And to add a rather belated set of good wishes -- I'm happy for you and Darius! And, of course, little Anahita.

An entire new Universe comes into being every time a new, unique viewpoint into our world comes to be. May Anahita's Universe be always fascinating and exciting. And full of love.

-the other Doug

No, I'm not thinking of the Ron Howard film -- this was indeed the TV camera's view of the Apollo 1 hatch. I can definitely recall seeing it on a TV news show, in which the commentator pointed out that there was no TV camera inside the capsule, but that we could see a little of what was going on through the hatch window. He talked through the brightening of the window, and then the feed cut off before the capsule breached and fires and smoke inside the White Room itself obscured the view.

I also recall hearing the voice tape on ABC pre-launch coverage of the Shuttle, but my memory is that it was prior to a scrubbed launch attempt of either STS-2 or STS-3. I seem to recall this because I didn't have a VCR at the time of the STS-1 launch, but I did for STS-2 and subsequent launches. I had been taping the launch attempt, and therefore had the audio tape on the VCR tape -- and I made a point of *not* saving it. I recorded over it when the launch was actually performed. Like you, I found its unexpected appearance disturbing and unwelcome -- although, as a student of the history of the Apollo program, I was somehow satisfied that I had heard it once, and was able to determine for myself exactly what was said.

But that scream -- it was Chaffee's -- will stay with me in my nightmares for as long as I live. And for that, I don't have any good things to say about Jules Bergman. Ever.

-the other Doug

I've been re-reading my copy of Murray & Cox's excellent history of Apollo (entitled, simply enough, "Apollo, The Race to the Moon"), and I just finished the section about The Fire.

I'm a little curious -- we've discussed here, before, about how Jules Bergman felt it necessary to run the audio tape of the final transmissions from Apollo 1 as the crew struggled in vain to get the hatch open. But, as I read the piece again this time, another fragment of memory popped up that I'm pretty sure happened, but that I can hardly believe was allowed.

On level A-8 of the Pad 34 service tower, where the White Room enclosed the spacecraft, there were several TV cameras. One was in the White Room itself. While there was no camera inside the spacecraft, that camera in the White Room was pointed directly at the Apollo hatch, and there are a number of descriptions of the hatch window becoming very bright as the fire swept across the cabin, with some blurry indications of motion as Ed White tried to open it.

I don't really see how it's possible, but I have a very clear memory of seeing a videotape of that camera as the fire flared. I saw it back in 1967, within a week or two of the event. It wasn't until 1981 ior 1982 that Bergman ran the comm tape, but I know with great certainty that I saw the video of the hatch window.

However -- again, I don't understand how it's possible that such a tape could possibly have been available to the TV networks at the time. I don't even see that it's likely that all of the pad cameras were even attached to video recorders (especially since videotape was a relatively new technology in 1967, and you'd need a separate huge recording deck for each camera on the pad).

Does anyone else remember ever seeing these images? If so, can you remember when and where?

Thanks in advance, people...

-the other Doug

Yes, I knew that, Mike -- but I felt that the Shakespearian reference was appropriate, and besides, everyone knew what I meant. Which means that, whether or not I abused the original Olde English meaning of the word, I did effectively communicate what I wanted to get across...

-the other Doug

I saw those paintings when I visited the crater back in the late 80's, Don. I was very, very impressed with them. (Of course, I've always been impressed with your work -- you're the Chesley Bonestell of our age.)

I'm sad to hear they've pulled them out of the display. Those paintings did an excellent job of bringing the reality outside the windows back to the event that brought that reality to life. I don't understand why the people running the museum would even think about removing them.

-the other Doug

And, like I said, Bill, the composition of the impact target makes a big difference in how much of the target is vaporized, how much melts, etc. If, for example, the target were mostly jarosite, or there was a thick layer of fairly pure jarosite, it would go from vaporization to pulverization with little melting in between. Some rock types simply don't melt in their primary form -- they pulverize into dust instead. And volatiles content affects the amount of mass vaporized, as well...

However, I rather doubt there was so much jarosite in Victoria's target as to inhibit widespread melting. My understanding is that the jarosite we've found is mostly in the blueberries, and the blueberries do not represent a large percentage of the evaporite down in this terrain. Though, if the blueberries resisted melting and were pulverized into sand and dust instead, that could explain the dark, smooth sandsheet remnants of the annulus.

-the other Doug

You know, Phil, it's funny that Ed Mitchell would misremember such a thing, when you and I remember that landing site so vividly. (Yes, I know Ed's getting up in years... but still.)

Even to this day, some 35 years and five months later, I still could walk up to a picture of the landing site and point out Triplet, Doublet, Weird, Outpost, Flank... and, of course, Cone and Old Nameless. Heck, I can even usually find the Cloverleaf and Star (which were Apollo 13 designations that got dropped during Apollo 14 planning), if the image includes enough of the surrounding terrain.

I don't know why that particular landing site was so memorable -- maybe because it was small enough for you to memorize all the fine detail (unlike some of the J-missions; I have to look at a map to tell you where Salyut and Earthlight were located at Hadley, for instance), but varied enough to provide some very memorable features.

One thing I never understood -- if sampling Cone was so important, why didn't they land in the valley between Cone and Triplet? They could have easily deployed the ALSEP to the north or south, in better and flatter terrain than up near Doublet, and would only have had to walk a half-mile to get to Cone and not the mile they ended up walking... oh, well, I guess it's a little late to be second-guessing such things.

-the other Doug

I, too, would have expected a little more time spent at Beagle, but they did a quick scratch-and-sniff, did they not? I think perhaps they're able to look at things in given wavelengths and with the mini-TES and can generalize to rock types we've seen and analyzed in detail elsewhere. And how close in do you have to get to be able to spend time later, leisurely going through your mini-TES and pancam mosaics, analyzing the way various layers seem to be jumbled around?

I think maybe they got enough to fill in most of the pieces -- and that maybe some of what they'd look for wouldn't be evident until after they get to Victoria anyway.

Besides, once we get done spending a couple of Martian years inside Victoria, we'll be able to study the other edge of the Victoria ejecta blanket as we cross it, heading towards the distant Big Crater...

-the other Doug

It's also very difficult to estimate the amount of material that was exhumed and deposited around Victoria. You would have to have a good topographic map of the contact between the ejecta blanket and its underlying layer. While this *might* be deduced from a seismic study of the neighborhood (the debris usually has more voids and more lower-density inter-boulder fill within its mass than the underlying pre-impact surface, and therefore has a different seismic signature), I don't think you could do much more than a WAG from the photo evidence.

I don't have the relative figures at hand (and it does vary by impact-target composition), but a certain amount of the target, and nearly all of the impactor, are usually vaporized at the moment of impact -- especially for a crater the size of Victoria. That vaporized material is sprayed in tiny droplets around the local area, and on planets with atmospheres, can be spread preferentially on the prevailing winds. *

As you reach the edge of the region in which the impactor and some of the target are both vaporized, heat and pressure are high enough to melt the rocks. This melt takes on the geochemical characteristics of *all* of the rock types that exist within the melt region of the impact event. It takes on the physical characteristics of igneous rock. This type of rock is typically called an impact melt.

Further out from the center of the blast, the temperatures and pressures decrease through the ranges at which some rock types melt, some are shattered into a fine dust, and others remain resistant to complete destruction. Those pieces which do not melt or shatter become clasts, embedded in a matrix of more easily melted rock. These are fine-clasted breccias -- the clasts in these breccias can be very tiny, indeed.

Even farther out, the impact melt and fine-grained breccias generated closer in to the blast are rapidly propelled through a portion of the target that is broken up, but not melted or pulverized. The still-liquid melts from closer in grab up these cooler rock pieces and make large-clast breccias. In many cases, the clasts in these breccias are pretty much pristine and unaltered examples of the rock that was originally swept up by the melt flow.

These are the kinds of things we ought to be seeing in Victoria's annulus as we traverse it. However, the fact that the Victoria area may well have had an active water table during or after the emplacement of the debris blanket muddies the waters (pardon the pun). The landscape has undergone massive aeolian erosion since the impact, and has possibly (but not definitively) undergone aqueous alteration since then, too. So the rocks will not necessarily resemble the examples we've seen of impact melts and breccias on Earth and the Moon.

* - In re the vaporized material -- it occurs to me that if there was any way to detect the extent of the deposition of vaporized elements from a given impact, we could back-model the atmospheric effects and set some limits on the nature of the atmosphere at the time of the impact. For instance, how thick it was...

-the other Doug

You know, this forum, while still incredibly rich and fulfilling, just isn't the same without Bob Shaw's wit and wisdom. I sincerely hope all concerned can get this connectivity problem fixed and we can see Bob back here soon.

-the other Doug

Well, I can tell you that, if the lingerie model who was briefly featured in this thread was "sold" to the American public as Victoria Crater, fully 90% of adult males would do everything that they could possibly do to, um, get inside Victoria... crater, that is...



-the other Doug

Well, Don, the U.S. of A. used those horribly toxic fuels to launch 10 manned Gemini capsules on the Titan II booster. And, of course, every lunar orbit insertion, every lunar descent and ascent, and every trans-Earth injection performed during Apollo used these fuels.

And, IIRC, the Shuttle uses these fuels for its reaction control system and its orbital maneuvering system.

And, oh yes, the CEV and LSAM are now planned to use these fuels.

I agree, they're horribly toxic, hard to handle, and even small leaks can have catastrophic effects. But the specific impulse of these fuels, along with their (relatively) easy storage over the course of a long mission, make them still the best choice for many applications...

-the other Doug

Finally got in and going, myself. Had an interesting one -- didn't take a screen cap or anything, since I just go along, give it my best shot, and go on to the next...

Anyway, there was one image that appeared to be pretty flat (no big slope on the subject), but two very, very small dark spots, maybe 1.5 microns or so based on the scale bar, came into focus at the deepest level. No track visible in any way, just a dark spot deep inside the aerogel. I marked the bigger of the two spots as a track, but that was a really soft identification.

I've also run across several images that do come into focus, but the perfect surface focus point is at the deepest focus setting on the adjustment bar. I reported those as "bad focus," since I figure the point of the exercise is to zoom your focus down into the aerogel. Any movie that doesn't let you get below the surface is, I figure, guilt of a focus problem.

Are y'all seeing the same kind of things?

Seems like almost all of the tracks I've seen are the ones in the test images... though my scoresheet says I've identified something like six tracks, and while a couple of them only have corroboration by one or two other people (out of 20 to 30 views), some of them have been pegged by a dozen or more people.

It's fun, and I feel like I'm actually doing something useful!

-the other Doug

For all of y'all who are old enough to remember Apollo 11 clearly -- you may want to chime in on this thread.

I woke up the other morning with a piece of music in my head, and after a moment I realized ti was the rather pompous orchestral music that ran behind the CBS intro to its coverage: "Man on the Moon - The Epic Flight of Apollo 11."

I saw that bumper so many times, I'll never forget it. If anyone out there knows of a source (audio is OK, a video file of the bumper would be preferable), I'd love to know about it.

Also, I'll preface this next part by saying that I've always been a big fan of James Burke. His Connections series (and its sequels) have always been favorites. I think he's one of the most intelligent and well-spoken people I've ever seen.

During Apollo 11 coverage (and I believe this was on CBS, I watched them most, although not exclusively), I saw a pre-filmed piece done for the BBC coverage of the flight. It featured James Burke, and began with Burke completely ensconced within an Apollo A7L lunar suit, complete with PLSS backpack, OPS, LEVVA, gold visor and all. For the first portion of the piece, you heard him through the PLSS radio, as picked up by the in-suit microphone.

Over the course of the piece, Burke took the suit off. As he took off each piece, he explained what it was, what it did, and how it worked. He doffed the LEVVA, the PLSS, the RCU, then the PGA itself. Then he removed his liquid-cooled underwear, took off his UCD and FCD (yep, those are what you think they are), and trudged off to the bathroom for a shower, stark naked.

Does anyone else remember ever seeing this? It stands out quite strongly in my mind -- I'd like to think that others remember this wonderfully well-done piece, too.

-the other Doug

Yeah -- my first reaction was "It's a masonry crater." It looks, for all the world, like a laid fieldstone structure, made in the shape of a crater, with the interior polished into a smooth bowl.

It may well be that the action of Martian winds as they swirl around the crater's interior is enough, all by itself, to have smoothed the interior to the degree we see. It's also evident that a portion of the interior rim has *not* been smoothed, or has been roughened since the crater interior was "polished." That portion lies to the right of center in our current view.

Another indication of varying rates of erosion is the "ray" that extends from between the one and two o'clock positions in our current view (with the nearest point of the near rim being the six o'clock position). This appears to be a classic impact ray from above (in the MOC image), but from this angle, it looks significantly *less* blocky than the surface we're on. What it *does* look like is a small ridge of evaporite, with its once-exposed evaporite blocks having been worn down smooth. The ridge is not really populated by the blocky evaporite (and other rock type) debris we see around the rest of the crater. I'd guess the ridge is a deformation of the shocked Victoria debris apron that the Beagle impactor struck -- perhaps a seismic reflection from a somewhat deeper structure created when Victoria's ejecta blanket was emplaced. Or maybe it was already there, a ridge of Victoria debris, and Beagle just happen to smack right down onto it...

So -- the "ray" looks more like a deformation feature than an ejecta feature, that has been preferentially eroded down flat, as has much (but not all) of Beagle's inner rim. I'd bet the less-eroded, blockier portions of Beagle and its ejecta blanket are more wind-shadowed than the polished portions.

-the other Doug

I finally received an e-mail saying that Stardust@home is launching. The e-mail gave a link to the Berkeley people who operate the various distributed processing projects out there.

Unfortunately, the site is non-functional -- the banner links to actually get started working on the project aren't working (aren't even links, are just plain text), and the message says that the website might be either slow or unresponsive because of the high volume of traffic.

I'm hoping the links start working in the next day or two -- I'm anxious to get started!

-the other Doug

Take a good look at Beagle, boys and girls -- this is likely the last *small* Martian crater we will look at from the rim for a while...

-the other Doug

Couldn't have said it better, myself, Diane -- notwithstanding that I've said the same thing, in innumerable ways, for decades, now.

-the other Doug

Oh, I don't disagree, Doug. There probably are many, many cheaper ways to gain the knowledge needed to mount interplanetary expeditions. What I'm unsure about, though, is whether the NASA bureaucracy (or any huge government bureaucracy) is capable of learning such lessons cheaply.

I have a gut feeling that it ought to be a lot easier and cheaper to get into orbit than current technology seems to allow, as well -- but I haven't seen anyone prove it yet. And since you need the infrastructure in place before private industry will recognize a profit potential in it, I doubt that private industry is the answer for creating the infrastructure in the first place.

NASA, other governments, and hundreds of private and semi-private concerns have been trying to come up with cheaper, more practical, and still safe ways to allow humans to expand into the solar system. No one has come up with anything that promises success, or that can attract the funding necessary to get it off the ground, other than NASA, the Soviets (and now the Russians), ESA, and the People's Republic of China. And I don't see any of those programs innovating towards inexpensive access to space.

I guess I wonder whether we're running into a basic sociological principle, here. If a given task is so large that it requires a government to fund it, then it becomes almost impossible to hope that the means to accomplishing that task will ever be the cheapest, most elegant, or "best" way to do it.

Here's a good analogy for y'all -- how much does it cost, per mile or km, to build an interstate highway (or autobahn, or whatever-you-call-it)? Why is it that governments, for the most part, are the ones stuck building such highways? And does anyone really think they spend the least money possible to achieve the quality of highway they want? And yet, do we hear people complaining that our transportation infrastructure is unaffordable and unsustainable?

Think about it...

-the other Doug

As long as they don't try and tell you that it's *flown* MER airbag material, I think you're all right, Doug. Otherwise, I'd have to wonder how they collected it...

-the other Doug

And, in defense of ISS, I will just say that ISS is a transition program designed to teach U.S. aerospace engineers and managers how to fly long missions, how to assemble multi-launch spacecraft in LEO, and how to keep crews alive for the time it will take to travel from one planet to another. (Or even to fly to nearby asteroids.)

Does anyone truly believe that NASA could possibly have moved directly from Mercury to Apollo? No -- Gemini was necessary to teach NASA how to fly missions with more than one pilot, to fly missions that lasted longer than a day and a half, to maneuver in space, etc. All things necessary to understand if you're serious about flying to the Moon.

In the same manner, I don't think it's reasonable to *ever* expect NASA to field a manned interplanetary mission without first having gained the hands-on knowledge they have developed in the construction and manning of the ISS.

ISS may not be an effective scientific research platform, but I continue to insist that it is a necessary step in learning how to fly manned interplanetary missions.

-the other Doug

Let me try to put all of this into layman's terms, for all of us who just don't think in terms of watts per square meter...

My understanding of thermal inertia is that this is a property of a body in which it attempts to achieve a thermal equilibrium, and that the time between a change in thermal input *or* output (i.e., changes in insolation or radiation) and reaching that equilibrium is the time in which inertia is holding the body back from achieving equilibrium.

Correct thus far?

All right, then -- from that basic understanding, it seems to me that the inertial rate of delay between a given change in radiation and/or insolation and the body reaching equilibrium is determined more by the rate at which the body either heats up or cools down than by the rate of change of insolation or radiation.

BTW, I know that a change in the rate of radiation is a basic change in how quickly the body heats up or cools down, and therefore affects that rate directly. My point, I guess, is that it seems like the characteristics of the body itself determine the thermal inertia of the body, NOT changes in its insolation.

That's why I can see Richard's point -- just stretching out the change in insolation from weeks to decades doesn't change the rate at which the body heats up or cools down. And, as such, it would seem that a body such as Pluto would have the same thermal inertia (all other forces being equal) if it orbited the Sun in a week or in two and a half centuries.

Of course, the temperatures of the surface and subsurface materials make a lot of difference to exactly how quickly Pluto heats up and cools down, and those materials change state depending on the overall heat budget. Which changes the heating/cooling rate, and thus the body's thermal inertia. If you put Pluto in a tight orbit about the Sun, its thermal inertia would change drastically, because its surface and subsurface materials would change state pretty drastically. But if you could change Pluto's insolation cycle -- not the intensity of insolation, just the rate of change it encounters between aphelion and perihelion -- from decades to weeks, I think that what Richard and others are saying is that since the surface materials would not change drastically, it ought to exhibit the same thermal inertia as it displays now. And that the move to equilibrium should take the same amount of time, regardless of the length of time it takes for the insolation to change from maximum to minimum.

So, please, tell me what I'm getting wrong, here, if indeed a body's thermal inertia is dependent on the rate of change of insolation, as many of you seem to be suggesting...

-the other Doug

p.s. -- it occurs to me that we've only ever seen Pluto while it has an atmosphere. What proof do we have that the atmosphere really *does* freeze out? Are we certain of this, or is it just a theory based on insolation levels and best-guesses as to Pluto's surface composition? Thanks! DVD

Yeah, Bill, I noticed the lack of blueberries, too. Speaks for this layer of evaporite having a different history from that back along our route -- it never sat and soaked in the same type of water that the evaporite which developed the hematite concretions was soaked in.

Whether this means that the mineral content of the water that soaked this evaporite was different, or that this evaporite was never re-soaked with the amount of groundwater (or standing water) needed to form the concretions, it's impossible to say. But I'd say it's a good bet that one of these two situations is responsible for the lack of blueberries.

Did we see blueberries in the Payson ridges at Erebus? I can't recall, offhand. I'm trying to get a feel for the blueberry distribution around older vs. younger craters, and in (presently) higher vs. lower topography. I know it's dangerous to try and evaluate ancient water levels based on current topography, since volcanic and tectonic forces have warped the crust all over Mars since the times when this land was covered with water. But the blueberry record *does* tell us something about how the water was distributed across our path, I think...

-the other Doug

Well, Climber -- Endurance and Eagle are old enough that their ejecta blankets have been worn down to a flat surface. That doesn't resemble what we see here at Beagle. Fram is a classic small, blocky crater -- it has blocks in the ejecta blanket and also in its inner walls. And Fram is a lot smaller than Beagle. So, even though it's rather a mess, the Fram impact probably wasn't energetic enough to blow a clean hole into the substrate, as Beagle has done. Fram's a mess because its impactor only had enough energy to blast a few rocks around, not to dig very deeply into the target rock.

Beagle seems to exhume a substrate that is made up of a megabreccia-like layer of evaporite within a basaltic sand matrix. In other words, a lot of jumbled rocks contained in hardened sand. Which is what Victoria's outer impact splash ought to have looked like. That's what leads me to think that the Beagle impact has simply exhumed a badly jumbled mess of Victoria ejecta.

-the other Doug

I have been very, very impressed with what I've seen of Dr. Tyson. He is extraordinarily well-spoken, has passion for his subject, and has the ability to convey his enthusiasm. Not all that many scientists have had these gifts -- Steve Squyres is one, and Carl Sagan was another. There are maybe another five or six scientists in the world today who possess these gifts to the same degree.

I'm very glad that Dr. Tyson seems to be aware of his gifts, and intends to use them for the betterment of science and of mankind.

-the other Doug