Yes, and I, for one (and likely some others here) agree with them.

This forum is NOT to be a repository for people who want to bash manned space flight and do everything they can to to bring it to an end. I thought Doug was awfully, awfully clear about that a couple of weeks ago.

-the other Doug

Bruce, I was watching a special on modern China the other day and a China specialist was pontificating on several points. His name was Bill Moomaw.

Now, you're the first person I ever ran across with that last name, so I figure it can't be all *that* common. Is this fellow some relation of yours?

-the other Doug

I still think they ought to have followed the example of the JPL MER mission patches, and called them Daffy and Marvin!

-the other Doug

I'm not so sure you would need any kind of artificial seismic inputs (thumps, bangs, or impacts) to study Europa seismically. I once read an analysis of Europa's position in the Jovian tidal sequence that predicts Europan surface movement on the order of hundreds of meters per orbit. Whether the surface is a thin or a thick layer of ice over a subsurface ocean, it *must* flex to some degree under the tidal stresses.

That flexing would provide sufficient seismic energy that a set of passive seismometers ought to be able to get a lot of internal structure information, I would think...

-the other Doug

Getting back to the original topic of this thread, I had a chance to watch Mike Griffin's report to Congress (well, the House science committee, whatever its official name) from last week. It was rebroadcast on NASA-TV last night, and I ended up staying up late watching it, rather than going to sleep like I ought to have. (I *love* living in a civilized community that puts NASA-TV on its cable system. Well, OK, they sometimes pre-empt NASA-TV for videotapes of local high school football games from last fall... but the 20 or so hours a day we get of NASA-TV is generally good enough for me.)

Anyway... Griffin was being *very* careful about how he spoke of budget requirements. He spoke of understanding that, in a world in which Iraq war and Katrina recovery costs were far more immediate needs than NASA's programs, there wasn't much likelihood of NASA getting any more money than it's currently receiving. He spoke of working hard to set priorities, getting the most important things (CEV and CLV development, according to him) done first, and then deploying other elements of the science and exploration infrastructure as time and budgets permit.

The chair of the committee, a guy named Shelby, responded to this by insisting that NASA needed more money. Griffin stopped him and said that he was *not* there to beg for more money -- he was only there to give a status report on what he was able to do with the money he had available.

Shelby just plowed on, insisting that no, NASA really did need more money. Griffin, tellingly, responded with an almost muttered comment, "You can say that, sir, I can't."

Griffin was asked some very pointed questions about specific programs, including the RLEP2 program. Griffin was challenged with the perception that NASA has lost all interest in pursuing the RLEP2 program, to which he replied that NASA was firmly committed to flying that mission -- but that he couldn't afford to start funding it for at least another two years.

And, as I mentioned in passing in another thread, Griffin was asked what the current estimates look like for repairs of hurricane damage at Michoud, the Stennis Space Center, and the Kennedy Space Center. He said that the current estimate is looking like about $550 million. This same committee had recommended that NASA get emergency hurricane repair funds of some $300 million last year, but that money never made it into the budget. Shelby asked how NASA was paying for the repairs, and Griffin said he was stealing the money from the Shuttle/ISS budgets. So, look at it this way -- there are even concerns so immediate that Shuttle/ISS, the Great Hog (as some of y'all would put it), is even getting some funds pinched, here and there...

All in all, Griffin gave the appearance of a basically good juggler suddenly finding himself with 20 or 30 more objects in the air at once than he's ever juggled before...

-the other Doug

Yeah -- you'd end up with a pretty ragged, hole-ridden sail/solar panel by the time you got out to the Kuiper Belt. How are you going to create a really, really thin/lightweight sail/solar panel that can stand up to the high-energy dust impacts it's going to face? Gonna redirect some of that energy into intense magnetic fields that divert dust particles electrostatically?

Before we get too involved in discussions of new propulsion technologies, I will make the cautionary noise, here, that when Mike Griffin went before Congress last week, he was asked point-blank about new propulsion technology research. He said that NASA's immediate goals (including the full range of VSE goals) do not require any new propulsion technologies. He said that almost every NASA program, with the exception of the Shuttle/ISS wind-down, has been cut or delayed, including propulsion technology research. He said that there will be *no* new propulsion research for a decade or more.

BTW, he also said that, since Congress and this Administration refused to give NASA any additional monies to repair damage to Michoud, the Stennis Space Center, and the Kennedy Space Center incurred during last year's hurricane season, he was even stealing from the Shuttle/ISS funds to cover a roughly half-billion-dollar repair bill.

-the other Doug

Hmmm... well, if you used a common transmission for all three flywheels, or if you can manage to add energy to all three of them in exactly the same increments at exactly the same time, then you're really operating as if you had three constant-speed CMGs, I would think.

-the other Doug

I'm pretty certain that the cobbles are remnants of basalt inclusions in impact breccias formed by the Erebus, Terra Nova and related ancient cratering events.

The way I see it, there is a cluster of really ancient, highly eroded craters with Erebus and Terra Nova forming the mid-northern portion. There are arcs of rims visible throughout the etched terrain as we go along to the south - southeast, all of which are part of this ancient crater cluster.

So, this ancient cluster originally had complex, inter-related ejecta blankets made up of highly shock-altered breccia and impact melt. Some of that breccia would be derived from the sulfate-rich evaporite, but some of it would be from sandstone that used to be large basaltic sand dunes, and some of it would be from original basaltic crustal formations.

So, imagine a cluster of craters with ejecta that consists mostly of soft, easy-to-erode evaporite with scattered inclusions of harder basaltic clasts. The sulfates are so soft that they've eroded down to the level ground. But where the basaltic rock chunks had been clasts in the soft evaporite matrices of the breccias, they've now "precipitated out" and sit, in scattered fields, buried and unburied, where the softer rock literally eroded out from around them.

If Victoria is anything like on the same time scale of age as Endurance, then I actually doubt we'll see a whole lot in the way of visible ejecta. We'll probably see the "crazy-quilt" rock pattern that we saw at Endurance, where the chaotically emplaced ejecta has been literally eroded down to flat level ground, with little left in the way of raised blocks.

It's amazing to me how completely these craters seem to lose their fine-scale ejecta in this environment. Either that evaporite is *awfully* easy to erode away, or it's just been eroding away for a *long* time.

-the other Doug

It was definitely in another thread, then. I recall asking about the feasibility of doing any actual rock dating in situ, and got told that all of the current dating techniques require extremely meticulous handling that just can't be done robotically. I recall expressing doubt about that conclusion, but was assured that we were a long away from such a feat...

I'm *very* glad to see that there are people who are thinking outside the box and coming up with inventive ways of dating rocks in situ. Let's hope these analyzers are available and sitting on Mars sometime relatively soon (like, say, within my lifetime... )

-the other Doug

Actually, I think that, for the system to have survived so many global catastrophes which have erased as much as 90% (or more) of all species then extant, and to still be producing such a wild variety of lifeforms to occupy nearly every niche that exists -- that has to mean that the system has to be awfully forgiving of error.

At what point did the overall biosphere become so well-designed that it could survive global extinctions and re-radiate different forms back into every niche? I have to believe that it happened pretty early on.

Now, as for the evolution of intelligence -- that's another matter. But it just seems inevitable to me that any rich biosphere will eventually generate at least *one* intelligent species. (And don't forget, it's possible that some of the cetacean species are as sapient as we are... so our biosphere may have, indeed, generated multiple sapient lifeforms over the course of life on Earth.) I do admit to some amount of terracentrism in this sentiment, though...

Of course, with only one sample to work with, it's impossible to tell just how forgiving the system is when it comes to eventual evolution of sapience. I cannot imagine how we can ever get a handle on the actual likelihood of the process until and unless we have other examples to study.

-the other Doug

Hmmm... if you're postulating a 1972 Venus fast flyby, that would be something that would have to have been planned for at least a year, and more like two years, prior to the event. That would give you a window to change the decision tree that led to the decommissioning of pads 34 and 37 (the Saturn IB pads) and the use of pad 39B plus the milkstool to launch the remaining four manned Saturn IB (three Skylab and one ASTP) missions.

In that case, you would have both pads 39A and 39B available for Saturn V launches throughout 1972 and into 1973.

-the other Doug

While increasing levels of resolution are satisfying, I'd like to repeat Wilhelms' Caution, here. Which is that, in the heady days of lunar exploration of the 1960s and 1970s, the push for greater and greater resolutions of lunar vistas led to a steadily *worsening* understanding of the processes that shaped lunar evolution. Ground conditions can become coated with ubiquitous features -- regoliths, dust covers, cratering densities -- that make surfaces created by far different processes look very alike on fine scales. Wilhelms comes to the conclusion that, especially for the Moon, lower resolutions and larger scales provide better clues to the large-scale impact processes that shaped our companion world.

While Mars is a different animal than the Moon, the same rules tend to apply. For example, on Mars, water- and air-driven erosion has distributed a poorly sorted covering of dust and rocks over underlying terrain features, making the fine details of the surface layer less than representative of the underlying units.

In terms of spectral data, yes -- we've yet to come across a high-resolution limit at which we learn less and less about the processes that formed the rock in the first place. But since Mars has redistributed it surface quite a bit over time, fine spectral resolution doesn't ensure that you're seeing information about the composition of the underlying units, either.

-the other Doug

Why, that's just fascinating, Bruce -- especially since, to my own question about this (likely in the thread to which you refer), I was rather loftily informed that the sample handling and preparation requirements for *every* existing rock dating technique require a delicacy of manipulation that unmanned probes would simple never achieve.

What changed?

-the other Doug

Well... all I can tell you is that I've probably read every single scrap of documentation publically available on the Apollo and unmanned precursor lunar programs, and that's a new one on me. I had never read that before.

I assume the LMSS they speak of was the mission module being designed for the Apollo I-series missions? The LM chassis loaded up with a ton of cameras and sensors? That would have been lunar-orbit-only missions? That were never flown (but explain why the Apollo landings went from H missions straight to J missions)?

-the other Doug

Ah, but the lack of an early Martian ozone layer is an assumption. Just as is the lack of an early Martian magnetic field. The latter seems to be on really thin ice -- I think we need to question the former assumption, as well.

-the other Doug

Ah -- you refer to the quake along the New Madrid fault, back in the 1800s, which moved the then-capitol of Illinois from Illinois into Missouri?

I kid you not -- the capital of Illinois was Kaskaskia, a port city along the Mississippi River. The legal definition of the border between Illinois and Missouri was the river itself; the center of the river was (and still is) the state line. The quake caused the river to re-route itself into a topographic low (that it had probably already flowed through once, eons ago) and moved the river from the west of Kaskaskia to the east of most of the town. The center of the town was literally inundated in the new river's path.

Fairly shortly after this event, the capitol of Illinois was moved to Centralia, which, as its name implies, sits right in the center of the state. It was another couple of decades before the capitol was finally moved to its current location, in Springfield.

But that quake is still the only one I've ever heard of that moved a state capitol into a neighboring state!

Sorry for the off-topic post, but it seemed to fit here.

-the other Doug

Well, hmm... yes, for a one-way, suicide mission with no hope of either entering orbit at the destination or of return, then yes, it would have been possible.

But likely not in 1968.

You see, the CSM was only designed to last for about 14 days. We're not talking about consumables, like food and water, here. Or even electricity. The gaskets in the fuel lines were only good for about two weeks after you cracked the seals and let the hypergolic fuels flow, among other things.

The CSM was redesigned for long-term hibernation so that you could use it on Skylab flights, but that redesign wasn't completed until 1971 and the first flight vehicles capable of lasting more than two weeks weren't built until late 1971 and into 1972. And even then, theose CSMs were only "rated" for 90 days in flight.

Some additional work would have resulted in a CSM that could have lasted for 120 days or more, but it would have taken a little while to implement the needed design changes.

That's not your only issue, though. You can only store so much in the way of water (or liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the fuel cells to make into water), or like food, in a CSM. You can't store food in the SM, because it won't be available. There was no way to get anything other than liquids or gasses from the SM into the CM.

For the additional consumables your crewman would have needed, you'd have to build a special-purpose mission module that would take the place of the LM in the launch stack. That could be as heavy as the LM, but it would only contain food, water and life support consumables.

The mission module would likely take another year or two to design, test and fabricate.

So, the answer to your question is yes, Apollo and Saturn V technology could have delivered a single crewman to either Venus or Mars, on a fast flyby trajectory with no hope of return. But it probably wouldn't have been able to fly until 1970 or later, and that's assuming the need to do so had been identified, and given unlimited funds to accomplish, sometime in early to mid 1968.

-the other Doug

Never fear, Emily, that was only the results from the F1 encounter. There are several more RADAR passes scheduled before the birth, right?



Congrats -- I wish you luck, patience, and foresight. In that order.

-the other Doug

I sure hope this (or something like it) works. I wholeheartedly agree with MEPAG -- I think heat-flow measurements are very important. With some idea of the current heat flow of Mars, we can at least start making informed speculations on subjects that, right now, we can only make wild arm-waving gestures at...

-the other Doug

So is the Viking 1 site -- a rather larger overall rock population than at Gusev, and the dominant rock size is larger. The Viking 2 site is rockier still -- in fact, I would say that the Viking 2 site is non-navigable by a rover the size of the MER, and the Viking 1 and Pathfinder sites are semi-navigable.

The one thing I noticed right off was that Gusev isn't as rocky as any of the previous three landing sites. Of course, Meridiani is something quite different from anything we have ever seen on Mars before.

I think the Viking 1 and Pathfinder sites are rocky primarily because they are located in outflow channels, where massive floods deposited a whole lot of rocks as they rolled through. I've never heard a good geological discussion as to why the Viking 2 site is so densely rock-strewn, though -- it's a rather high-latitude northern site, so perhaps the "type 2" plains deposits have simply been broken into a fairly well-sorted carpet of large fragments by frost heaving?

-the other Doug

The Moon is in a cratering equilibrium at most size scales, and the lunar highlands are in equilibrium at large scales, as well. That is to say, as craters are destroyed by erosion, new craters take their place. The lunar maria are not in equilibrium at large (1 km and larger) scales, because larger impactors have been much rarer since the maria were formed than they were prior.

So, when you're talking about 1m to 1km sized craters, crater counting on the Moon doesn't give you all that good a concept of age. Counting craters of a certain sharpness (i.e., that have undergone only up to 'x' amount of erosion) is a better age indicator.

The problem with crater counting on Mars as opposed to the Moon is that small (1m to 10m, especially) secondaries are pretty well erased by aeolian erosion in relatively short time scales. For example, Sleepy Hollow at Spirit's landing site is obviously a 1m to 2m secondary crater that has been eroded and filled in over millennia. It's not even recognizable as a crater in the CProto MOC images of the landing point. And yet, its origin and subsequent erosion are quite apparent when you look at it, from the ground, at a distance of less than 10 meters.

So, while on the Moon cratering reaches an equilibrium because the only real erosion process is additional cratering, the same thing does *not* happen on Mars, because the aeolian erosional processes are much more effective (i.e., have a far greater effect), over all time scales, than impact erosion processes.

And remember, when it comes to dating based on crater counting on the Moon, we have the following data points: 1) counts of craters of varying size and apparent freshness, and 2) geophysical dating of returned samples that identify absolute rock ages from given locations. It is only from those two data points that we have *interpolated* frequency of cratering events and size of impactors as a function of time.

The fact that the lunar surface is in a cratering equilibrium accounts for why we get the same crater counts of given sizes over different stretches of terrain -- it's simply a function of the lack of any other major erosional processes, so craters of most sizes, over billions of years, have reached equilibrium. The fact that the maria are less heavily cratered than the highlands makes a statement about the crater flux rate before and after the creation of the visible maria, and that's about it. It doesn't necessarily tie a given flux rate to a given timeframe. If you change the number of craters resulting from primary impacts, all you do is change the interpolated impactor flux rate -- you don't change the age indicated thereby.

-the other Doug

In re the truly lovely images of Husband Hill from Spirit's winter quarters:

Very nice, but not quite right. The automatic gain compensation of the imaging processes (stretching contrast, etc.) has rendered the extremely relatively dark El Dorado / Ultreya feature to be the same albedo as the surrounding, much brighter, hill and valley.

This would be a *perfect* image if El Dorado / Ultreya appeared as dark, in relation to the surrounding terrain, as it should be.

-the other Doug

Oh, gee -- do NOT get me started on the irrational European convention of "thousand million" when the proper term is "billion." The linked article uses *both* terms.

Do we speak of a hundred-fifty-hundred of anything? Of three-thousand-thousands? Of a million-billion?

Every three digits, the convention calls for the numbering identifier to change. Why, oh why, do the Europeans insist on making an exception when it comes to billions????

-the other Doug

Well... there *are* sharp and craggy features on the Moon, but they're at relatively small scales. There are tons of angular, sharp-edged rocks up there, ejected from relatively fresh craters. And there are new craters being made most every day, of various (usually rather small) sizes, that have pretty sharp rims. But because the vast majority of the rocks and craters have been softened by millennia of impact erosion, such sharp features do tend to stand out (and were immediately noticeable by the Apollo crews).

And there are colors on the Moon beyond the small patch of orange soil found at Taurus-Littrow. In overall coloration, the highlands have a very slight reddish tinge, while the maria have a very slight bluish tinge. And there are deposits of volcanic and impact glasses that are more brightly colored -- greens, yellows, oranges, reds and golds -- that occur on the surface in such small areal extents that they are only visible at small scales. (And it wasn't just the Apollo 17 crew that found colored glasses -- the Apollo 15 crew found light green glasses coating some rocks. But the coloration was so subtle that, while Irwin spotted it immediately, Scott remained convinced until he saw the samples back on Earth that the greenish cast was a function of the sun visors.)

These sharp and colored features are so subtle and relatively uncommon that the overall appearance of the lunar surface is, as you say, of an almost entirely colorless, softened gray expanse. But the overall impression isn't absolute, and on a planet the size of the Moon, you can find an exception to just about every rule.

-the other Doug

Richard, nothing -- and I mean, absolutely nothing -- in the private sector world *ever* gets done without *any* positive cash flow. No one is ever going to put up a few hundred million dollars for a planetary probe just because they want to see what's out there. Not without some way of generating some income out of it.

Even if Falcon worked (which it has not, as of yet) and even if the Falcon developmental costs (suffering from little, seemingly unimportant expenses, like needing to launch six or seven of them before they get the bugs out, or building an oxygen liquifaction plant so they can actually launch the things without having to wrap them in blankets that flap back onto the thrust chambers and damage them) don't push the eventual costs of a Falcon launcher up into the same range as the currently available launchers, there are still a lot of significant costs you're overlooking. For example, the DSN isn't cheap. How are you going to command your private Enceladus probe, or get data back from it, unless you pay the $10,000 or more an hour that using the DSN costs? Gonna build a new DSN? If so, how are you going to make it cheaper than the current DSN (seeing as how, AIUI, the current DSN is already a private enterprise)?

There are *maybe* three people in the world who have enough money to do something like this, and even they can only do this once or twice, at most, without bankrupting themselves. Corporations simply will not undertake such missions, since there is no chance of ever generating any income from them to match the outflow, or even to pay for a tenth of the costs. Corporations simply do not spend out millions of dollars for no return.

It's a nice dream, Richard. But that's all it is -- a dream.

-the other Doug