It looks to me like Pando is right and the middle feature is indeed a far rim feature. In the anaglyph, the most prominent right-most ridge of the near rim also shows what appears to be benches. There seem to be several indications of horizontal banding, both in the raised rim features and in what seems to be visible of the crater wall. And I think I see what looks like a small, subdued but bright crater on the far wall to the right of the raised far rim feature, only a little ways down from the lip.

Does anyone see anything in the MOC image that would correspond to a smallish, light-toned crater in what would be the far wall from here?

-the other Doug

I keep wondering if the specific forms we see in the soil right now (the granule size ranges, the organization of the granules into three basic sizes and shapes, color and hardness) can tell us something about the conditions of the impact target at the time of the impact.

Does any of the soil material suggest that the impact target was wet or otherwised volatile-enriched? I'm assuming that at least some of the granules we see are pieces of impact melt, and I suspect the conical "drops" that some have labeled tecktitic are the most likely candidate for being impact melts. Does their shape and size, and the nearly ubiquitous hole in the center, suggest anything about volatiles content of the target? Or about its composition? Do we have to assume that their present shape and distribution is the result of erosional processes, or is there anything of their formation still evident in what we can see?

Unfortunately, the three granule types seem so thoroughly mixed that it will be impossible for Oppy to get a good specific composition of just one of the types... so we'll have to infer composition of the various types from the aggregate Mossbauer and APXS readings we get from it. But I think that, if we could answer some questions about the constituents of this soil, we'd have some further insight into the chemical and climatic history of the region.

-the other Doug

You know, this image is another example of a Mars that looks unlike any other place on Mars we've ever seen. The Viking landing sites, the Pathfinder site, even Gusev -- they're all rocky, to one degree or another.

This place -- this is eerily unlike anything else.

Gives you an appreciation, deep in your gut, of how widely varied a planet Mars actually is.

This is the kind of thing that really excites my sense of wonder...

-the other Doug

This is just a personal gripe of mine, but... there really is no such word as "orientate." "Orientation" is a noun made from the verb "orient," to position. If you want to use a verb for the purpose, please use the correct one -- orient. The proper way to say the above is "we can see a suggestion as to how the rocks are oriented."

As a writer, I just have to express this kind of thing every once in a while. If I keep it bottled up for too long, you'll end up hearing an enormous explosion centered on the suburbs of Minneapolis...

-the other Doug

What, you mean it might only generate six instead of eight publically-released images?



-the other Doug

Marc, if you think Orion as a serious proposal for space transportation is outlandish, you ought to read up on the nuclear-powered aircraft they were trying to design back in the 1950s. The thing would have powered jet engines with a fission reactor, and IIRC, part of the process injected fissile material directly into the engines. The contrails of that airplane would have been so highly radioactive, they wouldn't have had to use it to drop bombs. They'd just have to overfly the enemy a few times and wait 15 years for them all to die of radiation poisoning and cancer.

-the other Doug

Thanks, Jim -- there have been so many mergers of the various aerospace companies I knew back in the 60s through the 80s, it can be hard to keep up with who used to be what, anymore...

Again, thanks!

-the other Doug

Interesting reversal, that. LockMart, IIRC, incorporates what used to be Grumman Aerospace, the builder of Apollo's LM, while Boeing incorporates what used to be North American Aviation/North American Rockwell/Rockwell International, which built Apollo's CSM. Now they've switched roles...?

-the other Doug

I seem to recall that there was considerable pressure to get Oppy off on the night she actually launched -- the speculation was that if she didn't get off that night, she might not be able to launch at all. Perhaps there was a weather system approaching that made the last week of the launch window look iffy? All I recall for certain is that the press was speculating in a "now or never" vein...

-the other Doug

OK, kewl. I know that Oppy got off literally at the very end of her launch window, as well, due to issues with (among other things) debonding of cork insulation around the booster. IIRC, Squyres made the comment at one point that no one ever proved that the cork actually stayed bonded to the vehicle during flight, and that they might have left a trail of cork pieces all along the Atlantic Missile Range...

-the other Doug

And that's the problem. The terrain between Victoria and the large crater is all etched terrain, with an awful lot of those troublesome dunes. Some of them look rather larger than what we saw between Endurance and here.

Also, the large crater appears to be more heavily dust mantled than other features in this vicinity. Even if Oppy were to last long enough to get there, she may not be able to traverse the terrain around the big crater.

-the other Doug

IIRC, they had to launch the Deltas from the same pad, so there had to be a separation of several weeks between the launches. At the beginning of the launch window to reach Mars in 2003, the amount of energy required to get a MER to Mars was within the capabilities of the more basic Delta II configuration. But by the end of the launch window, the energy requirement was enough greater that the Heavy configuration was required.

The problem, I believe, was more that the MERs stretched the ability of the Delta II right up to its limits. You oculdn't send anything much heavier than the MER package to Mars on a Delta II in any configuration. They nearly maxed out the launch and EDL systems with the MERs.

-the other Doug

Trust me, Bill, they didn't name Orion after the defunct atom-bomb-powered spacecraft concept. It was named after the constellation, just as the Apollo 16 Lunar Module "Orion" was named after the constellation.

And while Voyager was originally the name of a Saturn V-launched probe to land on and search for life on Mars, no one seemed to think it inappropriate that we actually sent two Voyagers to the outer planets.

Although, speaking of re-using names over the course of both proposed and actual spacecraft, I think that NASA would be wise to retire the space shuttle Endeavour before the other two. You see, the two shuttles that have been lost were named Challenger and Columbia, each name having been used for Apollo modules (Columbia was the Apollo 11 CSM and Challenger was the Apollo 17 LM). Endeavour, in addition to being the last space shuttle built, was also the Apollo 15 CSM. If the two-point graph pattern extends to a third point, the fallacy of statistics suggests that Endeavour will be the next shuttle to be lost...

-the other Doug

I'm not positive how the NASA dieticians made slices of bread "zero-G friendly." Perhaps they came up with a type of bread that doesn't get very crumbly. But by the time of the Apollo flights, there were not only pre-packaged meal packs, there was also a pantry of food stuffs the crew could raid any time they liked for snacks and meal items not included in their planned meals.

For example, there is a fairly well-known demonstration of the make-yourself-a-sandwich fixings during the first TV broadcast from Apollo 11 during transearth coast. Buzz Aldrin pulled out a pack of bread (two slices wrapped in a bag) and a tin of ham spread. He took out a slice of bread, opened the tin of ham spread, and used his spoon (the only eating utensil they actually had) to spread a big glop of ham spread on the bread. Of course, unlike how we would do things here on Earth, Aldrin then set the partially-full can of ham spread spinning in mid-air and watched as its uneven mass distribution caused it to deviate from a smooth spin...

-the other Doug

Both sites are loading normally for me, at the moment. Each site looks like it has for some months, now -- in formatting, anyway.

-the other Doug

Does Iapetus' ridge have to have been created by a ring orbiting Iapetus? Could Iapetus have traversed a ring strand (or series of ring strands) ejected from Saturn's early ring system while the moons settled into their various stable resonances?

-the other Doug

They put the waste containers and used food containers into jettison bags and left the bags on the lunar surface. The final bags were tossed out the hatch in the final clean-out cabin depress.

-the other Doug

Very true. If we want to go back to the original definition, a planet is any point of light in the sky that "wanders," i.e., that does not move in the same manner as the stars within the celestial firmament. If we go back to that definition, then any solar system object, no matter how small, that is visible from Earth is a planet.

I guess we could debate whether or not an object must be naked-eye visible to qualify...

-the other Doug

You guessed it -- they left their urine and feces on the Moon, in appropriate containers. They also left the leftovers of their meals, which also contain biomatter. (One comment Gene Cernan made, during a depressurization of his Lunar Module Challenger, was that he saw a piece of bread fly out the open hatch. IIRC, later on, he saw this piece of bread on the ground and thought it was a highly unusual rock. He even went so far as to bag it as a sample before Schmitt, who was chuckling mightily under his breath, told him not to bother...)

-the other Doug

Great! You don't know how happy that makes me...

-the other Doug

Rodolfo, it takes several *weeks* after they attach the orbiter to the external tank and SRBs to connect everything up and check out all of the connections. They do it in the VAB so that they can do all that work inside, without having to worry about the weather (and winds, which can get dangerous at 300 feet above the ground).

If they were to take the orbiter off the stack at the pad and roll it indoors on its wheels, it would take less time overall to get the orbiter indoors, true. But it would 1) leave the external tank and the SRBs exposed on the pad, and 2) would require a far longer launch delay, since it would take three to four weeks to re-connect all of the orbiter systems and check everything out when they re-attached it to the stack.

The concept of the mobile launcher was developed for Apollo, when they thought they might have to launch 20 or 30 Saturns a year in order to reach the Moon. The only way to support that kind of launch flow was to have a separate building where they assembled the rockets and their spacecraft, and then bring the whole thing out to the pad. In other cases, rockets and their payloads *are* assembled at the pad -- Delta II's were done that way, and I think the Delta IV's and Atlas V's are also assembled at the pad. But for vehicles that you want to launch on a fairly frequent basis, it makes a lot more sense to put them together indoors and then move the whole thing out to the pad.

-the other Doug

Exactly -- I was simple exaggerating for emphasis. Though, as I've said, I did think that the stay at Overgaard was overly long, and bespoke more caution than I think is appropriate with a resource that is on the verge of being within visual range of a great stratigraphic sequence (and yet might die any day).

As I said, I'd like to see just a touch more boldness, here. Then again, I'm not the guy who has to answer for it if they decide to be bold and something goes wrong. It just seemed to me that they spent tens and tens of sols figuring out how to drive Oppy without having to stow the arm in the normal manner, when the conclusion they finally came to was that they ought to just proceed as normal and hope the remaining winding doesn't give way. Any time you spend that large a fraction of a resource's useful lifetime investigating procedures that you decide not to use, I think someone is being overly cautious. Or that the debate over how to proceed is being allowed to run on *way* too long.

-the other Doug

Gee, Doug, are you saying I ought to go out and get a book with DON'T PANIC written on the cover in large, friendly letters?



I'm not panicking. I'm just observing that Oppy's remaining useful lifetime is finite, and that I thought the time spent (longer than the original Prime Mission length) at Overgaard, last time there was an IDD issue, was inappropriately long. I think it's time to be a touch less cautious and a touch more bold.

Just a touch, mind you...

-the other Doug

Yes, I think we should. After all, he was once asked whether or not he might ever think about building a second shed. That's all it needs...



-Doug "No Sheds" Van Dorn

If the IDD *has* stalled again, we're probably just gonna sit here for 90-110 sols, running one tiny test of the motors per day (four days a week), while people who should know better squander Oppy's remaining useful lifetime being overly cautious... *sigh*...

-the other Doug