Response times for pretty much all functions are noticeably faster here, Doug.

This joint is jumpin'!

-the other Doug

Must be propogating out pretty fast -- control panel says there are currently 71 people on the forum, 10 members and 61 guests. That's a pretty normal number for a Saturday late morning, here (late afternoon over on the other side of the pond).

-the other Doug

OK -- it's about ten minutes since I noted in the lifeboat blog that Comcast doesn't have the new IP associated in DNS yet, and here the forum popped up. So it's propogated out this far.

Looks good, Doug!

-the other Doug

Yes, good luck to you, Doug on the transfer. I have fingers and toes crossed that nothing will go wrong. I'm sure your by-now-vast experience with the Invision software will let you bring UMSF back online with no ill effects. (However, I'm already beginning the trembles, the first symptoms of the deliriens tremens that will pile on me full force in the tenth or eleventh hour without UMSF...)

And my heart goes out to you, Dan. I moved about 18 months ago, and while it was an urban move (from one city location to another), about 80% of it was accomplished over a period of six weeks, consisting of load upon load of boxes, transported a dozen miles in a truly tiny Subaru Justy. We had to have made more than a hundred runs before we ever even thought about renting the truck for the major furniture on Moving Day.

Sorry to hear that you're going to have to downgrade to DSL. It's better than dial-up, to be sure, but the speed you get is so dependent on your distance from the "central office" that it's truly a crapshoot whether or not you'll get tolerable service. I wouldn't recommend satellite internet yet, though -- last I heard, most of them still require you to upload via a dedicated dial-up telephone line, with only downloads available through the dish at broadband speeds.

As for rural areas being covered with poo -- in the U.S., that's sort of variable. Major livestock farming over here tends to be concentrated into blocks. You can have hundreds of square km with nothing but plant farming (corn, wheat, soybeans, sorghum) anywhere in site. Some farms will maintain a small amount of livestock on a primarily agricultural farm, but that livestock doesn't amount to much in comparison to the cornfields. (Of course, a relatively modest-sized pig farm, no matter how small a percentage of its county it may take up, is still going to make a very strong impression on anyone who happens to be downwind of it on any given day. Trust me, I know. I grew up in central Illinois.)

So, while you can *always* find poo out in the country, here in the States you can usually avoid it pretty easily -- if you watch where you're walking.



-the other Doug

Ditto ditto.

Second favorite is the UMSF Barbeque picture.

-the other Doug

Interesting! Says something about the surface conditions that a dust devil can sweep the surface and not change its albedo noticeably...

-the other Doug

Also, dust devils are *not* ubiquitous across the Martian globe. They only occur in specific places on Mars where conditions are right for them -- and you can fairly easily tell where they roam, they leave distinctive tracks.

I see no indication of any dust devil tracks anywhere in *any* of the images of Phoenix's landing site. In fact, I don't recall seeing anything resembling dust devil tracks in any of the pictures of any of the *potential* Phoenix landing sites.

I rather get the feeling that worrying about dust devils at a polar Martian site is somewhat like expressing concern over interference by hurricanes during a Soyuz landing in the Kazakh steppes. Yes, you do get hurricanes on Earth -- but never on the steppes. I'm fairly confident in saying that dust devil weather conditions on Mars are similar -- you get them, but not in polar climes.

-the other Doug

Does anyone recall whether or not Mariner 5 flew with the same solar wind vanes that Mariner 4 sported? I seem to recall the experiment had very minimal effect on Mariner 4, but Mariner 5 was flying into an area of increased solar wind density. Just wondering if they tried it -- especially since it's pretty obvious in the preceding image that the attach points for the vanes are certainly still there.

-the other Doug

There are any number of types of extended missions you can design for an Oppy whose IDD is no longer available. Some of them might cost less than others.

For example, I draw y'all's attention to the fact that the MERs are capable of autonavigation. One extended mission I can imagine would have us programming Oppy to drive for five days, taking a Navcam pan at every daily stop, and dumping the Navcams and all the engineering data for the past five days at the end of the fifth day. The MER team then analyzes the data for problems (sand traps, failed wheels, etc.) and, if there are no engineering issues to address, decide if they want to spend some time on Pancam shots of interesting items, and make appropriate changes to the upcoming standardized five-day program. I figure they can do a decent job of that, most times, in 2 days or so.

If there's a serious hardware issue on such an extended mission, you're probably looking at end-of-mission or once-a-month-check-in-stationary-rover mission, so you wouldn't run the risk (or expense) of working tons of hours and spending tons of Mars Yard time trying to work around a major glitch.

Seems like that would save some money -- especially the concept of standardizing a five-day driving program that Oppy could execute without supervision. You build it with easy-to-change parameters for things like daily heading and such, so you can adjust your route as you go along.

Granted, you do face the possibility of Oppy running into trouble while no one is looking. But you're only going to ever be, at the most, five days late in seeing a problem develop, and you simply program Oppy to safe herself if something really serious happens.

You'd still need a driving team and a science team, of course, but many of them would be working part-time on Oppy, the rest of their time could be charged to other programs. And you'd cut the number of DSN sessions down by a half, probably, attacking the extended mission costs at their most expensive spot.

The whole idea would be to move as far as possible, and see as many different aspects of the terrain as possible, documenting the scene every 20 to 100 meters. I can think of a time when you could argue strenuously for the value of a Mars rover that *only* did that!

-the other Doug

HiRISE's best resolution is actually roughly 30cm (or very roughly one foot, for those of us who still use Imperial units). That said, though, I'd think you're still correct, each of those rocks is likely as larger as, or larger than, Phoenix itself.

-the other Doug

Well. There seem to be a couple of different ways of looking at such things as high-definition images of the Moon.

The first one would be: "Here we have some really fantastic images. What is the best way of sharing these with a world population hungry for new vistas?"

The second one would be: "Here we have some really fantastic images. What is the best way of using them to stuff some money into our pockets?"

I hate to say it, but it seems rather obvious which of these two viewpoints JAXA has adopted... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

I don't ever resist the urge to cross my fingers. I cross my fingers and my toes, and if I can think of anything else to cross, I cross them, too...

I'll be watching NASA TV on my home cable system, as well. I am always grateful that I live in a civilized city where I get NASA TV on my cable system.


My schedule is entirely up in the air at this point. I work in a call center for that selfsame cable company that provides me with my NASA TV. (I troubleshoot problems with internet connections and digital phone systems.) We're open every day of the year, and we have bids for working on holidays. I *might* get the holiday off, but more likely I'll have to work the holiday. If I do have to work, I'll get paid double time and a half for working it, though.

Problem is, I don't right yet know what my basic schedule is going to be by the end of May. The call center regularly has what they call mini-bids for shifts, when they want to re-tool assets to match demand patterns. But they've had enough changes in the demand patterns that they need to run a once-every-few-years full shift bid, in which every single person has to bid for a new shift. Since I'm about 65th in seniority out of about 120 people in my job, I obviously don't get my first choice... and the new shifts will be announced this coming Monday, to take effect May 4th.

So I truly have no clue what shift I will be working on May 25th, or whether I will even have Sundays off. But, in addition to having NASA TV on my cable system, I also have a digital video recorder cable box... *grin*...

-the other Doug

The footage to which you refer is from the Apollo 14 mission. Those guys really hammered the flagpole into the ground solidly, it didn't fall over. But it really blew like a hurricane when the LM lifted off.

If you have any doubts, you can also identify the wheeled tool cart, the Modular Equipment Transporter (MET), in the frame in that footage that shows the flag blowing so violently. The MET was only ever flown on Apollo 14.

As Kenny notes, the movie camera aboard Eagle failed to start running when Aldrin initially tried to start it prior to lift-off. He noticed it wasn't running about 10 seconds after pitchover. The Apollo 11 ascent film doesn't image the landing site at all; Eagle is already several km downrange by the time it begins.

Apollo 12's movie camera didn't run at all during its LM ascent, there is no photographic coverage of that event at all. I think we were extraordinarily lucky that the movie cameras *all* worked perfectly during the descent and landing phases. All six of the lunar landings are well documented from films taken through the LMP's window.

-the other Doug

In re "The Marching Morons":

I have been heard to mention to my friends, in the past few years, that I truly expect to see a new TV game show on the air any day now. Its title? "Take It and Stick It."



-the other Doug

I'm not sure about that, Ian. I seem to recall Aldrin noting that he saw the flag go over as Eagle lifted off and rose away from the landing site.

I know that the RCS hot fire tests knocked over the erectable S-band antennae on both Apollos 12 and 14, though. That may be what you're thinking of. (And at the 14 site, the flag, which never blew over, was flipped around on its pole both by the RCS hot fire and by a couple of cabin depress cycles...)

-the other Doug

Well... after the number of times I have suggested that Squyres and company might well decide to trundle over to the rock face at Verde, and the equal number of times I've been told that it'll *never* happen, I feel good about the plans right now...

-the other Doug

Well -- someone correct me if I'm wrong, but 11pm in the UK is 7pm in New York, 6pm in Minneapolis (my locale), and most important, 4pm in Pasadena. So the guys in charge of EDL get to work it in the middle of the afternoon, their time.

Of course, the first pictures will come down "after hours" for any American location. But not so late as to be interrupting anyone's beauty sleep...

Besides, if you want to land at a given place, with a given sun angle, after a launch on a given day, you don't have many choices in terms of planning. The landing will happen at a specific time, and it's moot whether or not that's a convenient time for the engineers, scientists, or even us fascinated spectators... (Talk to me sometime about the times in my early and mid teens I would sit up all night watching lunar landings and moonwalks. Apollo 14 happened in a dark world in my memory, because most all of the lunar activities happened when it was dark in the central U.S.)

-the other Doug

True. But you'd be amazed at the number of theories that floated about which had the feel of last-ditch attempts to either shoot down the magma ocean concept (the only way in which the lighter anorthositic rocks could have separated out and floated to the surface to form a lunar crust) or to maintain some cherished pet theory (that the Moon must be completely chondritic, that it must have never experienced differentiation, or even that it must have once sported real seas and oceans).

It took a combination of orbital sensing (plotting aluminum concentrations from orbit using the J-mission SIM bay spectrometers) and ground truth (sampling a wide variety of anorthositic rocks) to finally prove the existence of an anorthositic original lunar crust, and to banish once and for all the defensive, "no, the Moon must be exactly as I have envisioned it" theories that grasped at more straws than you'll find in a barnyard in order to explain away the feldspar-rich fragments found in mare soils.

That whole episode reminds me a lot of the current state of speculation on Martian geology and planetary genesis. There are literally hundreds of theories out there about Mars which try to explain away ubiquitous observed phenomenah as the results of rare and non-characteristic "special circumstances." As with the resistance to accept an anorthositic crust on Luna, which requires acceptance of a magma ocean, there is still resistance to a Mars that was once warm and wet enough to have generated the water flow features observed there and which leads those who resist to postulate very transitory special circumstances to account for these features. It may require the discovery of, for example, a hidden cache of carbonate rocks to finally pin down the details of Mars' early history -- and it may require far more than "a few" samples to uncover those rocks. And that history.

-the other Doug

I will point out that the same was thought to be true of the Moon, and yet, even though Luna is obviously, just by cursory examination, comprised of two distinct rock types (the darker mare and the lighter terrae), Apollo returned more than 100 pounds of samples before it returned a single conclusive chunk of anorthosite to pin down the majority composition of the terrae. And this was *years* after in-situ chemical analyses (with an alpha scattering spectrometer) demonstrated a terrae composition "compatible" with an anorthositic gabbro.

It's quite possible that there are crucial rock and terrain types awaiting us on Mars that are hidden or difficult to see and understand from orbit. We may miss something very, very important if we only go for "a few"...

-the other Doug

You're absolutely correct, none of the Surveyor findings led to any engineering changes in the Apollo system. What those findings did accomplish, however, was to validate that the Apollo design would work.

Had there been no unmanned lunar landers prior to the first Apollo landing, NASA may well have given in to Tommy Gold's insistence that the descending LM drop brightly-colored weights along its final descent path, with Armstrong having orders to positively confirm that the weights didn't sink into the dust before he committed to setting his LM down onto the surface...

-the other Doug

Really? I clearly recall a much higher bounce estimate at the time of the landing, and a somewhat higher release point...

Perhaps they refined their estimates after the first reports that were reported at the time of the landing.

-the other Doug

Well -- Pathfinder was dropped onto Mars from about 100 meters and bounced up half a km on its first bounce, and they called that a soft landing...

There was an attempt to define such things as the Mars airbag systems, the early Luna landers (which also used airbags) and the attempted-but-never-successful balsawood-packed Ranger surface instrument packages as "hard survivable landers," but the concept never took solid hold. Any system that delivers a reasonably complex instrument package to the surface of a planet seems to be considered a soft landing system, these days. (I would argue that penetrators are in a special class of their own, neither soft landers nor padded/bagged/protected survivable landers.)

-the other Doug

You can tell I spend a lot of time perusing the ALSJ, can't you?

In point of fact, I tend to think of it as Little West, myself, since it actually lies farther west than West Crater. It was only given the name East because it lies immediately east of the landing site. But to have a crater named West and a crater named East, and to have West Crater to the east of East Crater -- that always struck me as a little too odd for my tastes.

-the other Doug

As highly as I regard your work, Phil, this statement is a teeny-tiny bit misleading. Surveyor's main descent engine was a solid rocket motor; it consisted of little more than a basketball-sized sphere, which held the solid fuel, and a nozzle. After burnout, which occurred about a km over the surface and at a speed of about 100 mph, Surveyor free-fell for a few seconds and then the verniers started up, at which point the descent motor was dropped. The combination of the vernier ignition and descent motor jettison gave maximum separation velocity between lander and motor.

I guess I just would never consider the sphere that held the solid fuel "tankage," just as I would never consider the length of a Shuttle SRB a tank. With solid fuel motors, the device that holds the fuel is more often called a casing than a tank...

I'd change the statement to "the burned-out descent motor casing and its nozzle were dropped," with this kind of technology.

I also have to correct another possible mis-speak -- Philco says "Surveyor 1 made the first soft landing on the Moon in June 1966." In point of fact, it made the first lunar soft landing in the Surveyor program. The first "soft" landing (in which an instrument package survived and sent back images and data from the surface) was, of course, made by Luna 9 several months prior to Surveyor 1's achievement.

-the other Doug

I'm a little surprised that East Crater (var. Little West Crater) isn't resolved. Compare the Kaguya view to the following view:

Eagle Ground Track

Many other craters the size and depth of East Crater are resolved quite nicely in the Kaguya image.

I'm not disagreeing that this is the landing site -- the rest of the landmarks seem to match up pretty well to a cursory inspection. But I'm surprised that East isn't resolved.

-the other Doug