I will point out that, according to some experts I've heard expound on the subject, interferometry doesn't work well in visible wavelengths of light, and that with current technology you almost need a physical connection between the two oberving points to time your observations such that interferometry is possible in the first place. Sort of put a huge damper on the concept of placing several large telescopes all over the globe to achieve a virtual aperature of thousands of km...

-the other Doug

The only exception that I am aware of in terms of there being any need to "hold up the rocket" was the original Atlas. And even with that vehicle, it was not done by structures at the pad. That original Atlas vehicle was made with a skin milled so thin that the tanks needed to be pressurized, or the whole missile would crumple and "deflate," like a large metal balloon!

So, for those early Atlas vehicles, when not filled with pressurized fuel, they were filled with pressurized air, which held the rocket up.

Now, on the other hand, you can argue the position that bolting a rocket down at the base "holds it up" since without such a connection at the base, many rockets would fall over sideways, especially under any kind of wind pressure. Most rockets are attached to their pad structures with explosive bolts (the entire weight of the STS vehicle on the pad, for example, passes through the SRB engine nozzle assemblies, which are attached to the pad with explosive bolts). Some, like the Saturn V, have (or had) hold-down arms which keep the vehicle firmly attached to the pad until all engines are up to full thrust and all other indications are clear for release.

The most fascinating pad-release mechanism I ever heard of was for the Saturn V. After the explosive bolts were blown and after the hold-down arms released the vehicle, the Saturn V still had one more process to go through. Huge soft-iron rivet-head bolts were attached to the rocket and through slots in the launcher which were smaller than the bolt heads. As the vehicle lifted off, these bolts were pulled through the slots and the soft iron was literally pulled through the slots, deforming like thick taffy as they pulled through. This attenuated vibrational shocks and especially any tendency for the rocket to lift off in very short, rhythmic "spurts" which could shake the whole stack dangerously. So, the final contact between a Saturn V and the ground was four huge soft-iron bolts that were forced to extrude through slots in the launcher. Fascinating stuff!

-the other Doug

I'll go for Sol 1066 -- and will be looking carefully for any Normans who may be storming up behind it...

-the other Doug

I toyed with designing a Graphic Omniscient Device, once. But no matter what I did, it ended up looking like me...

-the other Doug

"Just wait until I hit you with my disintegrating ray gun!"

PPPHHHHFFFT!

"Well, whaddya know -- it disintegrated!"



-the other Doug

My guess is that Sojourner is out of frame to the south (assuming north is up in the image), at about x=-4 and y=-40 or -50. I think she got back to the ramp area, started to circle the lander, angled left to avoid the rock garden, and kept angling such that she kept heading south. I think she'll have ended up a bit of a distance from the lander but not all that far. As I say, about another 20 grid squares below the bottom of the image.

-the other Doug

I'm about as positive as I can be that the sign was over the door to theatre 6 of the cineplex, and was dedicated to Mars. Hence, "Mars" and "6" on the sign. No intentional reference was made, I'd wager, to any Soviet probes to Mars...

-the other Doug

This brings up an interesting possibility in my mind.

If a close binary black hole causes the event horizons to fluctuate, then some mass and energy that has fallen inside the event horizon *ought* to be able to escape again. Could it be possible to fly a probe on a trajectory that intersects the event horizon in such a manner that it then flies *out* of the horizon, intact, as the horizon fluctuates?

I grant you, it's unlikely that we could ever find such a black hole binary pair to which we could ever travel... but it's an intriguing possibility.

-the other Doug

Mucho, mucho gracias for the maps, Phil and Tayfun. To borrow a phrase... fascinating!

-the other Doug

It's not merely a song about Benson, AZ. It's the somewhat improbable theme song of the John Carpenter student film-cum-cult-classic, Dark Star. It's a country-and-western song in format, but the lyric is about a lonely guy, flying through interstellar space at relativistic speeds, and thinking of everything -- and one special person -- he left behind.

If I can recall the words...

A million suns shine down,
But I see only one.
When I think I'm over you,
I find I've just begun.
The years move faster than the days,
There's no warmth in the light.
How I miss those desert skies,
Your cool touch in the night.

CHORUS:
Benson, Arizona, blew warm wind through your hair.
My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there.
Benson, Arizona, the same stars in the sky,
But they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, you and I.

Now the years pull us apart,
I'm young and now you're old.
But you're still in my heart,
And the memory won't grow cold.
I dream of times and spaces
I left far behind,
Where we spent our last few days,
Benson's on my mind.

(CHORUS)



-the other Doug

Yes, but...

I seem to recall that various analyses of Enceladus and the location of its "hot spots" indicated that the entire moon may have heeled over during its lifetime, repositioning its polar areas to equatorial regions and vice-versa. If the plumes were originally pushing at Enceladus from, say, 20 degrees south, could they have (very slowly) pushed the entire body around such that the plumes are now coming from the south pole?

-the other Doug

Too bad it would cost me $30USD to take a look at it...

-the other Doug

Bringing it down to spacecraft terms, though, while the outgassing won't have any appreciable affect on Enceladus' orbit (translation), how about its orientation in regards the rest of the Saturnian moon system (attitude)?

It takes a lot less energy to change something's attitude than to change its orbit...

-the other Doug

Wow! This view of the landscape is absolutely incredible. I've run out of superlatives -- I'm reminded of John Young, standing on the Moon, using the word 'spectacular' for the fourth time in five minutes, and then apologizing, saying you just run out of words...

From a geologic point of view, this image shows quite well that the boulder populations are concentrated on the floors and rims of depressions, but with a strong bias towards the west-northwest inner rims and east-southeast outer ramparts. This seems to match one of the two predominant sets of lineations; one set runs nearly horizontal through the scene, dipping only slightly to the south as it moves to the east, and seems to be composed mostly of dune, ripple and other aeolian features. The other set, which seems to align with the positioning bias of the boulder population, runs from east-southeast to west-northwest. (*) These lineations are rougher and expressed in larger features, the apparent sculpting of what now looks like a "scoured" terrain that, prior to the scouring event(s), featured a lot of 10- to 20-m craters.

Seeing as how the Chryse region was selected as a landing site because it's located in the midst of an apparent ancient catastrophic outflow channel, I guess you'd expect to see signs of directional scouring in the basic landforms. It looks to me like many of the boulders were deposited preferentially in the "downstream" sides of craters.

This image is, to me, far more compelling evidence of ancient catastrophic floods in the region than anything we actually saw from the surface.

* - All of the above directions assume that north is up in the image; I'm using them relative to this image only, and don't intend to convey that north is indeed straight up throughout the image.

-the other Doug

That's interesting, since NASA today announced their intention to build a south polar lunar base and have it permanently manned by 2024...

-the other Doug

"Okay, I've reached the floor of Melas Chasma.... can you hear me now? Good."



-the other Doug

In many of these images, I can almost convince myself that I see rover tracks, but only with the hindsight of knowing exactly where they're supposed to be. There are very few places where I can say with any certainty that I can see unambiguous images of tracks.

Interestingly, it's much easier to see the tracks that Oppy has made in the past few weeks around Victoria than it is to see the tracks up near Endurance, even though the surfaces around each are somewhat similar. I'm beginning to wonder how much of the lack of track definition in some of these images has to do with their intrinsic visibility (at the limits of HiRISE's resolution), and how much is due to weathering (and perhaps partial erasure) of the older tracks.

-the other Doug

I am struck by the number of 5- to 10-meter circular depression features I can see scattered through the dunes, both in the Payson view and (especially) in the Purgatory view linked above.

I'm not as familiar with the full panoply of drift structures as some others here -- are such circular features common in windblown drift/dune structures on Earth? 'Cause these look like cratering remnants to me...

-the other Doug

I wonder the same thing -- though I rather think that there are fewer than you might guess. One of the benefits of the ways in which technology was used and built upon during the 19th and 20th centuries was the relatively open environment in which new discoveries were made. We've spread pretty much every new discovery in every field across every single existing human society. Almost everything has been looked at from every cultural point of view currently extant.

Anything that we're missing by now is probably due to general human limitation, not just cultural limitation...

-the other Doug

Sagan has it mostly right -- with science relegated to "wizards" (be they religious or secular) who used it to maintain a sense of awe and fear in the populace, it just wasn't possible to apply the kind of collective brain-power that's needed to find applications for newly-discovered powers and principles.

However, there is one aspect that Sagan doesn't breach -- worldview. The ancient Chinese had made more scientific discoveries than the Greeks, Romans or Europeans did, and they did it thousands of years earlier. However, the Chinese view of existence denied that the real world could be modeled in any accurate way, since the real world was imbued by the Gods with a life-force that the modeler could not re-create. Therefore, even though the Chinese had electricity and gunpowder and steam power, their own view of how existence worked didn't allow them to really apply these technologies, because any modeling of larger systems via smaller systems was automatically disregarded. And without that crucial step in the logic process, development of technology just didn't occur.

There are those who believe that scientific rationalism was a result of the industrial revolution. I more believe that it was a cause...

-the other Doug

Why do I get this funny feeling that the people who work on HiRISE wake up in the morning to their HiAlarms, get out of their HiBeds, have some HiCoffee, ride the HiBus to work, and maybe break mid-day for some HiLunch?



-the other Doug

The only full-fledged geological analysis of the plains around Endurance that I've seen referenced anywhere seems to call them "materials removal features," or somesuch. From what I've been able to tell, they identified them as cracks that formed in the upper surface due to removal of volatiles (i.e., ice and water) from the substrate as part of the long-term evaporation process.

That does pose the problem of the lack of aeolian fill -- if these cracks were formed three billion years ago when all the water is supposed to have evaporated out of this place, why haven't they been filled with dust by now?

-the other Doug

I was just thinking exactly the same thing, Scott. I agree with you -- and with Occam.

-the other Doug

Yep, money. And an inability to juggle things to make more money available to the manned program for an earlier flight date. (Recall, Griffin wanted to divert even more money from other programs with the goal of getting Orion flying by 2012, and that's not been successful, either. Some programs got cut, but at least some of those cuts were restored.)

I will say that ten years to achieve an eight-year schedule isn't all that unusual, as far as percentages go. Not one single manned spaceflight program has *ever* stuck close to its initial schedules. Mercury was originally scheduled to start manned flights in 1959; Gemini in late 1963 to early 1964; and Apollo in 1966. Each ran two to three years behind those initial schedules, and each had greater annual funding levels through development (when viewed as a percentage of total development cost) than Orion has to deal with.

-the other Doug

I'm assuming that Oppy did a complete 360-degree pan from its "high point" perch at CSM, right? Oughtn't we be getting just about the best view of the surrounding terrain (including back the way we came) as is possible, since we are at the elevation of the first piece of Victoria that was visible along our route?

I wonder -- can we see Endurance from here?

(I have to admit, the line that just crossed my mind was "Oppy! We can see your house from up here!" )

-the other Doug