And, by the way, Doug -- we were talking about sending you an e-mail telling you that we had added a new board, AL1EN @BDUCTIONS (purposely mis-spelled here to avoid unwanted Googling), and that we had pulled in just a LOT of new members, and you ought to be proud of us for attracting new people...



-the other Doug

I do have to admit, during last year's Presidential campaign, I *did* see a few bumper stickers featuring the simple, two-word sentence, "Lick Bush." At that point, I probably came the closest it's possible for me to come to feeling sorry for the guy...



-the other Doug

Reminds me of an old Isaac Asimov short story in which a writer had been cursed by Satan such that he was incapable of writing anything except pact-with-the-devil stories. The upshot is that, after the writer died and went to Hell, the only thing he could end up submitting to the publishers in the Underworld were........


.....wait for it.....


.....pact with the Editor stories!

:::ducking:::

-the other Doug

Ummm.... what about the cross-bedding in the rocks at Eagle Crater? I thought that was supposed to be foolproof evidence of the sand grains being deposited by wave action?

-the other Doug

Careful, there -- oriental languages, which depend on tone to differentiate meaning between otherwise identical sounds, are *much* harder to learn as an adult (for those who did not grow up with such a language) than any other style of language in the world.

-the other Doug

That's still not as bad as when Coca-Cola tried to market its product in China. They found a Chinese phrase that sounded like "Coca-Cola," but after they had the campaign in place, they discovered that the phrase chosen actually translated out to "Bite the wax tadpole."

-the other Doug

What are you, some kind of wild-eyed, foolish optimist? Not in our lifetimes, I assure you!



-the other Doug

"mmmmrrrrllll mmmmcccnnnn."

"What did she say?"

"I think she said 'oil can'!"

Oppy is in a place where she can accumulate rust without ever getting wet...

-the other Doug

I've seen the original picture, and yeah, there was always the hint of the spacecraft structure in the shadows, lit by light reflected off the western crater wall. Your brightening makes it a good deal more obvious than in the non-enhanced image.

I always knew the whole of Surveyor was quite visible and evident to the eye, though -- Pete spotted it almost immediately when looking behind the LM, less than a minute after he set foot on the Moon. But the eye is a superior instrument to the camera, and can see in a greater dynamic lighting range. I'll bet the eye could see all of the Surveyor quite clearly, even half in shadow.

The more interesting thing is that both Conrad and Bean thought the slope of the crater wall upon which the Surveyor rested was a good deal steeper than advertised -- when they saw it in shadow. The next day, when the sun had cleared the eastern rim, it appeared far less steep. I have to admit, you sort of get that impression, of greater steepness, looking at this image, too.

-the other Doug

This Rhea encounter just reinforces my earlier impressions that this moon has more crater chains, both in straight lines and in arcs, than any other body I've ever seen. Moreso than any of the other Saturnian moons, certainly.

So, the question still lies a-begging -- are these chains exogenic or endogenic in origin?

-the other Doug

The question that comes to my mind is:

If "warm" ice is convecting towards Enceladus' surface and then fountaining out of these south polar vents in significant quantities, could this have been happening for a very large percentage of Enceladus' existence?

Do we have any clue of how much mass is entrained in the E ring? And can we even estimate the rate of mass lost from Enceladus due to this process? Because, for example, even if it's only losing a few tons of material a day, after billions of years, such venting would significantly reduce the mass and size of the body. And what would happen to an icy moon that has lost a significant amount of mass from within -- wouldn't there be signs of global crustal compression?

I guess it depends on what's heating the interior ice and forcing convection of "warm ice" to the surface. Since tidal heating seems unlikely for such a small body, perhaps it's radiogenic? Maybe Enceladus happened to form around a rocky core that, for some as-yet-unguessed reason, had an anomalous amount of radiogenic minerals within it?

If that's the case, then maybe Enceladus started out a lot bigger and has been losing mass -- and size -- for billions of years. Otherwise, you'd have to think that the activity we're seeing now is relatively rare, and we're lucky to be seeing it...

-the other Doug

As a follow-up, it's very possible that had LM-3 been ready for a December flight (the original Apollo 8, McDivitt's crew testing the LM in LEO), and Apollo 9 been the first manned lunar-orbit flight, it's quite possible that Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan would have been the first men to walk on the Moon. Borman's crew would have used LM-4, which eventually flew on Apollo 10. The first LM configured to land, LM-5, would then have been assigned to Stafford's Apollo 10.

Instead of flying the C, C-prime, D, and F missions before flying the G mission (the landing mission), they would have ended up flying the C, D, and F missions prior to the G mission. Either way, the E mission just wouldn't have ended up being flown... and without it, Conrad would've been screwed out of the first landing, either way.

-the other Doug

You can, indeed, see Surveyor in the EVA 1 color pans from Apollo 12 -- the top two and a half feet of it, anyway. The solar panel and antenna, and a bit of the mast, were in sunlight, while the rest of Surveyor was in shadow during the first EVA. (The sun angle during EVA 1 was only about 6 degrees above the horizon, so the entire east wall of the Surveyor Crater was in shadow. That's also why it was so jard to avoid pointing the TV camera at the sun -- it was sitting just a smidge over the eastern horizon.) You can just barely see the solar panel and antenna in those pan images, the rest of the craft is hopelessly lost in the shadow.

As for the Apollo 8/9 switch -- you're exactly right, except that Lovell would have flown on Apollo 9 and Collins on Apollo 12. Collins' neck surgery took him off of Borman's crew in July of 1968, well before the switch occurred. He would have been healthy enough to fly Apollo 9, but would have lost too much training time.

As for Pete being the first man on the Moon -- Deke would have approved the crew selection, but NASA PAO would have been sweating the entire flight, worried that the first words spoken by a man standing on the lunar surface would have been "Holy sh*t, I'm standing on the f**king Moon!" (Conrad, to his dying day, swears he actually said "Oh, sh*t!" after he shut his engine down and his LM fell the final six feet to the surface. He thought that maybe he said it softly enough that the VOX circuit didn't pick it up.)

-the other Doug

You're exactly right, Ted. Add to that the fact that, as I recall, ME had been in Mars orbit and taking images for *months* and ESA had released all of five images, or somesuch ridiculously small number.

I don't know how European culture reacts to such things, but when someone in America crows over how wonderfully successful his/her project is, but seems very reticent to show their results to the general public, people regard him/her with mistrust. If this is not true in Europe, I imagine this would explain much about how the ESA press department operates.

But... can you *imagine* how much fuel the Moon Hoaxers would have had for their cause had NASA decided to delete the TV cameras from Apollo (something they came very close to doing), not share the live air-to-ground communications of the landing and other mission milestones, and release only five or six pictures from the flight in the first six months after Apollo 11 returned to Earth? And, on top of that, only allowed "qualified scientists" to see results of the analyses of the moon rocks returned?

All I'm saying is that if you treat the results of space exploration as material that can *only* be discussed "properly" in approved scientific journals, if you believe that the *only* worthwhile means of making public the results of such explorations are through abstracts and articles in scientific journals with circulations in the low thousands, then you'll *never* reach the people you really need to reach -- those common folk who are dying inside for want of something that excites their sense of wonder.

I guess it all comes down to one basic question -- are we exploring the Solar System for the professional satisfaction of a few thousand scientists, or for the deep-soul satisfaction of the human race?

I know what *my* answer is.

-the other Doug

I'll say the same thing I said in another thread -- the ESA spokesman (I can't rmemeber his name) discussing the phyllosilicates said that the closest observed outcrops to either MER are a good thousand miles away. He was asked how long it might take for one or the other of the MER rovers to get to any phyllosilicate deposits, and he said (paraphrasing, my best recollection of his exact words), "Probably Martian centuries -- the closest is about a thousand miles away."

I remember this specifically because I thought it somewhat odd that a European scientist would reference the distance in miles and not kilometers.

-the other Doug

In the context image, your point is clear... but geez, everything that looked like a hole in the original image turns out to be a bump! That's totally counter-intuitive to someone who's been looking at cratered terrains his whole adult life...

-the other Doug

I disagree. The manner in which ESA decided to release this information showed a lack of respect for the average world citizen who has an interest in the information.

This forum wouldn't serve your purposes very well, Jon, if it was nearly impossible to read. The ESA press conference was nearly impossible to hear or see for American viewers -- and the fault for that rests squarely with ESA.

ESA's attitude *seems* to be, "If you're not a properly accredited scientist, you have no interest in or use for this information, so we're not going to spend any effort making the information available to you."

And I disagree *strongly* with that attitude.

The results are wonderful -- the means by which ESA chose to present those results to the American viewers was lame. The content of the results does not change that.

-the other Doug

Based on the shadows, the sun is on the *right*... unless you posted the image upside-down to the way you were looking at it when you made the comment.

-the other Doug

Well, it *may* not happen in the lifetimes of the average members of this forum. But that all depends on the state of advancement of propulsion technology. I've seen some articles on plasma drive concepts that are being championed by, among others, Franklin Chang-Diaz, that could dramatically increase the amount of delta-V capacity a spaceship can drag along with it.

If we can develop bigger, better propulsion systems in the next 20 or 30 years, things that can give you constant acceleration for most of your flight (and not at measely 1/100th G levels, either), then you can tool around the Solar System in months when you used to need to spend years. Months or years when you used to need decades.

It's not like we will *always* be limited to push-real-hard-then-coast-for-years technologies. At least, I'm sincerely hoping not.

-the other Doug

Doubtful that the underlying deposits at Meridiani are these phyllosilicate clays that the ESA guys were talking about -- they said very specifically that the closest to either of the rovers they detected these clays were more than 1,000 miles away.

-the other Doug

Ought to go into one of the Mars forums, I think, Marz...

For those of you who have been watching this press conference on NASA-TV on streaming video, y'all may be interested in the fact that I'm watching NASA-TV on cable and what ESA is sending out to NASA-TV is not even a video feed. It is, itself, nothing more than a streaming video from a webcam! They have all these wonderful graphics and charts and videos -- and all of them are on a 100k (or less) Real Player stream out to NASA-TV. And it's going to black every minute or two (I imagine so that their Real Player can re-buffer the stream).

It doesn't even have enough resolution to be able to read the PowerPoint slides -- which make up 90% of the visuals they're presenting.

For those who have been defending ESA's PR effort -- you *cannot* convince me that ESA has the money to mount planetary missions but lacks the money to provide a *watchable* video feed of their "triumphant" release of Huygens and Mars Express data.

This is totally, completely lame.

-the other Doug

The NASA publication that covers the Viking missions has a very nice appendix discussing the "true colors" of Mars. What spaceffm has come up with is an almost perfect example of what that appendix would call "What Mars would look like under Earth outdoor lighting conditions."

This look is more contrasty and a little bluer than how the same scene would appear on Mars. The actual in-situ look is a little redder and has less contrast, partially because the diffuse light from the sky is in the yellow-orange range.

But, if Home Plate and the Pitcher's Mound were magically transported into the high desert of the United States southwest, it would look pretty much *exactly* like this.

-the other Doug

It has occurred to me, over the past few months, as I see some of the most exciting planetary missions being planned for the 2010s, 2020s and even 2030s, that I may not be around to see some of them.

I just turned 50 years old last month. I was 13 going on 14 when we landed on the Moon, and I'm becoming worried that I may not live to see men walk on the Moon again.

I'm getting definitely concerned that some of these really interesting missions, like the Europa orbiter and the potential Neptune and Uranus orbiters, won't return results until I'm in my 60s, 70s, or even 80s. The target date for the new manned Moon landings, in 2017 (IIRC), will be when I'm 61 going on 62.

Now, I may very well still be around until 2025 or 2030 -- but I'm getting pretty certain that no manned Mars mission is going to be attempted by then. In fact, I'm almost thinking it might be a good idea to die *now* and get reincarnated in a hurry, so I would be about the right age to try and wrangle a seat on the first manned Mars expedition (which I'm beginning to think might not happen until 2035 or so, if it ever happens at all).

So, what do y'all think -- those of you who are young enough, what do you think you'll live to see? And those of you who are older, like me -- what do you think you might miss?

-the other Doug

That sounds fair -- since, over on the other thread, we're all talking about you...



-the other Doug

The biggest problem with using steerable aerocapture / landing trajectories is that you need to have a *very* good model of the atmosphere you're using to slow down with.

It's bad enough to have only a vague idea of the temperature/pressure profile of an atmosphere you're using to do straight-line drag braking. If you're designing into your spacecraft and trajectory a need for predictable changes in direction based on lift, *any* significant variation in the atmosphere's pressure, density and temperature profile from your model will result in completely different results.

They're talking about needing a Mars orbiter for day-to-day monitoring of the upper atmosphere in order to successfully land future probes -- apparently, Mars' upper atmosphere was so much thinner and extended than predicted during Spirit's EDL that she was very nearly dashed against the surface a la Beagle II. Cassini is seeing that Titan's upper atmosphere also seems highly variable in pressure/altitude. So, in order to successfully use Titan aerobraking for a Saturn orbiter, you'd almost need to already have a working Saturn orbiter there to tell you the detail you need about Titan's atmosphere at that moment...

Like many other elegant ideas, this one tends to fall apart when you look at it in greater detail.

-the other Doug