Not to try and offend any tea-totallers or professionally sober members we may have, but Nick's discussion of beer leads me to think of how I may use The Brew this Sunday.

I happen to have three-quarters of a case of Foster's in my kitchen. Assuming Phoenix lands safely, I will likely have one or two in celebration (and to wash down my peanuts). If it's not as good of a day as we all hope, I'll probably have several of them to savor the numbing effect...

-the other Doug

Thank you!

Actually, that's the first time I've tried to do anything even remotely poetic since high school. I originally was just going to post a "hey, we sure haven't been talking much about Spirit lately, have we?" comment, but as I started to write it, that post just sort of sprang onto my screen, with little in the way of my conscious intervention.

I guess poetry is supposed to happen that way...

-the other Doug

Drat -- I've enjoyed the live chat function here when we've followed things like shuttle launches, Ariane launches, planetary probe launches... I was hoping we could do the same thing this weekend.

Any way the function might be active by then?

-the other Doug

Oh, yes -- as much as I'm trying to hold it back and save myself the crushing disappointment if anything goes wrong, I have to admit that I'm getting very excited.

Lines from totally unrelated movies and TV shows keep popping into my head in relation to the upcoming event. For example, all of last week, I could see myself commenting right before the landing "I'm taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work."

Today, as I realized we're four days away from landing, I found myself paraphrasing a line by John Adams from the film 1776 (the character was speaking of the Declaration of Indepence, I'm only adjusting the line slightly): "This landing will be a triumph! I tell you, a triumph! If I was ever sure of anything, I'm sure of that. A triumph. And if it isn't, we still have four days left to think of something else."



-the other Doug

A few thoughts of my own...

First off, after you vent the helium, there is no pressure in the tanks. You'd have to add pumps to pump out anything from the unpressurized tanks, and those tend to be heavy enough to preclude their use. (Hence the use of helium to pressurize the tanks so the fuel delivery systems are pressure-fed and pumpless.)

Second, long-term storage of hypergols on Mars is probably not a great idea due to freezing, but only if you ever plan to use the remaining propellants. Otherwise, if you design your fuel tanks and plumbing properly, you can keep the remaining fuel (frozen or otherwise) in those tanks forever. Hypergols, particularly nitrazine and UDMH (unsymmetrical di-methyl hydrazine) were first developed as rocket fuels in the U.S. so you could maintain fully fueled missiles in their silos for months or even years and have them ready to go at literally a moment's notice. Only in later years were the hypergols traded out for solid fuels in American nuclear missiles.

In fact, there is probably significant hydrazine and nitrazine left in the tanks of the Viking landers to this day. AFAIK, no powered landers (including Surveyors, Lunar Modules, Viking landers, etc.) ever actually vented their propellants after landing. They all vented the pressurizing helium, but never the actual hypergols. (Indeed, if you vented your hypergols and they managed to mingle somewhere below your lander, you're going to get more than a "little hop" out of it...)

-the other Doug

I'll be in my living room with NASA-TV running on my TV (I've got a great cable system, and I don't say that just because I work for them) and UMSF running on my computer. I'm hopeful we'll have the UMSF chat room running so we can exchange info and emotions.

-the other Doug

Speaking of "The Sky at Night," is there any way to get BBC-America to start running it? I appreciate being able to watch Torchwood and Dr. Who on BBC-A, but it would be great if we could get TSAN to us Americans, too!

-the other Doug

Ah, but... this whole discussion depends on accepting the concept of simultaneity. And in a relativistic universe, there is no such animal.

Until and unless anyone figures out how to propogate information faster than C, as far as our perceptions are concerned, nothing "occurs" until we perceive it.

So I'm an ERT kind of guy. I just don't accept that simultaneity is a valid concept...

edit: To put it more clearly, I don't think of events at Mars as happening ten minutes ago. I think of them as happening ten light-minutes away. For me, it's a function of distance, not time.

-the other Doug

Spirit
sits,
dusty,
power-deprived,
shifting slightly now and then
as a few stolen moments
let her look at
and taste
her rusted
home.

Quiet,
but not
silent.

Not
being
discussed,
but
never
forgotten.

-the other Doug

In re the Hadron Collider:

If you look at the Universe from a quantum point of view, anything is possible at any time... and most things are so improbable that they will not actually occur within the lifetime of the Universe.

That said, yes, it's possible that extremely energetic collisions, if they occur in just the right way, could generate nano-singularities. But we have absolutely no clue as to how such things might behave when operating in a quantum realm, at a scale where gravity is weaker than the strong atomic force. I've read several theories that such nano-singularities would dissipate almost immediately, their gravity overwhelmed by atomic forces and quantum effects. But it's all theoretical.

I think the odds of creating a doomsday singularity are so excessively remote, considering the very short time high energies will exist in these experiments, that I too will sleep quite well while this machine is operating. After all, there was better theoretical support (at the time) for the concept that a fission explosion would start a chain reaction firestorm that would burn off Earth's atmopshere than there is for the doomsday singularity scenario. At some point, you have to declare that the benefit to be gained (great) outweighs the risk (extremely extremely tiny).

In re Martian backcontamination:

When we brought samples back from the Moon, we quarantined them (and the people who collected them) because the risk of backcontamination (very very small) multiplied by the consequences if a pathogen were present in the samples (very very large) yielded, in Mike Collins' words, "a finite number" representing a threat level that you could take precautions against.

Now, we will have much better information, by the time of MSR, about organic materials in Martian soils and rocks than we had prior to Apollo about such things in Moon soils and rocks. We will have done an amazing amount of in situ analysis of a variety of Martian rocks and soils by the time MSR flies, and may have a very good idea of whether or not the samples coming back to us might contain organic materials.

If we even suspect there are organic materials in Martian samples, then the risk potential rises, and Mike Collins' equation states you have to give the issue more of your attention. But if you're more than reasonably certain that your samples have no extant organic materials, that risk potential goes down and the amount of time and money the issue deserves automatically decreases.

Myself, I think you can make a good argument for super-clean handling of returned Martian samples, on the dual arguments of eliminating backcontamination of Earth and also terrestrial contamination of the samples. If life of any kind is found in any Mars sample, we have to be as certain as possible that it didn't get there from handling contamination. I don't think it's necessary to sequester the samples in LEO or anything that extreme (or expensive), but I'd establish some pretty tough handling standards.

-the other Doug

Right-o, daddy-o! You're like, man, groovy... and gnarly, too, dude.



-the other Doug

Amazing, Ian -- it's extremely obvious that the dark semi-circle north and northeast of the ALSEP site, visible in the Kaguya image, is formed by footprint-disturbed soil.

Apollo 15 had one of the best ascent films of all the LM launches. Not only does it give us a really good view of the descent stage from directly above, as it proceeds and the Falcon comes up to Hadley Rille, it makes a little evasive maneuver to avoid Bennett Hill and Hill 302 by swinging to the right and flying parallel to and above the rille for about 20 or 30 seconds.

Plus, the 15 ascent film vividly displays one of the major dangers of the LM launches -- the MESA blanket, a large piece of kapton foil that had covered the MESA, had been stowed under the descent stage. At launch, exhaust blew it up and out, straight west from the LM, and it skittered along the ground until it passed the ALSEP Central Station, clearing it by all of about 10 to 15 feet. Nearly wiped out the ALSEP in one swell foop. Its short but exciting journey about 400 meters out from the LM is well captured on the ascent film.

Getting back to the Kaguya image -- does it look to anyone else like you can sort of make out rover tracks, as faintly visible linear features, to the southwest of the landing site?

-the other Doug

And us contrary Americans settled on the middle version of the spelling... It's not that we just fail to pronounce a final "i" in the word, we don't even include it in the spelling of the word!

And who knew, as us humans quibbled over semantics, that this same metal was the primary component of the lunar highlands that shined over our heads at night?

-the other Doug

Ah, the Americans and the British -- two cultures, separated by a common language...

-the other Doug

Well, my roommate cringes every time he hears a shuttle launch and they give the call "Go at throttle-up." For obvious reasons. Me, I had a bit of a shiver on this last shuttle launch, when that call became "Go at throttle-up, and we'll have words on your RCS messages... later."

-the other Doug

As a general comment to the "discovery" that Mars' crust (for want of a better term) is thick and firm, I thought that had been "discovered" back in the early- to mid-70s when it was found that the Tharsis Plateau was sitting on top of the original crust, which hadn't deformed to a really significant degree. The planet is roughly spherical with a significant bulge above the mean where Tharsis sits.

If the planet can vomit trillions of tons of lava onto a quarter of its surface and the crust doesn't deform a tremendous amount, I can't imagine the lack of polar compression is all that surprising.

BTW -- yes, I know that Tharsis is surrounded by rift valleys formed by compression of the crust under Tharsis. I didn't say there was zero compression. But the mass of lava that makes up the bulge is far greater than the mass of either permanent polar cap, and, unlike the seasonal polar caps, once emplaced the lavas didn't come and go seasonally. The point I recall from Mariner 9 and Viking orbiter data is that Mars is quite significantly out-of-round because a vast majority of the height of the Tharsis lava pile has not been pulled back down to mean over several billion years, which led the scientists of the day to conclude Mars' crust must be very thick and solid...

-the other Doug

Oh, we are *so* in agreement! If there are two sets of data I dearly want from Mars, one is from a sustained seismic network, and the other is from a carefully designed heat flow network.

Those two sets of data could seriously constrain a lot of the current theories of Martian history, IMHO.

-the other Doug

I remember that episode quite well. The kid could only predict things he understood and knew were possible, and it just so happened he had just finished reading up on basic astronomy...

Actually, a few years later, some friends of mine and I decided that the following rewritten lyric was emblematic of that particular episode:

The sun'll blow up
Tomorrow!
Bet your bottom dollar that
Tomorrow,
We'll be toast...



-the other Doug

Hey -- we get to see tiny little peces of Mars under an atomic force microscope on this flight. That's enough to get most any space geek out there excited!

-the other Doug

You can always add to that "Poor Neil -- he did have such an awful cold..."



-the other Doug

Well, after a full day of using the forum on the new server, I have to say it has remained significantly faster in all functions. None of the individual boards or topics are displaying that "take five minutes to load a post" behavior that had plagued about a third of the boards for me, and pages pop quite smartly.

I think we all agree this is a really good move, Doug!

-the other Doug

And here's another example of what this thread is about:

I'm sitting here watching "Faces of Earth" on the Science Channel, a geologic history of the planet, and they've gotten around to mentioning the K-T impact. The exact line they used was "Something, likely an asteroid from space, hit the Earth."

No kidding! Gee, and here I was always under the assumption it was an asteroid from New Jersey... but hey, if they say it was from space, who am I to argue?

*D'OH!*

-the other Doug

Yeah, but... I have this image of Buzz Aldrin, in his pajamas, a la Bedford at the end of the film "The First Men in the Moon," exclaiming, "That.. that's where we were!"



-the other Doug

As someone who avidly read most all of the comic books that were printed in the 1960s, I always go to these film versions of the venerable comics I loved as a child with some trepidation. Some of these things have been done so badly...

Iron Man, however, is a tour de force in pretty much all arenas. Downey does a truly wondrous job of taking the Tony Stark character from someone you'd only want to have a beer with if you could poison his brew to a guy you really care about. And Jeff Bridges impressed me in this film as he hasn't impressed me for decades.

And, of course, anything Gwyneth Paltrow does is automatically worth watching, for me. Regardless of what it is. That's a hormonal thing on my end, though...

But the film really does capture a lot of the elements from the original comic book, moving (in accelerated fashion) from the original "shellhead" version of the Iron Man suit, to the Mark II form-fitting golden suit, and finally settling on the Mark III red-and-gold suit that we've known for so long, now. While much of the film must be CGI, transitions from effect to live film are completely invisible. And I had the good fortune to see the film in a theater using DLP projection -- not a bit of celluloid was killed to create my viewing experience! And the quality of the image, on a really big screen, was just exquisite... frame rates are higher in DLP projection than in standard film projection, so the fast movement on-screen never fluttered or strobed. Truly impressive.

I'd give the film four stars out of five.

-the other Doug

My understanding has always been that Kubrick edited 2001 against a temp music track composed of classical music, and after the film was mostly complete it was shipped off to one Alex North, who wrote a complete symphonic score for the film. Kubrick looked at the film with North's score and rejected it, having fallen in love with the temp score he used to edit against. No Pink Floyd contribution was ever mentioned in these accounts.

Also, recall that this was mid- to late-1967 when the scoring decisions were being made. Pink Floyd wasn't really generating a lot of "noise" in the music industry yet. I get the feeling that this is an apocryphal story, born more out of the coincidental musical confluences drug-addled minds found between PF's "The Wall" and "The Wizard of Oz" more than anything else... and of course, stories that PF was originally going to score Oz would be so self-obviously ridiculous that the story migrated on to 2001.

As with most things, of course, I could be wrong...

-the other Doug