If you're going to go the Eddie Izzard route, the first words upon the return to the Moon ought to be,

"You see, we have a flag..."

-the other Doug

That's OK, Dave -- just wait until it progresses, as it has with me, to the more advanced form, CRAFT...

-the other Doug

edit -- see, goes to show you, you were referencing a post of mine, and I totally had no memory of it... toD

Yes, but the lunar "structural grid" is a rather defunct concept, is it not?

-the other Doug

Over the past two days, I've been reading posts here saying things like "Well, look, it moved a little bit since the the last image taken, so I'm having a hard time stitching it" and things like that. I could be wrong (I often am... ...), but it seemed to me that this had been said after we had reached what was supposed to be her parking spot for the solar conjunction and all that photo work she'll do while we're out of touch.

If all that was being referenced was planned small, adjustment moves out to the perch position, that's great. I just hadn't heard much said about such fine-adjustment positioning, and so I wondered about the changes of position that had been discussed.

-the other Doug

I'm a little concerned about these small movements we're seeing in the images between sols, especially since I figured they had already reached their "perch" position.

How certain are we that the ground underneath us hasn't shifted under Oppy's weight?

-the other Doug

I keep hearing people wondering how a crater the size of Victoria could get filled in. It *is* counter-intuitive to try and imagine a crater this size being filled by windblown sand and later exhumed.

I think the key is in the fact that it may well have been that the crater wasn't filled by windblown sand. The ground that is collapsing into the crater, and thus ought to be of the same composition as anything that filled the crater, is made up of evaporite-cemented sandstone. Which could have been laid down by water, not wind.

It's more intuitive to me to propose the deposition of a thick layer that filled Victoria (and other craters) via aqueous deposition. If you had a shallow acidic sea, for example, which formed *over* a young Victoria and then gathered up tons and tons of air-fallen sulphurous volcanic ash from neighboring volcanic vents, it would create the kind of layering we see, and leave a quite erodable layer of soft sandstone that millions of years of winds could have removed, exhuming the original crater pit.

What do y'all think? Makes more sense to me than trying to fill over a Vickie-sized crater with only aeolian deposition...

-the other Doug

Agreed, Bill. The linear features on the inner wall in your posted subframe really can't be boulder tracks, in any event, unless Martian boulders roll sideways to the slope and not down it...

-the other Doug

OK, Fred -- with that flicker-gif, I have to agree, there may be an almost imperceptible brightening in the MOC image where the "rolling boulder" appears in the HiRISE image. And, to bolster that case, another boulder upslope of the "roller" looks rather similar in the MOC image, a very faint brightening.

And while a closer inspection of the HiRISE full-res image of Victoria does show some other features that might well be boulder tracks, none of them seem anywhere near as fresh as the one we've been discussing.

Ah, well...

-the other Doug

Darn it, Bill, I don't have Photoshop right at the moment,, so I don't have the ability to give you x:y coordinates. However, I can identify every other rock from the HiRISE image in the MOC image, but not the "rolling" boulder. In your grayscale image, the boulder ought to appear just above the bottom of the image, below a triangle-shaped grouping of boulders, and I see nothing in that position.

-the other Doug

I just brought up the full-res png image, and I'm positive, the boulder with the boulder track in the inner slope is the same boulder I don't see in the MOC image.

I also, after a quick but careful look around the full-res image, don't see any other boulders on Victoria's inner slope with boulder tracks. I don't see anything else that I convince myself is a boulder track at all. (And I can imagine that such tracks would get smoothed off by winds and slope pretty quickly.)

I'm thinking this boulder came down the hill since the MOC image was taken.

-the other Doug

Actually, I'm sort of impressed by this little coincidence -- the boulder of which I speak is the boulder that appears to lie at the end of a boulder track on the inside slope of the crater, as seen in a detailed subframe in this post by Antipode in the "...from overhead" thread.

As to the exact location of the cape -- drat, I don't have any of the naming conventions in front of me for the capes and bays. Well, let's see -- the next cape to clockwise around the crater is the Beacon, right? The Beacon cape, as seen from overhead, has a very sharp cut in it and a second smaller peak to clockwise of the most uplifted cape. But since this whole affair lies between two shallow bays, I count it as one main cape.

The boulder I'm talking about has rolled down from the counter-clockwise side of the next cape to clockwise from this Beacon cape complex. I'm pretty certain that the subframe in the post I linked above shows the same boulder.

-the other Doug

Great work, Tom. Interestingly, there are some ways in which the MOC image gives more information than the HiRISE image; the MOC image shows albedo differences more dramatically than the HiRISE image. I'm sure this is because of the higher sun angle. High sun angles give you better albedo differentiation and tend to wash out fine detail.

I'm sure that if HiRISE imaged the site at the same sun angle as MOC did, you'd see more similarity in the albedo features of the two images. But as it stands, it's actually helpful to have the MOC image to show you where to look for rocky strata exposed at or near the surface, since such features are somewhat less obvious on the HiRISE image.

Finally, after staring at your gif for several minutes, I keep thinking I see a boulder in the HiRISE image that doesn't have any correlated bright or dark spot in the same position in the MOC image. It's off one of the capes to the north-northwest, perhaps closer to straight north. (I don't have the gif loaded at the moment, and I can't get back to it while typing... grrr... so I can only rely on my less-than-perfect memory, here.) I can see correlating spots for a boulder slightly north of the one I'm talking about, and a conspicuous lack of anything at all visible below and south of it in the MOC image.

I don't see any changes in the central dune field, however...

-the other Doug

Hmmm... the stated pixel resolution in these images is 27.5 cm. How thick is the Pancam mast? I ask because the shadow of the mast is clearly visible, and I wouldn't think that the shadow of the mast would be anything close to 27.5 cm wide.

-the other Doug

Actually, the upper surfaces of the capes on the far rim, while they have some duning or rippling on them, seem to have been mostly *cleaned* of the dark upper material. The only part of the upper soils left on them seems to be the ripples.

-the other Doug

The problem is, if you tell these people that you need the energy available from an RTG to accomplish the mission, they'll just use their circular logic to conclude that any mission which requires nuclear power isn't worth the risk. Period. End of story. Their argument becomes: If you can't do the mission without using plutonium, then the mission doesn't need to be flown. If you insist that it does, then you are knowingly exposing them to an almost certain death. They're looking for a reason to hate and fear you.

No amount of logic or reasoning will budge them from that position, because they are not operating from a rational position. They are irrational and driven entirely by fear -- fear engendered by people who want to use a mass of fearful people to further their own goals of acquiring and retaining some form of power.

Keeping people afraid in order to achieve power is the worst, most profoundly sick and perverted mindset in the entire panoply of the human psyche. It's also one of the most common perversions. If it were possible to alter human nature, this is the place I would start.

-the other Doug

What always gets me is that one basic assumption of QM is, to put it very simplistically, the Universe (in any of its manifestations) must be observed in order to exist. Without anything out there to observe it, the Universe's near-infinite quantum states remain indeterminate.

The implications of that are truly profound.

-the other Doug

Since my name is Doug Van Dorn, I figured dvandorn was, well, appropriate...

As for my sign-off, well -- I had originally planned on signing my posts simply, like this:

-Doug

However, after my first post, as I read through the forum (which was, at that point, the old rlproject site), I saw that our Glorious Leader signed his posts almost identically. So, I figured, it was a little more appropriate (and perhaps a touch humorous) to sign myself, as I shall always be here,

-the other Doug

Mark, as I understand it, MGS will still be used as much as it has been in the past. They're just ending the practice of releasing a cool image every day from MGS -- it's more of a money/personnel limitation of people here on the ground to select an image, write a caption and upload it to the website.

The linked article from MSSS does say that MGS has received funding for yet another operational extension, so it will continue to operate...

-the other Doug

Hey -- you ain't renaming MY...

Oh, uh, sorry. Misunderstood...

-the other Doug

I just checked my old posts, and the term I used first on May 7, 2004 was "evaporation layers" to describe the light-toned rock beds evident throughout the Meridiani area. In a post I made ten minutes after that, I referred to individual rocks within the unit as evaporite.

Funny -- I made two posts on the old forum on 2/9/04, and then didn't post again until 5/7/04. Well, my marriage was falling apart at the time, I suppose I was allowed a little distraction... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

Actually, I believe I was the first one here on UMSF to refer to the light-toned, layered bedrock first seen in Eagle and later seen, well, everywhere at Meridiani as evaporite. It was about a week after I first used the term that I can first remember Squyres using it during a press conference or in one of his updates. I started using it because of the Anatolia-like crack features I could make out in the enhanced DIMES images, which suggested strongly to me the polygonality of dried sea floor beds. It just made sense to me that the surface we were seeing was the result of the dessication and shrinkage of a wet sand or mud unit; when the first-look at the rocks revealed them to be composed largely of sulfur salts, I laid the label of evaporite on them.

Technically, I suppose only the sulfur-salt matrix of the light-toned rocks are actually formed from evaporation of acidic, high-sulfur groundwater, and the resulting rocks are more accurately described as sandstones with evaporitic cementation. But since the high-sulfur-salt-content rocks were formed by multiple epochs of evaporation (and possibly sublimation?) of sulfurous, acidic water, it's just been a good shorthand to refer to them as evaporite rocks. And it differentiates them from the more pure sandstones that seem to underly the evaporite layers (the lower portions of the Burns formation).

I just keep wondering -- if there's a Burns formation, oughtn't there be a Smithers formation?

-the other Doug

I cannot conceive of them cutting off funding on either rover if they're still working and in reasonably good health.

The instruments are *already* on Mars, and have worked extraordinarily well. Just the Pancam images, with all their filters, are highly valuable, even if the mini-TES and the IDD sensors break.

Does it make sense to spend the money on platforms that are already performing on Mars, or on platforms that we hope will successfully land there someday? (Yes, we ought to do both -- but I can't see foresaking working explorers to put the money into another program that might possibly end up elsewhere from where they're targeted, like the bottom of the Atlantic...)

-the other Doug

Don, that is great work. Looks exactly like the Mariner 4 image quality. Thanks!

-the other Doug

And an excellent glog! Keep it up, Doug!

-the other Doug

Thanks, Mike. That's the kind of info I was looking for. (I used to own Wernher's book, a long time ago, but most of the details have escaped my aging memory... *sigh*...)

I guess the factor that isn't expressed in that quote would be the duration of such a military expedition. The American involvement in Iraq has reached or exceeded the cost of the ISS at this point (last I heard it was just about the same, and that was several months ago). We're talking in the range, in modern dollars, of between $150 and $200 billion, which is a little more than the current ISS cost, IIRC.

So, three years of a military expedition in a limited theater equate to a major manned spaceflight project? Interesting...

-the other Doug