Thanks! Yeah, it's been a continuing issue for me with the ESA websites. I may need to discuss this with my Comcast rep...

These links won't load for me. Perhaps it's just because I'm in the U.S. and the servers are in Europe -- I've noticed speed issues before trying to load images from ESA's websites -- but, for example, I started trying to load the first link about 10 minutes ago and it's still just spinning. The second link started to load an image, loaded about 5% of it, and after about five minutes gave up and said the 5% of the image is all it will load.

Have others here in the U.S. seen the same issue trying to load ESA webpages?

Too bad, I've been waiting for OSIRIS images for a while, here, and now they're out and I can't get them to load...

AIUI, planet formation theory would have it that metals get less and less common in the original protoplanetary disk as you moved away from the Sun, reflected in the relative abundances of metals in the planets as you move outwards.

I have also heard theories that Jupiter once orbited much closer to the Sun, approximately where the asteroid belt is now located, while Saturn was created approximately where Jupiter is now located. As we have seen happen in other solar systems, Jupiter began to migrate closer to the Sun and supposedly began to draw off materials that ought to have contributed to the overall mass of Mars (resulting in Mars ending up smaller and less massive than would otherwise have been expected), but that before Jupiter could move far enough in to begin to disrupt the formation of Earth or any of the other inner planets an orbital resonance with Saturn began pulling it back away from the Sun, in the process tossing Saturn much farther out and likely tossing Neptune out past Uranus.

This all could have affected the formation of Ceres by disrupting its formation at a critical time, such that Ceres had a much larger amount of mass taken away from it by Jupiter. The square-dancing swing-arounds that reorganized the outer planets could also well have been responsible for tossing Ceres into its current, somewhat-skewed orbit -- meaning it could have been a planetesimal that had been forming closer to the Sun than its current location, and thus more enriched in metals than the moons of the outer planets. But it was far enough away from the Sun by the end of its creation that it accumulated a lot of snowballs near the end, accounting for its (potential) resemblance to the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

However, in terms of radioactive heating, most of the planetary formation theories I've read point at Aluminum-26 as the major heat producer in the cores of the inner planets during their early histories. AL-26, however, has a relatively short half-life after it is created in a supernova, so the heating would have contributed only to the initial melting of the rocky planets' cores. None of the other radioactive heat-producing elements that survive to modern times could be contained in great enough quantity in such a small body as Ceres to create a hot core that would have persisted to modern times.

-the other Doug

Fascinating -- the chem cam image is so devoid of fine soil grains, I assumed it had been brushed. Indeed, then, a most intriguing surface texture, especially on the surfaces of the crystal lumps. I'll be very interested to hear what the lumps are made of, based on the chem cam results. There are a lot of interesting vug-like structures, as I said, apparent in the surface texturing, most of which seem to have been filled in with a locally brighter material.

Oh, my...!

-the other Doug

The nice stacked image in Paul's post is obviously of a brushed area. Do y'all think that the general surface texture of the "matrix" portion of this rock face is mostly an artifct of the brushing, or does it actually reflect the natural texture of the rock?

I ask because there seem to be a lot of filled-in vug-like structures, some of which connect nose-to-tail, and one set of which (at about the two o'clock position, just about exactly halfway from the center of the image to the outside rim of the circle) is arranged exactly like a snowflake. This snowflake structure is in fact located on the top of one of the crystal "bumps" within the main image.

It would be interesting to work backwards, so to speak, to see what kinds of crystallizing conditions would result in such a radially oriented crystal structure. If in fact that's not a brushing artifact, that is...

-the other Doug

These images, and especially the animation made from them, do give the impression of a cratered body. In much the same way that the early Mariner 10 images gave the impression of a cratered Mercury -- very suggestive, but not enough to say for sure.

Of course, we would most definitely expect Ceres to be cratered -- with no tidal "pumping" I can't conceive of a heat source (internal or external) that would result in ongoing re-surfacing, and every other airless body that lacks an internal heat source (i.e., pretty much all of them except Io, and to a lesser extent Europa and Enceladus) that we've looked at in our solar system has been heavily cratered. Even Enceladus has some heavily cratered terrain far away from its active plumes. It would be the scientific discovery of the decade were Ceres not heavily cratered.

The one nice thing we can say is that we don't have very long to wait, in the overall scheme of things, to get a much better look at this dwarf planet. The Hubble suggestions of an almost Mars-colored world have had me intrigued for quite some time. Now we are very near to knowing, if not the whole truth of the matter, then at least enough data to raise questions we don't even know enough to start asking yet.

-the other Doug

I would just like to express my mix of emotions, here. Extreme wonder and pride that the little Beagle that could, actually did. Intense frustration that a single petal deploy failure led to loss of mission. And deep and profound sadness that Dr. Pillinger did not live to see this day.

At least one thing that has changed my life came of it, even if the mission failed -- that it led to Doug creating this wonderful home-away-from-home for myself and all of my good friends here at UMSF.

Godspeed, Beagle 2.

-the other Doug

Just as a cautionary note -- until the actual vs. predicted signal acquisition times are released, I would take statements made during those crazy hours of the landing and surface ops with a grain of salt.

We don't have the needed data to find Philae on the surface. Hopefully ESA does, or will in the future. But without the needed data, I believe all we here on the forum can do is guess.

-the other Doug

I would add:

1958 -- Explorer 1 discovers the van Allen belts of energetic particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field, extremely basic information needed for planning of all future spaceflights of any kind.

1959 -- Luna (aka Lunik) 3 photographs the far side of the Moon for the first time, and for the first time we see prominent backside features such as Tsiolkovsky crater.

1966 -- Humans see the Moon from its surface for the first time, from both Luna 9 and Surveyor I.

1976 -- Viking landers 1 and 2 give humanity its first actual views of Mars from its surface, making the Red Planet an actual place and not just a light in the sky.

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

So, how does this jibe with the previous posting about how all of these sedimentary rocks have olivine that has not been altered by water? The landforms say streams and lakes, and the rocks say no water?

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

ADMIN NOTE: Please note that a number of comments below contained information that was 'off topic' in the Philae thread. The reasons are stated herehere.

Has anyone heard anything yet from the CONSERT experimenters about their assurance that they would be able to pinpoint the landing site within just a few days after the landing? AFAIK, we haven't gotten that information out here in the non-ESA world yet.

Also -- and this is not a criticism, just a statement of how much the American and European cultures apparently differ -- I find it odd that most ESA comments about the landing still seem to take great pride that they landed Philae not once, but three times! When actually they bounced Philae off of the comet and there was a large element of luck in the fact that it eventually fetched up against a spot where it could perform most of its experiments. If JPL had such a result in a similar landing attempt, the element of luck would, I think, have been readily admitted and the self-appreciation would have been for the incredible job done by the experiment teams to get their data down under rather extremely off-nominal circumstances.

Don't get me wrong, I have an awful lot of respect for the PIs and engineers who were able to work against a penurious and critical time limit to get their data collected and down to Earth. It was an admirable and incredible performance all around. It still just rings odd to my American ear to hear the off-nominal aspects of the landing itself referred to as extra added accomplishments, when in fact they were serious anomalies that could just as easily have resulted in no data being recovered from Philae.

I guess I just need to chalk it up to the different ways the "European culture" treats such a situation. It surely doesn't reduce my admiration and respect for the teams who were able to turn a potential disaster into a brilliant success.

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Could this have anything to do with the latest cutbacks at NASA where the JSC Media Center has been closed permanently and all images from various NASA projects are now being posted only to Instagram and Facebook?

I know this information comes more from the JPL side of the farm and not JSC, obviously, and this particular website is the Exploratorium's page (not directly a NASA website) -- but perhaps they have lost all links to the image downloads due to media cutbacks?

Just wondering.

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Yes, Philae was in free fall, but the gravity of C-P is so small that Philae was primarily following a straight line from its point of release, with a very minor perturbation induced by C-P's low gravity.

Which makes me wonder exactly how much velocity was imparted to Philae during the bounce. Philae was slowly drifting towards the comet, while it seems the comet was moving faster than Philae was in terms of rotation. The contact with the comet had to have imparted velocity to Philae, the vector of that velocity defined by the rotational energy of the comet.

It was obviously not enough to exceed orbital velocity for C-P, but it may have been close. Or perhaps it would have been orbital velocity had Philae not relied on some lithobraking for its final stop. I would be interested in seeing just how much velocity was imparted, and what Philae's resulting vector was. We should be able to backtrack that once we have the exact landing site, but it's also possible to predict with good accuracy the landing site from those data.

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Here, here! I'll be glad to second that, my friend!

Three cheers!

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Since this is really well done, I thought I'd post it -- I'm a huge fan of XKCD, and when I ran across this on YouTube, I just had to post it.

However, it's not really appropriate for the science-and-ops oriented Philae thread, so I decided to post it here.

Wonderful take on the landing, even if it doesn't follow through to the news of The Bounce.

XKCD Philae Landing

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

I was looking at the "best" of the CIVA images in terms of showing detail of the surface near Philae. I noticed a couple of very interesting features...



In this image there is what appears to be thin, straight rod, or pipe. Looks for all the world like a length of copper pipe. Not necessarily unremarkable, but it appears to sit directly in front of what looks an awful lot like a black-smoker-like structure. The smoker-like formation looks like the side closest to the camera has broken off, and the pipe-like piece could have been inside of the smoker-like formation.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to see black-smoker-like structures on a comet -- at times there are likely pockets of volatiles that are seeping slowly out of the innards of the comet's body, finding paths to the vacuum outside and altering the material they pass through, also pulling material along with the gases and possibly liquids coming out of them. So, you could build internal pipe-like structures and external black-smoker-like structures.

It's just really kewl to see something like this.

Also, something else I noticed...



In this second inset, you can see what are probably slick masses of ice, flattened onto the underlying surface. Almost looking like gobs of plastic or silly putty. They're obviously shiny in a glassy sort of way that makes you think about soft plastics, or ice. Some of the little knobbly features also look like they are partially covered with this "goey ice" look, too.

Just a couple of initial observations...

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Okay, from what I heard it sounds like Philae may be simply resting on the surface. There was no confirmation that the drill-footholds had secured a solid hold on the surface.

If Philae is on the surface and completely unsecured, but in an attitude that allows the science instruments to work, I guess I have a question for all you physics majors out there: How much force will it take to push Philae up off of the surface again? And is that amount of force exceeded by the lander's various planned movements?

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

To me, the layer upon layer of desiccation-patterned, thin emplacements speaks to well-spaced-out inundation events, where (either in the air or below standing or running water) a new layer of sediments is laid down on top of a desiccated layer. The new layer sits there, in the open air, long enough to desiccate and develop vein fillers, and then the whole process is repeated. Over and over.

This implies a few things. First, that if the sediment layer is water-transported, the water doesn't last for significantly long periods. It has to be there long enough to have transported the sediments, but after each deposition it dries out such that the newly laid-down layer desiccates. Second, that the vein-filling process occurs between inundations of new sediment layers. Otherwise, the new sediment layer would simply fill in the desiccation cracks and the crack-fill would just be more of the same material, not the veining material that we see. Third, that the vein fill process not only happens fast enough to fill the cracks between inundations, it is complete enough that the fill material has integrated itself into the previous layer such that it shares the same hardness and erosion resistance as the layer it infiltrates, so it has to be hard enough by the time of the next inundation not to be washed out of the cracks by the transport mechanism of the succeeding inundations.

So, it rather sounds like the inundations happened repeatedly, but with a fair amount of time between them. Our Earth-based, weather-based thinking tends to expect inundation events will happen every year, or every few years. Or at the most once every decade or century ("hundred-year floods" happen very close together in geologic terms, after all). Maybe this is not useful thinking on Mars and we're looking at repeated inundations separated by thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years?

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

I recall that Sojourner's APXS identified some of the rocks at the Pathfinder site as andesitic. Does this rather fall in line with the andesine indications here at Gale?

IIRC, there was significant discussion back the 90's as to the significance of andesitic lavas in any great profusion on Mars. Something about the alkali or sodium content in the lavas that would be considered unusual. I also recall some discussions since then, that this shines some light on the nature of the Martian mantle and possible water infiltration of the crust and crust recycling that can happen in the absence of plate tectonics.

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

According to our friend Wikipedia, gaylussite is "formed as an evaporite from alkali lacustrine waters. It also occurs rarely as veinlets in alkalic igneous rocks."

Why is the presence of an evaporite unlikely in what has been postulated as a potential lacustrine environment? Because of the alkali nature of the water that would have to have been involved?

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Boy, it's good to see some new OSIRIS images being released. Extremely impressive! (I just filled a swear jar to overflowing with this most recent release.)

It's going to be a very exciting time when the OSIRIS images hit the international version of the PDS and we can see more than a handful of them... maybe even more exciting than the preceding six months.

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Anyone have any ideas if the ESA website will have live streaming coverage of the landing? Here in the U.S. all I can find on the vast array of cable channels I receive for same-day coverage is a one-hour special, "Landing on a Comet," running on the Science channel. I heard reports that NatGeoUK is running live coverage in the UK, but the U.S. NatGeo is not running anything on 11/12.

The Science channel program runs at 9 pm EST (8 pm CST, etc.). If the estimate of landing confirmation at about 1600 GMT on 11/12 is still accurate (as was posted a couple of weeks ago, after the landing site was selected), that puts this program about four hours after landing confirmation. I'd hope we would have a number of good images back by then, but I'd also really like to follow the landing event live.

(As an aside, Science is using this opportunity to bring out a few new space-related programs, running the first of their "space weeks" since Curiosity landed a couple of years ago. We may get some nice eye candy from them in addition to same-day coverage of Philae's landing.)

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

No landing rockets. Philae is left in an orbit that will intersect the comet's surface at a relatively low speed. It has attitude control, but no retros. So, no target visibility issues due to rocket blasts.

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

As Curiosity demonstrated, though, it is quite possible (with modern electronics) to take descent images, store them and send them back to Earth later, when the landing sequence is *not* making the lander too busy to add the image transmission to its duties.

I would hope that planetary landers from now into the future will have this capability. It's not just valuable for developing context of the landing site within the general area, it also has the highest "cool factor" of any part of the missions, IMHO.

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)