And also from this one.

Of course, I edited the pre-packaged message a little -- especially since "program" was mis-spelled "porgram" at one point in it.

-the other Doug

I dunno about the lack of sending professional geologists to the Moon (with the exception of Schmitt) really hurting the science return, since the J mission crews were well trained in geology. VERY well trained. In essence, we sent six professionally trained geologists to the Moon -- only one of them had a degree in the field, but all of them could well have claimed such a degree.

-the other Doug

Yes... but... in this new world, where IDD deploys are going to have to be more rare than they were (and have therefore become the new coin of the realm), we are arguably *wasting* a lot of them here.

There had better be a whole *sheaf* of publications coming out of this extended stop...

-the other Doug

Personally, I'd be more worried about your stuffed animals!

Tales of the Plush Cthulhu

-the other Doug

Well -- I just joined The Planetary Society last week. (I happened to have the membership fee available, for a change...) And today, I received a very nice set of nine 8x10 glossy photographs, one for each of the planets in the solar system.

I'm assuming that if UB 313, or Xena, or whatever it's called, ends up being named a planet, I'll get a supplementary mailing...

-the other Doug

Very, very good reply, Bruce. Thank you -- this is more the kind of spirited discourse this subject needs.

Now, for a few counter-points and expressions of appreciation...



I'm very glad to hear that first statement. I actually think we're more in agreement than not, overall, Bruce -- I don't think it's necessary for us to be spending billions on manned lunar or Martian operations within the next 20 years, when we're on the verge of making some significant breakthroughs in so many areas that will make it *far* faster and easier to get around the solar system than it is now. For instance, I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about Franklin Chiang-Diaz's plasma drive in the near future.

However -- and here we part company, I think -- I *truly* believe that we have to stay in the manned spaceflight business in order to be able to take advantage of these new technologies as they come on line.

I am convinced that developing a CEV that can be used as a multi-purpose crew delivery system to both present and future mission-dedicated spacecraft is a good idea, a good investment, a necessary maintenance of American manned spaceflight capability, and a justified use of NASA's resources.

I personally think that Shuttle ops should be limited to completing the ISS and performing one last Hubble servicing flight. The NASA planners are saying that will require 29 more flights. I assume they know better than I do how much it will require... though I have to say, I think it could be done in less. And the current (dare I say cowardly?) reluctance of NASA to fly a vehicle that is safer than any version of it they have ever flown before, drawing good money after bad without getting *any* result out of it, is the basis of yet another discussion... *sigh*...

The failure of NASA to be able to maintain any kind of consistent funding levels for a well-planned unmanned exploration program is not, in my opinion, simply a case of the manned program "eating" the unmanned program. What we are seeing is a political failure, not an administrative failure. For good and solid administrative *and* political reasons, the manned and unmanned spaceflight directorates were set up separately 'way back when in the '50s, precisely so that funding pressures from a potentially floundering manned program would not result in the rape of the unmanned exploration programs. The political failure took place gradually, over the course of both Democratic and Republican administrations, but the multi-center, separate-accounting days of NASA have been over for some time now. And with a single administrative steering committee responsible for *all* NASA programs, and responsible for the "sharing of the pie" all 'round the town, we have now been put in the position where political pressure to "make us some space heroes" has become responsible for cutbacks in unquestionably worthwhile programs.

As with any political failure, it can be reversed, over time. The concept of presenting to Congress separate funding requests from different NASA centers, each with its own set of justifications, can be brought back. I mean, there are constituencies within almost every other federal agency -- we *can* get it back to where the unmanned and manned constituencies are able to argue their own cases and be dealt with as separate entities, pursuing related but separate goals.

That, IMHO, is the only reasonable course to try and navigate -- get JPL and APL and Huntsville and Houston out there, pitching their own programs and getting their own separate budgets. Such a process would raise the level of discourse, and result in a better-educated set of lawmakers.


Yes, a lot of deep-sea investigation is being done by robots. But, even though robots can do the job far more safely and effectively, and can get into so many small nooks and crannies, why do people spend millions of dollars to arrange their own manned dives down to the wreck of the Titanic?

In that case, just sending our senses there isn't enough. As a people, as a culture, we have to *keep* sending people down to that wreck. Even though it costs a fairly ridiculous amount of money to do so, and is a somewhat risky thing to do. And even though such continued visits are destroying the wreckage.

Even though we don't have to.

But, as near as I can tell, solely because we can.

As for those pesky polls -- you know what they say: there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. If you look more closely at those same polls, those same people believe that NASA's budget is larger than that of the Department of Health and Human Services, that it amounts to well more than $100 billion a year, and that they believe that somehow all that money ends up getting shot into space, and not spent on salaries, resources, support and maintenance, etc., etc., etc....

Give me a poll of informed Americans, and I'll take it a little more seriously.

-the other Doug

Ahh, but I have it from reliable sources that a Professor Pearson from Princeton University has identified those Mars flashes as vast explosions of hydrogen gas. While these may seem unusual, they are more than likely simply the result of volcanic activity, and shouldn't concern us in any way...



-the other Doug

I like your overall concept, Richard, and I think something like that will end up being the cornerstone of our eventual manned Mars exploration strategy.

However, in addition to the many advantages you mention (immediate no-lag control of robots, ability to explore on more human timescales, etc.), there will be a more important and useful application for a Phobos or Deimos base.

At such an orbital base will reside Mission Control for the manned landing and surface operations.

We've seen just how well lunar exploration worked when we had a Mission Control back in Houston watching out for the technical details, allowing the surface crews to concentrate on the exploring. The Apollo J missions were a testament to just how effective such a combination can be.

So, for manned Mars surface operations, you can outfit a Flight Control Center within your orbital base, and have the orbital crew serve as flight controllers for the landing and surface ops. In fact, a majority of the people staffing the orbital base would likely have more primary concerns over telepresence robot ops and over manned surface ops than they would with any of the orbital base's functions, be they maintenance, engineering or scientific.

We could fly a set of manned Mars orbital missions which start developing an infrastructure on either Deimos or Phobos within the next 25 years. By the third or fourth orbital expedition, we could permanently man the Phobos/Deimos station, switching out crews every 18 months or so. Ten years of that kind of orbital ops, and we'll be *more* than ready to tackle manned surface ops.

Unfortunately, even with this relatively slow, simple, we-have-the-technology plan, we're looking at about 2040 for the first manned surface ops... *sigh*... Be a hell of a way to celebrate my 85th birthday, though!

-the other Doug

Yes, and NASA's scientists worked out back in the late '90s a design for a mission that would have pieces of Mars back on Earth right now, for only a half-billion dollars.

So much for studies by NASA scientists.

Seriously, unmanned sample return had not been accomplished at the time that 1970 study was done, and since then it has been done to the tune of only a few kg of rock and soil, at most. I'm not saying it couldn't have been done -- I'm saying that the odds of some mechanism becoming jammed by the ubiquitous lunar dust, ruining the mission, were high.

You can't even admit that Apollo ended up as a scientific windfall for exo-geologists, far moreso than *any* unmanned program of the time could have returned, can you, Bruce?

Frankly, this sing-song "there is and has never been a single good reason to put men into space" rant of yours is getting a little old, at least with me. And, again frankly, I don't want to live in a world where all humans are told to take a seat on the sidelines and leave the *real* exploring to the robots. That road leads to the end of *all* significant exploration, IMNSHO.

-the other Doug

Bob, I agree entirely with *anything* that will kick-start asteroid exploration/exploitation. Asteroids are a lot easier to get to than planets (in terms of landing on them or docking to them, anyway), they contain tons and tons of raw materials, and may provide resources to us back here on Earth once some of our more popular resources (like soft iron, for which terrestrial sources are nearly depleted) get so scarce here that importing them from asteroids becomes financially feasible.

I want to see manned asteroid explorations in my lifetime, and I'd like to see *mining* companies get involved. I want to see us start to figure out how to do mining operations in microgravity!

-the other Doug

There were several lunar Gemini proposals, but likely none of them would have been Gemini XII. The one that was talked about most, I believe, was using a Centaur as a TLI booster (fit a docking collar on it from the Agena TDA assembly and put in a manual control system) for a lunar flyby. The Titan double transstage concept was for a lunar-orbit flight, IIRC.

If we had decided to put a Gemini out around the Moon, it likely would have been Geminis XIII and XIV. And it's likely it would have been circumlunar only, not lunar orbital.

What eventually happened was MSC got really jittery about sending a Gemini so far away from home. While the Gemini had matured by the end of the program, every spacecraft had its share of little glitches, and overall it was a somewhat more fragile spacecraft than Apollo. And, of course, it wasn't designed for a lunar re-entry (though a beefed-up heatshield probably would have handled it fine). They just decided that they already had a spacecraft in the works that was *designed* to go to the Moon, and that it made more sense to get Apollo ready to fly than to divert resources away from Apollo to toss a Gemini (that was *not* designed for such a trip) out there...

-the other Doug

I think it's totally a mistake to discount Katie's brother's attitude. That is one of the reasons why, if the U.S. manned spaceflight budget were to go away entirely, that there would *not* be a sudden windfall for the unmanned program.

Manned spaceflight TO somewhere (not just going around and around endlessly in LEO) is intrinsically more interesting to, and more supportable by, public opinion (informed or not) than unmanned-only exploration.

I love the argument I've seen here -- "Why push the faulty, can't-fly-right manned program when we have such a successful unmanned program going?" I''ve even seen editorials that basically make that argument.

I'd have loved to see them try to make that argument in, say, 2000. With only the MCO and MPL failures, and the greatly curtailed Galileo, to point at for their "successful" unmanned space flight program...

-the other Doug

Gordon saw both the LM and Surveyor with his eye, yes. They didn't really show up in the 16mm film frames, was my point.

-the other Doug

Let's see -- the Apollo 12 CSM didn't have any cameras with enough "throw" to get the kind of resolution you'd need to observe that effect. I think the longest lens they carried for the CSM's Hasselblad was a 250mm. Dick Gordon did try to capture the view through the CSM's optics on his 16mm movie camera, and suceeded in getting an overexposed, washed-out image in which you can sort of recognize Surveyor Crater, but you can't really resolve the actual LM landing point. And the image was so overexposed that any local brightening was washed out.

The only other way to have documented the "bright splash" of the LM's landing site would have been the 16mm movie of the LM liftoff from inside the cabin.... except that the camera malfunctioned and there is no film of the Apollo 12 lunar ascent.

In fact, though, the Apollo 12 landing site probably wasn't all that much dustier than any of the other mare landing sites. Pete brought his LM down by curving along the north rim of the Surveyor Crater, and dropped pretty much straight down from about 200 feet directly over the northwest rim. Crater rims on the Moon seem to display less consolidation in their regolith -- the slope keeps the surficial layer from "firming up" as much as it does on more level ground. At least, all of the Apollo moonwalkers reported that the dust on relatively "flat" ground let them sink in less than an inch, but that crater rims were "soft" and that they sank in several inches on most crater rims. This was pretty ubiquitous at all of the landing sites, as I recall.

So, Pete's Intrepid blew up so much dust because 1) it kept blowing over the same spot for the final 200 feet of descent, and 2) it was blowing down on a crater rim that, by its nature, was composed of looser and less consolidated dust than they would have encountered on the adjacent plains.

To back this up, I'll point out that the second dustiest landing was Apollo 15's, during which the LM made a near-vertical final descent from about 150 feet, with the engine plume impinging directly on the rim of a 10-meter shallow crater. (The engine bell even got whacked by this small crater's rim, since the LM landed directly astride its western rim.) So, dustiness of landing seems to have been controlled by whether or not the exhaust was plowing up a crater rim during an extended near-vertical descent.

-the other Doug

Bruce, that one got started because of the AZUSA guidance system of the Atlas rocket. The trajectory guys on the first Mercury orbital flight (MA-6, Glenn's flight) were tracking the capsule using the AZUSA system, and their first projection after MECO told them that the capsule's orbit was "safe" (i.e., it wouldn't decay on its own) for at least seven orbits. They called that out and Alan Shepard, at the Cape's CapCom console, passed it along to Glenn.

So, very shortly after orbital insertion, Shepard called up to Glenn, "You have a GO, at least seven orbits."

That call-out had nothing to do with the anticipated length of the mission -- it merely told Glenn that his orbit was high enough that it wouldn't decay naturally before at least the seventh orbit. I believe that this was a planned call-out, and that any value for this call-out greater than three orbits was considered a GO situation.

Since most of the news people covering the flight, and since an even greater percentage of historians who have written about the flight since, didn't have any kind of clue as to how the flight controllers called out their data and how that data was used by all involved, there has been an urban myth that MA-6 was supposed to fly for at least seven orbits. The myth is simply a misunderstanding of the call-out.

-the other Doug

This is really sounding like a load balancer issue to me. Your ISP may well be using load balancers to maintain even traffic on its server nodes. If one of those goes a little bad, this is the kind of thing that can happen. And it's hard as hell to track down.

Instead of pretending ignorance of such things, it might be best to simply tell them what you know and inquire as to whether they have been doing any tests on their load balancers.

Also, it's possible that your ISP is using a larger provider's servers, and has limited control over some of the nodes it uses. And that includes load balancing on those nodes. So, that might be a good data point to pin down with them, as well -- if you can.

-the other Doug

In fact, Bob, the footprints and wheel tracks near the LMs were not at all darker than the general soil at the landing sites. The LM DPS exhaust would sweep the top layer of dust grains from the regolith during landing, resulting in a temporary brightening of the soil around the LMs. "Darkened" footprints and wheel tracks were simply *restoring* the soil's natural albedo within the splash of brightened soil.

There is some question, I guess, as to whether or not the local soil brightening around the LMs still exists. I don't believe any of the Clementine or SMART-1 or Lunar Prospector images were able to answer that question -- though Phil probably knows the answer to that better than I do.

-the other Doug

I know I'm probably not seeing what I think I'm seeing. But it looks a little like limestone to me.

It's got this flat-smooth-plates look to it that reminds me of limestone emplaced in hot springs.

I'm probably wrong, but it's a lovely image...

-the other Doug

Naw -- it's not like he's going to Pluto. He's just getting a little Goofy, is all...

-the other Doug

Well, we knew that this inclination change was coming. I'm looking forward to it -- the views of the rings ought to be just spectacular!

-the other Doug

I just got a phone call from my roommate -- it seems that, after a review of the situation by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, George Deutsch (the 24-year-old political appointee we've been discussing here) has been fired from his post at NASA.

HA!

-the other Doug

There are obviously two different lithologies going on here, even though both are finely layered. One is what appears to be a light-toned sandstone, which is rather hard rock. It's more erosion-resistant than the soils and rock beds within which the entire Home Plate formation is located -- as evidenced by the fact that the HP formation sticks out, far less eroded, from the surrounding soils.

The other is a much darker layered rock, that has a Salvador Dali-esque look to it -- it has slumped and "melted" over the aeons, even though it preserves its finely layered structure.

If the light and dark layered rocks share the same lithology, I'll be incredibly surprised -- and I'll have some very basic questions as to how their appearance can be so much different.

I keep thinking in terms of artesian springs. I've seen a number of them on Earth, and especially those which vent volcanically heated water tend to bear water that's absolutely saturated with minerals. The "throw" distance from the source of the spring makes an obvious difference in the lithologies of the rock that's deposited by the flowing spring water.

Until we get some definite info on the lithology here, I'm still thinking that this was an impact crater that developed a hot spring vent (possibly as a result of the impact cracking a route for pressurized water between a somewhat deep aquifer and the surface). The hot spring could have turned on and off cyclically, depending on the level of subsurface volcanic heating, laying down layer after layer of minerals collected by the water in its journey from the aquifer up to the surface.

Let's wait and see how water-altered these rocks are before we trap ourselves in any corners, though, eh?

-the other Doug

I've had some occasional issues with UMSF not refreshing well (or at all quickly), but it's been a while since I've had a really hard time staying connected. And when I do have a problem, it's usually a SQL error and not a DNS lookup issue that's killing me.

However, I'm seeing a more subtle behavior issue lately. Keep in mind, I'll often start reading posts here, go off and do other things, and come back to read more posts -- all without logging in or out of the site.

Now we all know that when you first bring the site up, the forum and sub-forum icons show you if there are unread posts in those fora. When you get into the topic lists, of course, there is a small red flag next to individual threads if they contain unread posts.

When I leave the site up but unattended for a while (especially when displaying a given thread or sub-forum topic list) and then go back to the main forum list, the forum icons reset to an "all read" status, even if I haven't gone into those fora during this visit. I end up checking the last-post timestamps at the forum levels to see if there might be unread posts out there that I haven't seen.

It's not a huge inconvenience (if I didn't care about keeping my reading organized into fora, I could just look at the recent posts lists). But it is a glitch in the proper operation of the Invision board software, so I thought I'd mention it.

-the other Doug

You know, I was listening to talk radio the other day -- a rabbi was the guest, talking about spirituality in the 21st century. He spoke of someone asking him what all those Hebrew words really meant in the prayers, and he told the questioner, "Most all of those words, when it comes down to it, translate out to simply saying, 'Wow!'"

In this jaded world, it's important for us to remember that it is *especially* in these "wow" moments that we are in touch with our spirituality.

As y'all know, I'm not particularly a proponent of ID -- but seeing something as wonderfully, richly complex as the Home Plate feature, in all its finely layered glory, fills me with wonder at what we can find in God's universe. And so, I say the only prayer that means anything to me.

WOW!

-the other Doug

Man.... I can recall, very very clearly, when there was not a single photographic image in existence from the surface of *any* planet other than good old Terra Firma. A lone, highly contrasted, poor resolution and difficult-to-interpret Luna 9 image from the surface of the Moon was an absolute revelation.

As blurry and compression-artifact-filled as they are, the Huygens images of Titan's surface (limited though they are in location and clarity) are magnitudes greater in their revelation than even those first Luna 9 images.

But in this post-MER world we live in, methinks we've gotten just a little spoiled. Let's not under-appreciate what even those short lived, accident-prone atmospheric probes and one-location landers can teach us -- especially when *any* probe costs billions of dollars to deliver to its worksite.

-the other Doug