Oh, please, no one get me wrong. I'm 1000% for a robust unmanned lunar program, really. I think there is an awful lot left to be learned about and from the Moon.

And personally, those bright sun-soaked sands beckon me.

-the other Doug

My only concern for the suitability of these caves to human habitation is that, being volcanic (empty lava tubes and such), the only occur in regions of "recent" volcanism.

These are the most boring places on the planet, IMHO.

Also, if these cave systems are all located near and within the big volcanoes in Tharsis, then how easy is it going to be to stage useful exploration from the side of a mountain in the middle of the highest-above-datum portion of the planet? How easy is it going to be to simply deliver the gear we'd need to bring from Earth to such a location? Not a lot of atmospheric braking, that high above datum.

Now, if there was a reasonable expectation of finding cave systems branching out from the floors of the deep valleys -- *that* would be an excellent place to look for life and to dig in for human habitation.

-the other Doug

Oh, I wasn't making any comments about the value of manned vs unmanned lunar programs. I was just saying that the *unmanned* program that was being planned was primarily designed to support manned lunar operations, and the most obvious reason for NASA seeing no need for it now is because they understand that there won't *be* manned lunar operations for some time to come.

I mean, it seems a very simple cause-effect relationship, to me...

-the other Doug

This is because NASA knows it won't be flying anything beyond the taxi version of the CEV, and that only into LEO, for another 20 or 30 years. Funding is just plain drying up for LSAM and Ares V development, and the Orion program will almost certainly not reach for the Moon for at least another quarter of a century. If ever.

-the other Doug

The article doesn't give the informal name. Do you recall it? (I seem to recall the whole episode, but can't for the life of me remember the informal name.)

Good article, though -- especially as it's written by an old Usenet friend, Henry Spencer. As a proud virtual owner of several "I Corrected Henry" T-shirts from back in my Usenet days, I fondly recall his near-total and rarely-failing memory. (It's not true that I cribbed my writing style from Henry, though. When I encountered him on Usenet, I discovered that he and I have virtually identical writing styles -- another thing I enjoyed about him.)

-the other Doug

I still wouldn't rule out a role for hydrothermal factors in the emplacement of Home Plate layers and in the deposition of salt-rich soils.

-the other Doug

It's quite interesting to me, Don. I know I can't actually speak for anyone else here, but I think it's probably interesting to a lot more of us who read and post to this forum.

These kinds of details, which let all of us share the daily challenges and rewards of those of you who are our proxies in this grand exploration, are tremendously worthwhile.

I welcome them!

-the other Doug

Don, does the science team there *really* believe that only five other people in the *world* are interested in VEX science operations? Or how VEX will supoprt Messenger's Venus flyby?

If you're being accurate and not just trying to be clever and funny, that would go a long way towards explaining the knd of extremely faulty assumption that's driving ESA's poor excuse for public outreach...

-the other Doug

I remember, in the magical summer of 1969 when humans were just *steps* away from the stars, that less than a month after the first manned lunar landing, the TV networks carried the arrival of Mars pictures from Mariners 6 and 7. Live.

We watched images build up, line by vertical line, over the course of minutes. As they were received at JPL, they were flashed across our TV screens.

Even before that, I remember the very first time any TV broadcast ever used (or could use) the title overlay "Live from the Moon" on a live news broadcast. It was the flight of Ranger IX. At the age of nine I was able to watch the Moon swell from image to image, as Ranger executed its suicide dive into Alphonsus Crater.

Oh, yes -- NASA has a long history of sharing the results of their planetary missions, live and (when possible) in color. (When not, in glorious black and white... )

I was very, very interested in Project Mercury, it's true. But I can date my extreme fascination with extraterrestrial geology to that astonished nine-year-old, watching the lunar surface rushing up at me and realizing that it was happening RIGHT NOW! (Well, OK, 1.3 seconds ago... )

-the other Doug

That's actually a positive thing, I think -- but has there been any allowance made to protect the careers of the researchers from being derailed because they can't get their work published before someone else runs with it?

I'm just afraid that forced release will simply drive bright and able researchers away from those fields. We need some system that allows everyone to shine and gives everyone due credit while allowing everyone to share what they learn, quickly and completely.

Like all pundits, I know where the destination is, and what it looks like. Where the road is, and how to navigate it, I haven't a clue... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

All very true. The reason for that, I think, is that the non-imaging data *does* require interpretation by the professionals for us non-professionals to be able to make any sense of. Just looking at APXS or Mossbauer raw results would be pretty much like trying to read Greek, for me. Someone would have to interpret what those results mean for them to be meaningful to me, and I *do* understand that this is a process that takes some time.

However, as I said, cameras are non-specific data gathering instruments (leaving aside for the moment the use of multiple wavelengths and analyzing wavelength differences for compositional clues). They provide images that non-professionals can view and evaluate -- and as we've seen on this forum, even non-professionals can occasionally make very good and interesting observations. Even when only working with contrast-enhanced and compressed images.

That's why, IMHO, it's relatively important (and more rewarding) to have as many eyes as possible looking at every image returned from every spacecraft we send out into the Solar System.

If anyone has any doubts as to what can happen when you expose as many people as possible to these images, just re-read Steve Squyre's preface to Roving Mars. After spending a *day* in Cornell's Mars Room and reviewing everything they had of the Viking lander images, the man became committed to a life course that delivered to all Mankind the accomplishments of Spirit and Opportunity.

How many children and young adults would become "hooked" on Mars or Venus if ESA's images were published as soon as they arrived? And how many of them might be the ones to lead the next major efforts to explore those planets?

How much are we, as a race, losing because the Wizards want to keep their secrets close to their vests...?

-the other Doug

And we'll likely see that amateur data before we ever see any VEX results... *sigh*...

Unless the VEX Science Operations Team is putting all this together to try and keep the *amateur* data secret, too??? (OK, I'm not really serious about that. I don't think...)

-the other Doug

Useful? Yes. But it was *optimized* for the liquid-landing ("splashdown") scenario.

Instead of analyzing liquid surface materials directly, we got to analyze gasses that were generated by the contact between the relatively superheated Huygens and the solid surface. The reduced sample density affected the amount of data inferrable from the results.

And, once again (as I noted in another thread), there was an enormous amount of "data triage" that went on even before metal was bent on Huygens. With only so many grams of mass available for the science payload, the designers *had to* make educated guesses about what they wanted to look at, and designed their instruments to return the data they thought would be most interesting and informative.

As much as all of us would like to see sensors that collect the maximum amount of data about their surroundings, mass budgets are so tight on planetary probes that you are almost forced to target your instruments to address a very narrow range of specific questions.

This is why, by the way, I'm a firm believer in imaging systems on spacecraft. You can argue about the most useful wavelengths at which to take imagery, but in general visual representations of physical phenomenah contain more non-specific data (i.e., data not "targeted" to answer a very narrow range of specific questions) than any other type of data representation. That's why I'll always believe that a camera is *always* the most important instrument you can fly to almost anywhere.

-the other Doug

Hmmm... let me try and say this in an acceptable way, since I really do believe that this is a factor in what we're seeing with ESA's release policies (and with the entire, broken publish-or-perish system that exists in nearly every scientific research field).

The basic principle seems to be that, if you are doing any kind of research, your entire professional career depends on how much you can publish about your work in peer-reviewed journals. Correct?

This places enormous pressure on researchers to keep their pre-published data secret, lest their published works have less than the positive impact on their careers than they wish. It also puts forth a tremendous temptation to use *only* the data that supports the conclusions you want to publish.

This affects the process all the way up and down the line, creating a blindered, narrow-focused view on only that data a researcher *believes* he/she is going to see. The data he/she *wants* to see.

It not only affects the process of selecting which data you will use when you publish, it affects the very instruments you design and use to collect that data. (For example, if you're studying fields and particles and you expect to see "interesting" results in only certain wavelengths or energy ranges, you design your instruments to give you data in only those wavelengths and ranges. Allowing possible *crucial* data to slip past you unobserved.)

Now, to a certain extent, this is unavoidable. Instruments can't do all things for all people, and on space probes in particular, mass is a huge factor. You often have to decide what types of data you will collect before you can even propose a mission, and so you have to do a lot of "data triage" even before you start bending metal. But it can blind you to things you really need to know.

However, the broken portion of all of this is that you tend to produce researchers who are so narrowly focused on proving one specific hypothesis that they ignore data which tends to disprove it. At the very least, you produce an environment where there is a strong *temptation* to ignore such data.

That means that, unless you control the raw data and allow only yourself and your immediate confederates to see it, someone else might *dispute* your conclusions. And then your career doesn't benefit from the work you've done (or at least you truly believe that will be the result).

The people associated with the MER and Cassini missions have taken a very brave and bold step, to allow people to see raw data as it's collected. They're depending on the NASA culture to protect their careers, I think -- anyone who can become a PI for NASA has *already* achieved enough distinction within their field that they can afford to conduct their research more publicly, and they can afford to lose the option of ignoring data that doesn't support their pet theories. (And even then, some NASA PIs have had the system so ingrained in them that they still try very hard to keep their pre-published data as secret as possible.)

Perhaps that's what needs to change in the process, as it works throughout all fields of scientific research -- make the course of one's career *independent* of finding data that punctures one's pet theories. At the very least, it would eliminate the pressure on researchers to keep their raw data secret and the temptation to ignore data that doesn't support their own theories.

Until that happens, unless there is some other factor that will protect a researcher's perceived career path (like the distinction involved in being a NASA PI), I doubt any of us will see any significant reform in the process any time in our lifetimes.

-the other Doug

This is emblematic of the "scale trap" with which lunar geologists are all too familiar. It turns out that lunar geologic processes are far more obvious at larger scales than at small scales, and that the ubiquitous dust cover tends to mask the true geochemistry of a region from remote sensing. The same is true of Mars, in many ways.

Remember, too, that radar soundings of the lunar surface indicated that the surface was made up of fairy-castle structures, but failed to reveal that these structures are extremely tiny in scale.

So, it may be more useful at this juncture to try and derive the cryogeological processes on Titan from its large-scale landforms, and work backwards from there to determine which compounds and ices are most likely to have behaved in the ways necessary to create the landforms we see.

I'm afraid we're going to need some sophisticated analysis of the materials on and under the surfaces of a variety of Titanian landforms to directly adress composition questions, and that's something we're not going to get for a long time -- certainly not within my lifetime.

-the other Doug

Well, hmm -- not only a prediction, but "established fact" well into the 20th century was that space was actually filled with "aether," a gaseous medium that filled the void between the planets and stars.

Also, in the arena of lunar predictions, there are all of the crazy predictions by Spurr and Green, including the idea that the lunar seas were dried-up ocean beds. (As Don Wilhelms put it, the Moon is neither Spurrish or Greenish... .) And, more subtle but just as wrong, there were the predictions by the photogeology team that the Descartes and Cayley formations represented highland volcanics.

-the other Doug

Well, yeah -- but I'll point out that the same Lunar Orbiter V images of the Tycho area show the Surveyor VII landing site. From orbit, it looks like a complete mess of ropy ridges and sheer cliffs. But from the ground, it becomes apparent that the slopes are, on average, far more gentle than they appear from above.

Our Moon always seems to look rougher and more rugged from orbit than it does from the ground. I don't know if that's a lesson to be learned, or a trap to be avoided, as we head out to explore other Solar System bodies.

-the other Doug

I seem to recall that you had posted a portion of a Surveyor VII pan that you had cleaned up. You may not have posted this one, though.

Emily, I don't think it's really a crater rim we're looking at in the distance -- the entire terrain is really pretty chaotic, and I think these are really ridges that are arrayed radially to Tycho.

However, as chaotic as this terrain is, I'm struck by how *soft* most of the terrain really is. There are a lot of locations in this panorama alone that would be quite suitably flat landing sites for a LM (or some other type of landing module), and the local slopes aren't, for the most part, any greater than what the J-mission Apollo crews worked on with relatively little difficulty.

I wish they had actually tried a J mission to this location. Would have been the most spectacular site ever!

-the other Doug

You know, it's a lot of fun to talk about all the goo that ought to be present all over the surface of Titan. The real issue is, we need to reconcile that with what we actually see on the ground at the Huygens landing site -- a solid, goo-less, pebbled surface.

I'm not saying there isn't goo elsewhere. I'm just saying that the only place on the surface we have ever seen really close-up has none whatsoever. And it would appear to have been flooded by liquid many times in the past...

-the other Doug

"...it's an object to you,
But it's always a planet to me..."

-the other Doug

Yep, they've been working on different parts of that stretch of interstate every time I've gone to visit my mother for the last several years. And I can remember when the whole deal, interstate and all, was almost all corn fields...

-the other Doug

I really don't think the Lump is all that different from the other intact, large ejecta blocks we see in the walls. I just think it was, until (relatively) recently, completely covered by a cape-top. When the end of this cape slumped into the crater, the supporting rockbeds beneath the Lump slumped, and the entire remaining cape-top inboard of the slump line (which ends at the Lump) skidded down about a half a meter and dipped down towards the crater.

So, the end of the Lump we see was probably safely embedded in soil and debris very similar to what we see around it now until the (again, relatively) recent slump event which exposed its blunt end. That end is now eroding, but *appears* to be more erosion-resistant than its surrounding rockbed because it was an intact piece, while the rock that surrounded it was less consolidated ejecta debris.

-the other Doug

Hmmm... appears to me that the Lump *is* fine-layered. It's just eroding primarily parallel to the plane of lineations, not through them. You can see traces of the fine lineations in the Lump along its left side, where they ought to become non-parallel.

-the other Doug

Fred, what I was seeing that looked very similar to the Lump was on the very far right edge of the pan. As others have pointed out, there are also two large (and spurious-looking) blocks of very similar looking material elsewhere in the rim wall. I have circled this annotation of your false-color view to point out where I see similar blocks. The circle in red, on the far right edge, is more where I expect the layer originates. The two large blocks circled in white look like they deformed the rock layer below them when they were emplaced, thus arguing for their emplacement as in-place blocks, possibly ejecta flaps from the similar lower layer:



-the other Doug

Do we know what effect (if any) Oppy's broken steering actuator on that one front wheel has on her ability to drive up and down slopes?

-the other Doug