One of my favorite homages to Mr. Wizard was the parody shown on the mid-'90s Jim Henson Productions TV comedy, "Dinosaurs." I even forget what they called the show (something similar to "Mr. Wizard"), but the running gag was that the dinosaur science teacher always had a mammalian child assistant named Timmy. Most of the "science demonstrations" ended up killing the assistant, which brought the tag line, "We're gonna need another Timmy!"

This led to me informing my roommate over the phone today of Mr. Herbert's death with the respectful, but still amusing, comment, "It looks like we're gonna need another Mr. Wizard."

I sure hope someone can step up and fill Mr. Herbert's shoes. The concept is not only valid, it's important.

-the other Doug

Yeah -- one of the problems I have with a majority of the space-themed desktop images out there is that the left side of the screen (where my icons are located on this Windows XP machine) is too busy and cluttered. My favorite desktops are those which feature a lot of black sky in the upper left portion of the image. Hence my predilection for lunar and deep-space scenes.

-the other Doug

You point out a key factor in understanding how these things happen, Littlebit. People who don't care to evaluate the relative desirability of various funding programs refer to the process simply as "pork" -- money distributed amongst various congressional districts in order to gain broad support for the funding.

In reality, you're often talking about pumping millions, if not billions, of dollars into the private sector to build, fly and manage these spacecraft. It makes sense to distribute that money as widely around the country as possible, to avoid giving all of the economic benefits to a small segment of the population. A majority of the dollars spent on a spacecraft generally goes into labor costs, and that money gets spent in the communities where the workforce lives. So, even though you're always going to be giving the money to the same types of workers -- engineers, scientists, factory workers, etc. -- if you gave all of the contracts to a few companies in southern California, that money wouldn't circulate as widely, and provide economic support for as many communities, as if you spread it around to contractors all over the country.

That's one reason why the Shuttle is so expensive to fly -- it serves not only as a space transportation system, but also as a mechanism for distributing federal funds into the private sector via an overly-large (for the task) workforce. While this does nothing to reduce the costs of getting into LEO, it does provide jobs and pump money into the communities where Shuttle processing and management facilities are located.

So, while this type of funding process is looked down upon by purists who believe that "pork" is always a bad thing, it actually has some sound economic reasoning behind it.

Oh, and BTW -- there are other factors involved, too, not the least of which are the inter-Center rivalries and jockeying for new project funding amongst all of the NASA Centers. APL winning the management of New Horizons was a major coup, since most every other planetary probe flown by the U.S. has been managed out of JPL. It's a good precedent, encouraging each Center to work lean and mean and out-bid the other Centers for new projects.

-the other Doug

Now, that is an extraordinary statement. I know that I, for one, have *never* heard of any such problem plaguing the various researchers working with the MER or Cassini images (which are released as soon as they are received). I can understand that the various non-imaging instruments may take some time to process and interpret, but images? Especially jpegs of the images?

If it is truly the case that anyone on ANY research team working with planetary probes feel they must sequester ALL of their images until they have a chance to publish, then we (the taxpayers who are PAYING for their precious probes, often also paying their salaries) ought to put pressure on our representatives to force at least limited release of imagery as close to real-time as possible. Playing the game of "Oh, my editors might give me hassles if anyone sees any of these images before we publish" is just plain unacceptable in this day and age. Period.

-the other Doug

Yeah, Tom, I hear you -- like the time I thought I had discovered shoulder-to-shoulder tiny craters in one of Spirit's first MIs of the soil at Gusev. I had to whack myself in the head (nearly literally) to see that they were actually tiny pebbles, not craters...

-the other Doug

I've heard people try to use "areology" for the study of Martian landforms, "selenology" for the study of lunar landforms, etc. Frankly, I'd rather just use the term "geology" for all of them, and I'm glad there is an acceptance of the term as it applies to the study of non-terrestrial landforms.

-the other Doug

I've got as my desktop (at the moment) a rarely-published section of a panorama taken by Buzz Aldrin on July 20, 1969:



This pan includes the only decent image of Neil Armstrong taken from the lunar surface -- Neil is working on someting at the MESA table.

The pan is rarely seen because of the sun flare, which someone (our very own Ian R, if I recall correctly) did a very good job of artistically dealing with on this particular reproduction.

-the other Doug

Let me just add my voice to the chorus, here. I watched the original Mr. Wizard series back in the early '60s. It was fascinating to me -- the guy had a real knack for bringing arcane scientific information into *my* world. Whether it was demonstrating how regular materials react when dipped in liquid nitrogen, or showing what happens to a bag of marshmallows when you put it in a vacuum, the demonstration were always well conceived and very well explained.

Don Herbert was one of the prime factors in attaching scientific explorations to my sense of wonder. He will be missed.

-the other Doug

Yeah -- disgust often motivates people...

-the other Doug

Oh, yes, there were live TV displays of incoming images prior to the Voyagers. The first that I can recall in detail was from Ranger IX. As it plunged into the Moon, the output from one of the cameras was fed directly to a TV feed, real time. For the first time in history, the title "Live from the Moon" was displayed on my TV screen.

I also recall that the first image from Surveyor 1 was broadcast live as it was received at JPL. It was a low-res (200-line) image of the footpad and the soil disturbed by the footpad. It was the first image of a footpad settled down on the surface of another Solar System body. I remember it well.

The Mariner 6 and 7 far-encounter sequences were shown real-time, at least on CBS. (Walter Cronkite, after just finishing up his network's coverage of Apollo 11 less than a month before, was not going to let live TV pictures of Mars go without live coverage.) I don't recall the close-encounter sequences being covered live, but for all of me they might have been.

The first Viking 1 lander image was also displayed real-time, as it built up line by line. So was the second image. And, of course, the images from Pioneers 10 and 11 from Jupiter and Saturn were presented real-time. They were very poor, since they had yet be corrected for spacecraft motion during the image build-up process, but even so, they were shown real-time.

I just don't recall any of them, except for the Voyager images, having the histograms displayed on the live feeds.

-the other Doug

Venus is an interesting place, yes. It is somewhat more difficult to get to than some other places -- you have to lose a lot of your solar orbital velocity to get there from Earth, it's not as simple as it sounds. And while it has very interesting processes, it takes a lot of power and sophistication to see through the very dense atmosphere to study the surface. So, it's by far not the easiest place in the Solar System to explore.

And there is another factor -- it's a place that humans will likely never visit. The conditions are just too extreme. There is something of a disinclination for people to get interested in places they can never, ever visit. As much as I enjoy unmanned space exploration, it's easier to get people's imaginations fired up if you can get them to visualize standing there, themselves. Seeing it with their own eyes. If that can never realistically happen, it's more difficult for most people to get enthusiastic about it.

Oh, I'm assuming you had your tongue fully in your cheek, hendric, with your little list there. Most of the items you list make Venus *more* difficult to explore than other Solar System bodies, not less...

-the other Doug

Unfortunately, the tendency towards "there must be something NEW each mission" is driven, not always by science, but by "sexiness" and an attempt to sell a project. MARSIS and SHARAD, for example, are good ideas, but the data that comes from them are incredibly hard to interpret. Just as with the Lunar Sounder flown on Apollo 17, these radar "glimpses" into subsurface structures provide data that requires you to know more than we *do* know about subsurface conditions in order to get valid interpretations.

I remember during Apollo, there was such a push to do something new on every subsequent landing, without having any time to analyze the results of the last two landings, that some of the experiments made little sense, or were rushed so much that they had technical or design failures. This was especially true on Apollo 17, where everyone's pet experiment was going to be flown or *never* be flown. So you got such time-consuming and otherwise marginally useful experiments as the Surface Electrical Properties experiment, the Lunar Sounder, and the Lunar Surface Gravimeter. The data returned from the first two was marginal at best, and the speed with which the last one was assembled led to a mistake in the balancing of its central measuring device, a free-floating beam structure, which rendered it useless.

Thankfully, at least for outer planet probes, we have enough time between the last one and the next one that the choice of sensors we fly in the future is at least strongly influenced by the results we've seen from earlier probes. And with lead times in the tens of years between probes to given outer planets, you would naturally expect a lot of improvements in technology from one probe to the next.

You need to have a rapid-fire series of missions to take advantage of volume efficiencies, and it's just not reasonable to send out a probe every six months to a year, as we did during the Golden Age of the 1960s. Back then, if you wanted to send a probe to Venus, well, just borrow a Ranger spacecraft body, adjust its instrumentation, and send it on its way. Build a dozen octagonal spacecraft busses and then outfit them for the mission at hand, a la Mariners 3 through 9. But when it will be 10 years or more between outer planet missions, it makes no sense to standardize your bus -- the technology will advance enough between missions it makes more sense to build new each time. It may be more expensive, but it makes more sense.

-the other Doug

I haven't used that quote since, oh, before you were born...



-the other Doug

That's because your cosmology is faulty. It has nothing to do with frogs -- it's TURTLES. All the way down.



-the other Doug

I know that by the time the Voyager Jupiter encounters began, images coming in "hot off the wire," so to speak, were displayed (on TV, anyway) with histograms alongside the images.

Was this when the practice of showing histograms along with the images began? If not, when did the practice start? I don't recall seeing them on Mariner 6/7 images, or on Mariner 9 images. Were there histograms on the initial public release images from Mariner 10, or either Pioneer 10 or 11? (I have my doubts about the Pioneers, as they had a scanning photomultiplier tube in lieu of a real camera.)

And note that you don't see it much anymore -- when did the practice stop? Or was it really mostly done just during the Voyager encounters?

Anyone remember?

-the other Doug

"Well, in my dream, we were driving along and we came across a set of tracks. We asked Houston if we could follow them, they said yes, so we followed them, and we found another rover that looked just like ours..." -Charlie Duke, 1972



-the other Doug

I was responding to a post by our new member, 3488, which suggested an Io orbiter/lander combo, with a HiRISE-style camera system on the orbiter. He since deleted his post, which makes mine look like I'm responding to Jason or someone else... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

I only have one basic question, but upon it unfortunately hangs the feasibility of any such mission.

How are you planning on dealing with the intense radiation environment at Io? It's not just a matter of using hardened circuitry -- CCDs in imagers, which have to have a visual path to what they image, will deteriorate quickly at Io. Everything not encased in massive (and I mean that word literally) shielding is going to fail very, very quickly in Ionian orbit.

Another issue is the fact that it takes continual maneuvering to remain in a stable orbit around Io, because of the pulls of Mother Jupiter and sister Galileans. But that's a minor issue compared to the raditation environment issue.

I agree, it sounds like exactly the kind of mission I'd like to see. But I really wonder if we have the technology to pull it off any time in the next 50 years.

-the other Doug

For all of us who read "Marooned Off Vesta" as children (one of Isaac Asimov's first published stories), we've been eagerly awaiting close-ups of both Ceres and Vesta for a lifetime. I'm hugely thankful that we're finally sending a probe to look at them.

I completely, entirely and utterly agree. We *really* should be looking at asteroids first, Mars second, when to comes to the next phases of human exploration. I've been making this argument for nearly 20 years now... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

Now, see, I'm in the camp that every solar system object is interesting. I think Luna is *tremendously* interesting -- all you guys and gals who think that samples returned from eight sites, and varying degrees of in-situ measurements from another six or seven, means we know everything we need to know about the place, are just plain misguided... Luna is more the norm than the exception in this system, and we can learn a LOT more from it that will apply to other bodies, such as Mercury and the asteroids.

There are very definite classifications of bodies, too, each of which holds its own fascination. Vacuum-shrouded rocky bodies; rocky bodies with atmospheres; small rocky bodies; small icy bodies; large gas bodies; and large ice and gas bodies. Each has its own general set of processes, each has its own general set of geological conditions. (Titan, as a small icy body with an atmosphere, is sort of in a class by itself...)

Even Rhea, with the interesting organization of its crater chains, holds some interest for me. I'm still convinced that a lot of Rhea's crater chains are endogenically controlled...

-the other Doug

And *controlled* null-grav maneuvers, at that! If you didn't notice, she not only moved laterally about two or three meters, she rotated clockwise 90 degrees. (At least, it seems so to my old, tired eyes...)

-the other Doug

I think these channels only resemble dendritic channels in their forms. In fact, many of them define the boundaries of polygonally fractured dry-ice surficial plates, a patterning not normally noted in dendritic channel formation.

-the other Doug

Kewl! You just don't know how much I'm looking forward to seeing what LRO comes up with. I have a deep and abiding interest in selenology. Comes from having been 13 years old in the summer of 1969, I think... *grin*...

Thanks for the link, Phil!

-the other Doug

Agreed -- "Carrying the Fire" is written solely by Collins (no ghostwriters here), and showcased the man's great sense of humor and intelligent (dare I say intellectual?) viewpoint from within the most fascinating endeavor ever set upon by Man.

I was also quite impressed with Collins' decision to follow Charles Lindbergh's format from "The Spirit of St. Louis." Everything Collins recounted about his life, his training, his pre- and post-flight experiences was written in past tense. His accounts of the flights of Gemini 10 and Apollo 11 are written in present tense. This brings a great sense of immediacy to the actual flights.

Collins is not only one of the wittiest, most intelligent and most perspicacious of the early astronauts, he is undoubtedly the best writer of the lot.

-the other Doug

Besides, I didn't specifically mention Mars, did I? I'm firmly convinced that humans will and ought to visit small solar system bodies (asteroids and possibly comets), perhaps even before we set foot on Mars.

Mars presents its own unique resources, opportunities and challenges. It's relatively hard to land on Mars, for example, because of its combination of gravity (high enough to draw a lander down with fatal velocity) and thin atmosphere (which doesn't provide all the braking you'd like). And we have yet to have a complete chemical analysis of Martian soils -- if they are rich in peroxides, we could be dealing with severe environmental issues when trying to live there.

But the Moon provides many similar environmental factors to what we will find on asteroids. Operating in vacuum, dealing with variable amounts of insolation, working in potentially severe radiation environments... these are all factors that are similar on the Moon and on asteroids.

In some ways, working on the Moon will be easier than working on small bodies, because you have a certain amount of gravity to hold things in place. But it's easier to land on small bodies -- though it might be a little *too* easy to lift back off of them.

So, when I spoke of the importance of learning how to live for extended periods on planetary surfaces, I was mostly speaking of minor planets. Like Ceres and Vesta. Or even Eros.

-the other Doug