And, the final nail in the Europa-orbit coffin was that Galileo wasn't completely sterilized (although you'd think that the Jovian radiation belts would have finished *that* job*), and there was a perceived contamination risk if it were to crash onto Europa. The easiest and most certain way to make sure that never happened was to ensure that Galileo was destroyed well away from Europa -- hence it was flown to its destruction into Jupiter itself.

-the other Doug

Yep, noticed that right off.

Looks at first glace like the pond / artesian spring origin theory for HP is not, at this point, ruled out...

-the other Doug

That was me, not Richard. And keep in mind that the glaciation would have occurred *before* the basalt lake filled Gusev, and it doesn't take a great leap in my mind to see glaciers moving downslope along the curving, bowl-shaped floor of the original impact crater.

And while there are no obvious large-scale glaciation features visible *now*, recall that the vast majority of the landforms that would have shown glacial erosion were covered over by the basalt.

-the other Doug

One thing to remember -- the President may propose a budget, but the Congress has to pass it. And Congress is quite famous for making extensive changes to budgets proposed by Presidents.

As long as they're not worried about actually collecting anywhere near as much money as they spend back there in Washington, why don't all of us American members of the forum get in touch with our Congresscritters and tell them that funding for unmanned spaceflight, taken out of the budget by the White House, *must* be restored?

Hey, it's worth a shot...

-the other Doug

Man -- I had hopes for Griffin. Here we *finally* had someone who was both an accomplished aerospace engineer *and* manager, promising that he could successfully keep the manned and unmanned spaceflight arenas separate and free from financially affecting each other.

I guess he's just another politician -- saying what he thinks his bosses want to hear and not worrying overmuch that he's lying through his teeth.

Pardon me, I need to go throw up some more.

-the other Doug

Makes it obvious why they're replacing the Shuttle with an Apollo-clone-on-steroids to be shoved into LEO on a stick.

-the other Doug

Who needs cartoons, when I can link to sites like this?



-the other Doug

Bruce, it is simply not possible to send more than one basic sense (and that is sight) away from us. We cannot smell the plume of Enceladus; we cannot feel the crunch of Meridiani's blueberry pavement under our feet; we cannot hear the low rumble of the winds as they blow God-knows-what particles into linear dunes on Titan.

All we can do is see. And at that, we can see "something-close-to-maybe-something-like-the-color-you-would-see-with-your-own-eyes-had-we-not-actually-decided-to-leave-green-out-of-all-of-our-images." Sort of.

Maybe only twelve people walked on the Moon. But those people interpreted that experience, however effectively they could, and communicated to the rest of us what it felt like. What the lower gravity did to them as they bounded across the dusty slopes. How the moondust gave them stuffy noses and smelled like burnt gunpowder.

They communicated the realization of their presence on another world.

I had seen pictures from Surveyor and Luna, but as even Neil Armstrong has said, his experience of actually *being* there showed him, in so many myriad ways, how subtly different the surface was from the pictures, how the conditions were replete with their own nuances -- nuances that are completely missed by cameras.

So, OK -- through Surveyor, *one* of my senses was (partially, and not completely effectively) transported to the Moon. So, I was on the Moon.

Not.

Hell, *two* of my senses were transported (quite a bit more effectively) to Detroit today, when I watched the Superbowl on TV. So, I was at the Superbowl.

Not.

On the day that I can hook my brain into a machine that feeds *every* one of my senses (including my internal body sensations) from a *completely* accurate simulacrum located on another world, that can give me *instant* feedback to *exactly* how moving and working on that world feels, sounds, smells, tastes and appears -- on that day, *maybe* "telepresence" will be good enough.

But, then again, maybe not. Because, in the final analysis, when asked if I (or anyone at all) had actually *been* there, I would have to say...

Not.

-the other Doug

If you're asking Bruce that question, the answer is obviously "Why would you want to do anything about that? There's not ever been a reason for a human being to go into space, not when robots can do it much more cheaply, safely and effectively. Sit on the sidelines and shut up -- when it comes to exploring new worlds, your human presence is less than worthless."

I grant you, I disagree with that sentiment in the strongest possible terms. But that's basically what he's saying.

-the other Doug

I'm really excited, I can tell you that!

And as for the finely layered rocks -- I made a case before we got here that HP looked like it was depositional in origin, either windblown or water-bourne sediments filling a smallish crater that has since been deflated down to the remnant sandstone "plug" at the bottom of the bowl. I'm beginning to think that's exactly what this is.

I mean, goodness! That one piece of rock that obviously broke off the side of the slab -- it looks almost machined, the laminations are so artistically cut into it. Looks like the remnants from an old movie theater or something, after the wrecking ball came through -- finely wrought laminar sandstone, carved to accentuate its natural layering.

Mars is not only a fascinating place, it can be a beautiful one, too.

-the other Doug

Boy, the white caprock layer on top of the Pitcher's Mound looks exactly like a concrete slab that has slumped when part of the material on which it sat was washed away.

This whole structure looks like a heavily eroded concrete pad. I know it's not -- but it sure looks like it!

Unless -- we *could* have found the original foundation for the Helium Thoat Shearing Pens...

-the other Doug

The closer we get, the more this area looks to me like something similar to glaciation may have carved up the Columbia Hills and other similar landforms throughout Gusev.

My thinking here follows this general timeline:

1) Near the end of the LHB, Gusev is formed by impact into an already impact-shattered and brecciated megaregolithic crust.

2) Tectonic stress during the final cooling and "setting" of Mars' crust (the end of any major crustal plate movement) uplifted a string of hills through the center of Gusev. The Columbia Hills are one stretch of a general line of hills that runs off-center through Gusev and extends beyond it, and thus doesn't appear to be related to impact formations. Ergo, tectonic uplift is implied.

3) Before, after or during this tectonic uplift, Gusev filled with water and became a lake. This may have been a relatively long-lived phenomenon, or a short-lived one. Or even a cyclic one. I'm thinking this happened after rather than before the hill uplift, because while some of the rocks of the hills seem to have been fairly strongly aqueously altered, many more seem to have seen very little liquid water in their histories.

4) As Mars cooled further, the liquid water all froze and glaciers formed. Glacial movement deflated much of the original floor of Gusev, including a lot of the lacustrine materials, piling them up in some places and denuding them from others.

5) The volcanic deposition originating from the Tharsis Bulge finally reached the Gusev region, filling over all but the tallest features from the original Gusev floor in a lake of basalt -- the last lake Gusev would ever hold.

6) Therefore, the currently exposed surfaces of the hills and the inter-hill basins are the result of, first, major glacial deflation, and second, long, slow aeolian deflation and deposition, of the Gusev flooring material that was uplifted into the original hills so long ago. It's the last exposed remnant of the pre-lava-flooding Gusev floor. And while that is exactly what the MER Team was hoping for, the long and eventful history of the site jumbles everything and makes it nearly impossible to gain a clean context for most of the exposed rock beds.

One reason it's all so jumbled is that the original Gusev floor was impact melt and breccia, which is jumbled to begin with. That floor then collected layers of volcanoclastic and lacustrine materials (all the while being peppered with impact craters of all sizes), and then was tectonically uplifted, which is a jumbling process in and of itself. Then when the Gusev floor was heavily glaciated, rocks and soil got transported glacially all over the place. Yet more jumble.

I'm beginning to think that it's going to be almost completely impossible to find any geologically non-jumbled sites on any bodies that still exhibit major scars from the LHB...

-the other Doug

No, the SNAP is actually pretty warm...

-the other Doug

That's exactly how democracy died in Nazi Germany. If you've never seen it, y'all ought to watch Leni Riefenstahl's film "Triumph of the Will," which "documented" the 1936 Nuremburg Nazi Party rally. Pay close attention to parallels with current events. And try not to be scared spitless.

-the other Doug

First: SuitSat was NOT in any way a NASA-funded experiment. So, your first statement is not truthful.

Second: Your second statement is truthful, but you contradict it with your third statement, which is not truthful. If there is no money for real science, where did the money for Spirit (and Oppy, too!), Cassini and New Horizons come from? Much less the money for MRO, LRO, MSL, and all the other missions out there, present and future?

Dawn has already cost nearly half a BILLION dollars -- that's not "no money" for Dawn. That's a LOT of money for Dawn.

It is completely acceptable to ask the question, how much more than a half a billion dollars ought we have to spend for a mini-tour of the asteroid belt? And can you state, with a straight face, that ISS and Shutle are responsible for the fact that the Dawn project team has been unable to provide a *working* spacecraft for the half-billion dollars they've already spent on it?

If you want to know why money for Dawn is drying up, don't look at $6 billion for ISS/Shuttle activities -- look at a half a TRILLION dollars to fight a war in Iraq. Or look at $85 billion spent so far on reconstruction after Katrina and about five other major hurricanes that struck the U.S. in 2005. Those two little, minor funding drains have had just a *little* more of an impact on the U.S. budget than U.S. manned spaceflight -- like several orders of magnitude more of an impact.

I want to see Dawn fly, too. But I am sick to death of seeing the manned spaceflight program being blamed for the Dawn team's inability to get their spacecraft built and working for the amount of money they *promised* it would cost. It's simply not a truthful argument, and must therefore be rejected.

-the other Doug

I registered with Stardust@home as soon as its existence was revealed on the forum, here. I've yet to hear anything at all back from them.

Has anyone heard from them? Or did they only take the first couple of thousand applications, and I'm SOL?

-the other Doug

Guys -- if you compare the pancam image in which alan declares that the edge of Home Plate is visible, to the navcam locator image linked by atomoid, you'll see that the white ring structure is not at all visible in the pancam image.

The flat sand patch with the bent rock that points to the left is identifiable in both images. When you then compare the two images, you see that the entire field of view of the pancam image lies below the visible portion of Home Plate's white ring. We're looking up the outer slope of the "inner rim" around the white ring. This inner rim obscures the white ring from Spirit's present vantage point.

So, there's your answer -- the white ring isn't visible in the frame!

-the other Doug

As some of the angles on the basin that contains landslide crater seem to show, it's not exactly circular -- the edge that runs along the equator seems to run straighter than the rest of the basin circumference.

Looking at the image above, it looks for all the world like that edge of the basin actually follows the exact same line as the by-this-point-defunct equatorial ridge!

Makes me think, even more than before, that this might well be a collapse feature and not an impact basin.

-the other Doug

I've read several different accounts of CMPs watching LM engine operations, and of course we have the TV record of the three J mission LM lift-offs. From these, I've determined that you pretty much have to be looking straight down the throat of the engine bell to see much in the way of actual self-illuminated exhaust with the nitrazine-UDMH engines they used in Apollo. Otherwise, the exhaust expanded far too rapidly for there to be much illumination. Or even much in the way of visible exhaust at all.

The best view of such an engine exhaust is the TV record of the Apollo 17 lunar liftoff. The engine exhaust is very briefly visible just as the stages separate, due I'm sure to the reflection of exhaust from the descent stage forrming interference patterns in the plume. As the ascent stage lifts clear, you see absolutely no indication of exhaust or even illumation from the engine. At pitchover, however, the ascent engine brightens, and as the stage flies almost directly away from the TV camera, you see a dramatic brightening as we look straight down the engine bell. The brightness of the exhaust at that point overcomes the brightness of the sunlight reflected off the stage. It's fairly dramatic.

I imagine the exhaust was somewhat more noticeable when burns occurred in darkness -- but even so, Mike Collins wrote of being able to see Eagle's DOI burn (in darkness), but that he was looking through his telescope pretty much straight down the descent engine's throat, which we know is the optimal angle. So the question of dark-condition visibility is still not that well defined.

Of course, we *do* have the record of Shuttle attitude control and OMS engine burns, which produce quite bright and noticeable exhaust patterns, when viewed from the Shuttle windows. And those are also nitrazine-UDMH engines. Maybe it's just a matter of the lighting...

-the other Doug

But, Bob -- not even the CMPs were able to see the LMs firing their engines from more than about 100 miles distance. Of course, they didn't use night-vision scopes, either...

-the other Doug

I guess it depends on what you mean by "operational satellite." The Mercury balloons were inert, simply meant to be an object wiith which the Mercury pilot could make certain attitude-control maneuvers. The REP had some active electronics, but it was only designed to be used, for *any* reason, by the Gemini V vehicle that released it (and was only designed to operate for a few hours, which meant it was never actually *used* for its intended purpose, since Gemini V's rendezvous tests were postponed until well after the REP fell silent).

The Apollo 15 and 16 sub-satellites were the very first independent satellites launched from a manned vehicle that were designed to be used by ground-based investigators entirely separately from the spacecraft crew or its primary controllers. The *only* function that the crew and the Apollo flight controllers had, in regard these sub-satellites, was to give them a ride into lunar orbit and leave them there.

I mean, heck, we could always include Ed White's EVA thermal glove, if we're just talking about *any* object left in orbit that originally went into space aboard a manned vehicle...

-the other Doug

The problem is that, at least in American media, it's become acceptable to state "facts" that you've made up (i.e., LIES) in order to support your own personal point of view (i.e., AGENDA).

If you want to listen to supposedly professional journalists stating incorrect "facts," over and over again, all day long, I suggest you spend some time watching Fox News. Some of the other cable news channels are nearly as bad, but that one's the worst.

As long as high-profile "journalists" are allowed to state lies and then claim they are facts, over and over again, it's a little difficult to teach our schoolchildren and our journalists-in-training that they ought to have some type of abiding respect for the TRUTH.

...*sigh*...

-the other Doug

For the issue with IE trying to dial out, go to your Internet Properties dialog box (I get there by right-clicking the desktkop IE icon and selecting Properties). Find the Connections tab, and click the radio button that says "Never dial a connection." That will let you start IE without it trying to dial out.

I'm assuming you have a separate dialer, if you're on dial-up, or that you have some form of broadband connection...

-the other Doug

And let us not forget that Deep Impact used the Moon as a photography target to test the focus and operation of its cameras -- during which activity it was discovered just how horribly out of focus its NAC was.

-the other Doug

You bet your sweet [recorded off live loop] I am!

-the other Doug