Date: 2006-01-21 10:10 am (UTC)The difference with space probes is, of course, that particle physics apparatus doesn't tend to abruptly disappear without a trace just before the experiment begins. Though we did have a detector explode once.