I have a copy, though it's rather too large (at 892KB) to simply attach to a post here, I think. And I don't know that Doug wants us cramming the site's storage space full of movie files that most of us have already seen...

-the other Doug

What, you mean the current speculation tossed out by Squyres that Home Plate was actually once the concrete flooring under a thoat pen?

Nope -- sorry, didn't catch it...

-the other Doug

Oh, I'm not saying that Hayabusa was a failure. Far from it. I'm just saying that to brand her "the little spacecraft that could" when she quite literally could *not* do several of the things she was designed to do is a little bit like calling Galileo a 100% successful mission. Or calling the Ranger program a resounding success because three of the nine spacecraft worked properly. Or like insisting that Deep Impact would have been a really great mission even if it hadn't managed to hit the comet with its impactor. Or like hailing the MERs as great successes even if they had never been able to roll off of their landers.

MGS was a spacecraft that could. So are the MERs. Each achieved all of its pre-flight mission objectives, and then some. Even though Hayabusa returned an awful lot of really good data and images, a lot of its major objectives weren't achieved. I was really looking forward to seeing data from Minerva, for example, and I'm still disappointed that the whole sequence got fouled up.

Hayabusa is at best a partially successful mission. I truly appreciate what it managed to accomplish but to hail it with such superlatives when it partially failed seems wrong to me.

-the other Doug

Hmmmm... she apparently failed in her primary mission, of getting a sample of the asteroid. She also failed to properly deploy her little lander. Half of her engines have failed, and it's still not a very good bet that she'll come home.

If that's your idea of a vehicle that "can," remind me not to buy a used car from you...

-the other Doug

If you're talking about bleeding off NH or Voyager-like speeds, then you're talking about something going between 10 and 20 km/sec. Even with carefully shaped trajectories, you're talking about only a minute or two of passage through Triton's extremely, extremely thin atmosphere.

Just how many fancy maneuvers you think you'll have time to do in such a time frame?

-the other Doug

Too bad all I get is an Imageshack page with a link to host my own pictures, but no image...

-the other Doug

You got that right! I'm a good 25 to 30 degrees of latitude south of the Arctic Circle here in Minnesota, and on the summer solstice the sun sets a little north of directly northwest (at about 9:40 p.m.) and in the six or so hours it remains below the horizon, a faint glow never completely disappears from the northern sky. The glow rotates across full north and then flowers into a north-northeast dawn, between 3:30 and 4 a.m.

I love summer up here -- but of course, we also get the obverse in winter, when the sun rises at 8:30 a.m. and sets by 4:20 p.m., never rising (even at noon) much above thirty degrees off the horizon...

-the other Doug

Must be non-baryonic dark matter...

-the other Doug

That sounds like a paper written by a Professor at the University of the Dukes of Hazzard...

-the other Doug

Yep -- while the energy costs to get "up the hill" are high, they're not much higher, relatively, than a lot of other things. For example, I've seen numbers that say a fully-fueled 747 has enough energy available, in its fuel tanks, to put the plane into orbit. It takes that much energy to fly a 747 halfway across the globe. But in flying at airliner speeds, the 747 releases the total energy much more slowly than needed to accelerate to orbital velocity.

If you could expend all of the energy in a 747's tanks in about six or seven minutes, you could, indeed, put it into orbit... (shades of Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers!)

-the other Doug

No, I've been assured that there is no chance of any impact on Earth of any pieces of comet Hamner-Brown er, McNaught...

-the other Doug

Yes, but I'll remind y'all that the Soviets used to fly high-power radarsats to track U.S. naval movements, and their power requirements were so high that they were equipped with nuclear fission piles. It was one of these satellites that crashed in Canada and spilled plutonium over the countryside.

It's rather difficult to get the raw power you need for such powerful radars with solar or thermoelectric power sources...

-the other Doug

Whereas we in Minneapolis get NASA-TV on our cable system, even though our cable system has been through two ownership changes in the past 10 years (local company Paragon bought by Time-Warner, which then sold out to Comcast in a shady "we'll give you this market if you give us another market" deal).

I'm told we get NASA-TV because one of the local high schools insists on having it available and actually uses its own satellite dish to pull it in. They then share the feed with the cable company. I was concerned that we would lose NASA-TV forever here when it went digital (requiring a somewhat pricey new decoder box to pull in), but it's still on 24/7 in Minneapolis proper.

Now, if we could just get the programmers in Houston to give us a little more variety in programming -- we seem to get an *awful* lot of the kiddie programming (including one called "An Astronaut's Life" or somesuch, which features Sunni Williams prominently with no explanation as to how she's on a stage at MSC and at the same time is the FE on the ISS... ). We also get nothing all night (at least some of the time) but interviews with the crew of whichever Shuttle flight is next up, which is fine -- except it's *all* they run overnight, sometimes, for several months prior to a flight. It gets a little old after the 40th or 50th time you've seen it.

I'm an old guy, I admit (51 years young last birthday), but I would really like to see more of the films made of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights back in the 60's and 70's. Every once in a while we get one of them, but not often enough for me...

However, it *is* nice to get the press conferences, even if I have to wait for them to be re-run sometimes. I was very pleased to see and hear Alan Stern and John Spencer, both active posters to our little forum, being so delightfully enthusiastic about the Jupiter encounter. I wonder a bit, though, if Alan's statement about how we just can't get as much science out of NH as possible because we can't afford a Voyager-sized staff for it might have been aimed at members of the new Congress...

-the other Doug

Man -- with all of the once-in-a-century comets, you'd think that I'd have had a chance to actually *see* one by now!



-the other Doug

I'm not sure if you'd want to eat any fish you caught on Titan, though, Thu. I'd bet they would have ethane for blood... of course, that means you might want to stuff your catch into your heating unit!

-the other Doug

Perhaps actual topographic features and gross albedo markings ought not be on the same maps. But I definitely think that some form of albedo-marking map ought to be officially recognized. As long as amateur skygazers on Earth look at Mars through their 'scopes, they ought to have the pleasure of saying that they saw Syrtis Major, or Sinus Meridiani, when they glanced through the eyepiece. Or, at the very least, have the pleasure of saying that they saw *something* they can name, as opposed to "you know, that big dark triangular feature" or "the big dark thing that looks like a claw-ended arm, right along the equator."

For me, the great reaching claw of Sinus Meridiani has always been the "face" of Mars, the look that defined the planet in pre-space age telescopic images. The fact that one of our plucky little rovers is sitting at the tip of the Meridiani claw is just cool beyond words, to me...

-the other Doug

I will point out that in the "NASA Gallery" segments on NASA-TV during overnights, they often replay recent press conferences. Sometimes over and over.

So, it's quite possible that those with access to NASA-TV will be able to catch the press conference at some point this evening (or in the wee hours of tomorrow morning) in replay.

-the other Doug

Looks a lot like Luna 9 (or Mars 3, for that matter), doesn't it?

-the other Doug

All I can say is that, of the Comet McNaught, I've seen....


.....


.....


.....


.....


(wait for it)


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Naught!



-the other Doug

Steve Squyres came up with a ratio of MER time to human time. I believe he said that what it took the MER an entire sol to do, a human geologist could do in about 30 seconds. This was in terms of moving to a sample site, selecting a rock or patch of soil to examine, using your rock hammer to break off a chunk or a rock pick to clean off a spot, and then using a hand lens to look at the rock's structure.

Of course, the MERs can do other things in situ that a human observer can't -- getting images in multiple wavelengths (as opposed to taking pictures that can be analyzed later), taking APXS and Mossbauer readings (as opposed to simply picking up rocks for later lab analysis) -- but all in all, robotic explorers are going to take a lot longer to accomplish most geologic tasks than human explorers will take.

-the other Doug

I'm unsure whether this observation should go here, or in the policy forum, or what -- but here goes.

In America, science and research operate in a "publish or perish" mode. Every scientific investigation (except for those undertaken by the defense and intelligence agencies) is *designed* into a process that results in articles and papers which document the investigation and its results. It's nearly impossible to get funding for anything here in the U.S. that doesn't lead to published results -- if you spend grant money and don't publish results, you don't get any more grant money.

Now, while there is similar pressure to publish in Europe, I imagine, there is (from what I have observed) somewhat less pressure to do so. As long as you don't need more money, a European scientist can take as long as he/she wishes to play with his/her data and publish results. There is less pressure to get your results analyzed and published than in the U.S., since in the U.S. that next grant is always riding on whether or not you got the results of your last grant's investigation published.

I don't know why there seems to be less publishing-pressure in Europe than in the U.S. -- perhaps it's a manifestation of the same phenomenon that saw the French CEO of a primarily American consulting firm come to its Chicago offices and complain about American productivity, announcing cuts in holidays and vacation allottments, while his European employees all received six *weeks* of vacation time annually (as a start-up benefit) as opposed to the five *days* of vacation per year that he was now imposing on his American employees of less than five years' employment. In other words, perhaps it is simply a slower, less pressing culture in Europe (but with an expectation that someone else will work their butts off for them) that reduces the publishing pressure in Europe.

Then again, you have the old Soviet system. In the Soviet planetary exploration program, while it resulted in a number of papers and some reduction of the data received, it seems that their investigators could publish if they wanted, but that there was no expectation of scientific results. The simple act of sending the probe to another planet and receiving *any* data (usually pictures) satisfied the political goals that generated the funding, and so actually reducing the data and analyzing it seemed to have been a poorly-attended-to afterthought. I mean, just how many of the tens of thousands of Lunakhod images still exist? How much of the fields-and-particles data returned by *any* Soviet planetary probe is available for further analysis? Like I said, there seemed to be no real interest in doing anything with the science returns from Soviet probes, except in some cases by a few individuals who were really interested in the results. There was no connection between funding and even *looking* at the science return, it seemed.

So, that seems to be the spectrum. And while the pressure to analyze the data and publish your findings seems to get a little more accomplished here in the U.S. than gets done (or at least released to us peons) in Europe, I will point out that, even though the data return may be lacking, the purely political motivators for the Soviet explorations got nearly as much done as the somewhat more scientifically motivated American explorations. We just didn't see as much in the way of results from it.

-the other Doug

IIRC, the analysis of the Ares Vallis site and the rocks found in the vicinity of the lander were found to be consistent with transportation and deposition of large rocks via catastrophic flood events. At larger scales, the Ares Vallis region certainly looks to have been the site of catastrophic outflow flooding, though it must have happened a long time ago.

However, it interests me a great deal how MRO reveals that the rocks in the "Rock Garden" seem to be defined be the rim of one of the many, many linearally-alined elongated depressions that make up the terrain in the area. And that a majority of large rocks visible in the MRO image are alined along the rims of these depressions.

If many to most of the rocks in the area were washed there via catastrophic floods, why should they appear preferentially along rim crests? From above, a majority of these "rock gardens" seem to have been the rims of the original depressions, which have since been eroded away to leave blocks of the materials that made up the rims.

Unless the *entire* surface we see here was laid down by catastrophic floods, down to a depth of several meters, then it seems to me that the rims of depressions in the ground ought to be made of the materials that pre-dated the floods. Which means that the surface that was flooded was already made up of rocks with a seemingly wide variety of types and formations.

So, by the process of elimination, we seem to have two different possibilities: either the entire surface at Ares Vallis (and, by extension, at other catastrophic outflow channels on Mars) is made up of rocks and fines deposited there by the flooding event(s), or the original terrain that was scoured down to what we see today was already composed of all different types of rocks, from frothy and andesitic lavas to sedimentary and conglomerate rocks.

Interesting...

-the other Doug

Pardon me -- I came here to arrange a holiday!



-the other Doug

On the Moon, the soil only looked darker where the atronauts' feet had disturbed it in the area right around the LM. As Phil has pointed out, this is because the area right around the LM has been "swept" of loose dust and appears lighter than the surrounding terrain. This is obvious in all of the images of landed LMs that were taken during the J missions.

From some angles, lunar rover tracks in areas away from the LM could look lighter than the surrounding terrain, and from other angles they looked darker. Same with astronaut bootprints -- though for the most part, away from the LMs, the bootprints were usually the same color as the surrounding soils.

On Mars, there are more active chemical reactions happening (or potential) in the soil than on the Moon, and Mars features a so-called "duricrust" over much of its soils which protects a possibly different chemical environment just below. I can well imagine that buried soils are darker than soils exposed to the very low-pressure atmosphere and the nearly unfiltered UV radiation to which the surface is exposed.

I think it's interesting that this dark quality seems to fade over time with at least some exposure to surface conditions.

-the other Doug

Bob, here I thought you were going to suggest eating Martian babies!

Of course, had you done so, you would have deserved a good Swift kick in the pants...

-the other Doug