I chatted on the phone with my elderly mother today, who mentioned that a couple of days ago, a meteorite landed in someone's house back in my old home town!

Well, OK -- it might have been a piece of a satellite, but it might have been a meteor. And while I was born in Normal, Illinois, Bloomington/Normal is a "twin city" area, two towns that long ago grew together into a single (if smallish) metro area. But still...

I almost feel like going outside, looking up in the sky, and taunting, "nyah, nyah, missed me!!" By about 33 years...

-the other Doug

You know what I find really fascinating? I'm pretty sure that, given subtle changes in how we transliterate Chinese names these days, Chang'e is named after the same character described by the Houston Capcom to the Apollo 11 crew the morning of Landing Day, July 20, 1969:





-the other Doug

Looks to me like the Lump is the same kind of rock we can see on the far right of the color panorama, here, *below* the light-toned layer. Those rocks seem to be falling down into the crater, but they have the same color and appear to hold together in the same way as the rock in the Lump.

That would mean that the entire body of rock that makes up the Lump and the piece of rockbed that has slumped down all around the Lump are "flaps" of ejecta that came from a deeper rockbed than the surrounding rockbeds. That's not at all unlikely, given the size of Victoria.

-the other Doug

Yes, Tom, the one hole on the top does seem to be dust-filled, but the rock has several other clasts. Most of them just seem to have eroded at the same rate as the matrix.

I'd have to say it's definitely a clastic rock, and that means it's either an aggregate, a breccia or a welded ashflow tuff. And it doesn't look like an aggregate to me.

-the other Doug

Yeah -- I had looked through Amazon and Ebay and found several places where I could not only order the set, I could order "used, unopened, like new" copies of the set for significantly less money.

But I wanted to deal directly with SCF because I wanted to encourage them to continue doing what they're doing, making these materials available to the public. I wanted *them* to get the full profit, to encourage them and such.

I don't want them to stop doing what they're doing -- but I'm truly irritated and disillusioned with them, now. So it's quite likely I *will* order any further SCF products from third parties -- preferably third parties who take a nice big cut of the profit and leave SCF with less. Because if SCF is going to be this irresponsible with their direct customers, they deserve to only get the smaller cut they receieve when someone buys their products through third parties.

I might have had a different attitude had I been offered something -- ANYTHING -- beyond a refund. Like, a refund AND the set, or another set for free, or something like that. But they've blown it, as far as I'm concerned.

*heavy sigh*

-the other Doug

Anyone else here having any problems with Spacecraft Films lately?

I had ordered the Apollo 15 set last summer, and I got it in five days. I was very happy with it. I got the 15 set first, I think, because 15 was the flight I didn't audio-tape at the time of the flight, and I wanted to be able to re-live the EVAs as I hadn't been able to do with the other J missions.

So, on January 15, I decided to order what I've been wanting all along -- the Apollo 16 set. I had little extra cash after Xmas from bonuses and such, and decided I could afford the set for 16, which was my favorite of all of the Apollo flights.

Two weeks after I ordered, no DVDs had arrived. I wrote to Spacecraft Films, asked what was going on, and was told that the set was out of stock (even though there was no mention of this on the website). I was told it would be another four weeks, and the note suggested I might want to take a refund.

I didn't want a refund, I wanted the set, so I said no, four weeks is OK, please send me the set.

Now, four more weeks have passed. I checked the website just about a week or so ago, it said nothing about out-of-stock, so I figured it had to be ready soon. But when the four weeks (plus) had passed, I wrote them again.

They said it would be *another* four weeks, and again more strongly suggested I take a refund.

I wrote back saying I REALLY wanted the set, and was at a loss to understand what the problem was. I also suggested they note this on the website, since for nearly two months, they were out of stock on something and there was no mention of that on the website. I told them I was irritated, but that I really wanted the set.

The reply from that, this morning, was "Why don't I just apply a refund -- we don't want you to be irritated."

These people just don't seem to want to sell me the set.

I am still irritated. I feel that if the item was going to be out of stock significantly longer than what they told me, they had a certain responsibility to let me know that, and not just add another four weeks to the supposed delivery date every time I asked about it.

Now I'm doing the LAST thing I wanted to do, here -- taking a refund and NOT getting my Apollo 16 set.

Now I'm more irritated than ever, and I want to know if I should bother even trying to order from Spacecraft Films ever again? Or if any of y'all should, either?

-the other Doug

I'd have to say that it's either a breccia or a welded ashflow tuff. In either case, the rock matrix could very well be crystalline, since it started out as a rock melt. The rock fragments embedded in it were caught up in the rock melt, but didn't melt themselves (though some of them may have partially melted, and all were probably altered).

Since breccias are most commonly formed by impacts (the impact melts some of the target rock, and that melt incorporates cooler fragments of other rocks as it travels through its trajectory), and we're on the ejecta blanket of a reasonably large crater, I'd say that Occam's razor suggests this is a small breccia.

-the other Doug

I hate to say this, but I really think that extensive exploration of the outer Solar System is going to have to wait for a new generation of propulsion technologies. Uranus and Neptune orbiters, in particular, are very, very difficult to do with our present propulsion technologies.

We need some form of constant-thrust propulsion that doesn't require tons and tons of propellant in order to get out to the outer System in months, not decades, and that allows us to brake into orbit around the outer planets. Frequent energetic maneuvering, and even breaking out of orbit to travel to another planet, are also capabilities that we're going to need to develop eventually.

As long as we're stuck with either big-push-then-lots-of-coasting chemical propulsion and constant-but-really-miniscule-thrust ion propulsion, we'll never be able to afford more than three or four flagship missions to the outer planets in any one person's lifetime. That's just not going to get it done.

-the other Doug

Voyager flybys, as I recall. I'm just thinking that any really energetic geysers on Europa would eject enough water (ice crystals) to create an observable torus. I grant you, the sulphur torus is very energetically enriched, constantly... but also as I recall, many of the probes that have gone to or past Jupiter have had rather sensitive spectrometers that would have detected even a very tenuous water ice torus in Europa's orbit.

I'd think that such detection would be possible from Earthbound telescopes, too, at this point -- but I could be wrong.



-the other Doug

I speculate that Europa simply cannot be emitting anything more than a tiny fraction of the mass that Enceladus is emitting (if any at all), or else the Voyagers and Galileo would have observed the ring/torus of particles that such outgassing would create. Assuming, of course, that geysers on Europa would propel particles fast enough to escape its gravity and form a ring in the first place...

But, I mean, really -- the smoke ring created by Enceladus is noticeable enough that, if there was such a ring at Europa's orbit, it would have been discovered by now (as, for example, the sulphur torus at Io's orbit was discovered fairly early on).

-the other Doug

I don't think you'll ever get rid of the term "planet", if for no other reason than a century and more of science fiction has entrenched the term solidly within the human psyche.

When humans imagine going out into space and exploring the Cosmos, they think about living on chunks of rock with roughly the same size, shape and general characteristics as the Earth. We imagine exploring, but not taking up residence on, other chunks that are less hospitable.

It doesn't matter if you're talking about David Brin or Arthur C. Clarke or Gene Roddenberry -- when you tell stories about traveling to distant worlds, you have to have a generic name for the bodies you visit, and that name, for better or for worse, is "planet".

So, "planet" will continue to describe those chunks of rock that humans imagine visiting. Otherwise, billions of words of science fiction will instantly become "quaintly out-of-date," and that just ain't gonna happen...

-the other Doug

I understand that there is serious concern as to whether Hawking can physically endure the stresses of boost and entry on the suborbital flight. But if I were in his position, I'd insist on the right to be allowed to fly even if it might kill me.

-the other Doug

Welcome to the club! You'll now start receiving mailings from AARP once a month...

-the other Doug

While I'm still in the clean-sweep camp. The dark sand within Victoria isn't, to my eye, as dark as the streaked surface.

Of course, I'm prepared to be proven wrong...

-the other Doug

In addition, if liquid was flowing on Enceladus in any significant amount, I'd have to think we'd see fluid flow features on the surface. I grant you, we don't have extremely high definition views of the entire moon, but the flow of enough mass to fill those tiger stripes ought to leave large scoured scabland-like terrain behind, and we really don't see that.

In fact, the areas near the tiger stripes that we *do* have high-res images of doesn't look like it's ever seen fluid flow. Extensive cracking of an ice crust, perhaps, but no fluid flow.

Great conceptual idea, Martin, but I don't think it fits all of the observed facts...

-the other Doug

Those numbers don't sound right -- we just passed 2.3 million km from Jupiter, and Pluto, which is eight years' travel yet away, is less than twice that same distance away, at less than 4 million km?

I'm thinking that the distance to Pluto ought to be billions, not millions, of km -- am I right?

-the other Doug

And, of course, from the bodies known as hemerhs, we derive...



-the other Doug

What we need to know to be able to properly interpret this latest lake image is whether or not the SAR mode can actually penetrate the surface of the liquid we're looking at. If it does penetrate, how deeply does it penetrate?

I'm frankly having a hard time believing that the lower portion of this lake is actually filled with liquid. Look at the upper portion, which is obviously liquid-filled -- there is a spit of linked islands near the center of the image, very near the top. You can see absolutely nothing of the formation which, logically, must connect this spit of islands beneath the lake surface. They completely disappear at what appears to be the surface level of the liquid. It's certainly the horizon at which the radar ceases to "see" through the liquid. There is no darkening, no "bathtub ring" around the bases of these spit islands, to indicate that we're looking through the surface of the liquid (as you would expect if the lower portion of the image is seeing submerged terrain). The break in visibility between the "seeing horizon" and the spit islands is sharp and well-defined.

Also, in the lower portion of the image, there are several locations which reflect just as darkly as the liquid surface above, and they tend to be arrayed in arroyo-like formations. These *could* just be drainage formations that are, indeed, currently submerged, but again, it's really hard to say when you don't know how deeply the radar may be penetrating the liquid's surface.

Without any convincing data about how far the radar can penetrate this liquid, I'm pretty certain that the lower portion of the image is not currently flooded, but that the radar-dark material that seems to complete the lake shore is actually sedimentation from recent flooding. (Also, some ripple-like formations in this darkened terrain look as much like dunes as they look like liquid-flow ripples. Brings to question how much of the time this terrain really spends submerged.)

In addition to the question of whether the entire region is submerged, I'm fascinated by the flecks in the liquid surface in the upper portion of the image. They seem to be more concentrated closer to the shorelines. Are these blocks of ice floating on the liquid? Would the local ices even float in this liquid? Or could these flecks actually represent wave action on the surface of the liquid?

Think of it -- waves on the lakes of Titan...

-the other Doug

I'm not sure I'd use the term "rained down," here. I think "surged onto" is more appropriate, this close to the cratering event. It makes a difference when you try to envision the dynamics that emplaced the ejecta layer.


While the dynamics of the ejecta surge around a cratering event can be well-described in aggregate, the conditions at any given point in the surge tend to be chaotically dynamic. Pockets of gas, pockets of vaporized volatiles (such as water or water ice), layers of soft rock underlying layers of harder rock -- all of these things cause localized discontinuities within adjacent parts of the surge flow.

That's all a rather long-winded way of saying that conditions can be just right to cement some large blocks of ejecta, while adjacent portions of the flow can consist of far more shattered blocks of rock. It's also possible for surge conditions to favor the ejection, whole, of some large blocks of pre-existing rockbeds while all around these large blocks you find far smaller, shattered pieces.

In other words, the conditions in the local ejecta surge around a cratering event could account for the LOGH to be either cemented ejecta (i.e., a breccia of some sort) or an intact block of rockbed. So, in this case, theories aren't enough -- we need (hint, hint) to go take a close look at it (hint, hint) to determine the truth either way (hint, hint).



-the other Doug

The only version of the Beeb we get here in the States (well, at least the only one I get with my Comcast cable TV system) is what they call BBC-America, or BBCA. I have no real idea what programming from the various "mainline" BBC channels get combined into BBCA, though. I do enjoy listening to the BBC World News at least once a week -- IMHO, it's good to get some news from foreign viewpoints on a regular basis.

-the other Doug

How about this:

Any body that's half the size of Earth's Moon or larger, and that orbits directly around the Sun and not around another body, is a planet. Smaller non-satellite bodies in the inner system are asteroids. Smaller non-satellite bodies outside of the inner system are iceteroids.

Think we could get that past the IAU?

-the other Doug

PBS does some very good documentaries on space themes. In fact, right at this very moment I am watching a PBS documentary in the "American Experience" series entitled "The Race to the Moon." It's an hour-long piece on the Apollo 8 mission, including a lot of very interesting recent interviews with Susan Borman, Marilyn Lovell and Valerie Anders. It features extremely good and accurate CGI animation of the various maneuvers, a very good preamble setting up the circumstances in which Apollo 8 flew, and some pretty rare footage (including onboard voice recorder tapes, some of the final TV transmission during TEI and snippets of Walter Cronkite's CBS coverage of the flight).

And while it happened coming up on 20 years ago, I remember PBS devoting more than six hours to "Neptune All Night," live coverage of the entire Voyager 2 close encounter with the Neptune system. I was *very* happy with my "national TV system" that night!

-the other Doug

And nothing makes the practice in archeology right or useful, either.

Hoarding useful (and interesting!) data is simply not justifiable to me. I appreciate it when a PI says "We've put so much of our lives into this, isn't it fair that we get to see and use the data before anyone else sees it?" But while someone may have spent years or decades of their lives working on these programs, his or her salary almost invariably comes from the public.

If I'm helping to pay salaries, I don't think it's fair that they keep their work secret from me, or want to release to me only those bits of it they choose to show me. As an American who grew up in the 1960s, that kind of behavior was always characterized as the Soviet approach to things. It was invariably criticized, and cited as one of the reasons why the Soviets had such high failure rates in their space programs.

The whole thing *feels* like an attempt on the part of the PIs to avoid any accountability for their work. These people are accountable to their supporting taxpayers and to humanity in general, *not* just for the publication of whatever small subset of their data they choose to show the world.

Maybe it's just an American cultural thing, I don't know, but I think Americans tend to mistrust people who hoard information. In America, people who keep secrets are usually thought of as people who have something to hide. I know that my basic emotional response to ESA's poor excuse for public outreach is "What the heck are they hiding from me, and why should they want to hide anything from me?"

This is the kind of behavior that just fuels the kooks and c0nspir@cy guys, too -- how many times have those guys pulled the line "if this probe took thousands of pictures, what's in the ones they haven't shown us??? Why are they keeping them secret???"

-the other Doug

Possibly? POSSIBLY???

I'll be glad to be proven wrong, but I'll frankly be surprised if we see any of these pictures.

***sigh***

-the other Doug

Had the Voyagers used the same release policy as ESA, we would have seen two or three images each of Jupiter and Saturn, maybe one each of Uranus and Neptune, and if we were really lucky one image each of each of the targeted moons. And we would have waited for from six months to three years after the images were acquired before seeing them.

After all, the general public has absolutely no need or desire or interest in seeing more than one or two images of something, right? That kind of thing is obviously only of *any* interest to the PIs, right?



-the other Doug