Actually, some of the more recent cosmological theories propose that our entire Universe consists of a membrane which floats through a matrix of higher physical dimensions. It is but one of many such membranes, and the sudden creation of all of the matter and energy within the Universe occurred when our membrane touched another membrane, some 12 to 15 billion years ago.

I certainly don't understand all the math, but there are apparently mathematical descriptions of all this that show it could maybe be the path via which quantum behaviors at small particle levels can be reconciled with Einsteinian general relativity at macro levels.

But one of the things that is appealing (at least to scientific rationalists) about the membrane theory is that it allows for a "before the Big Bang." Instead of making the Big Bang a singularity that cannt be examined or evaluated on any rational level, it makes it simply the logical consequence of some other natural event.

-the other Doug

I disagree. The ground truth shows that disturbed martian soil at Meridiani (as in disturbed by the MER tracks) starts blowing around after only a day or two. And it shows that the drift surfaces are not cemented.

The only thing that keeps the drifts from changing dramatically from day to day is an equilibrium that has evolved between the grain sizes and the winds' transport capacities. Change that equilibrium (for example, by adding a few tons of dust per square kilometer, say in a dust storm), and I'd bet the drifts will evolve much faster and more noticeably.

Of course, if this dust storm kills Oppy, it'll be sort of hard to show how the greater levels of deposition will affect the drifts...

-the other Doug

Now, here is the crux of the issue. Intelligent Design is *not* a theory. It is a statement of *faith*. And, by definition, a statement of faith *cannot* be proven. It must be taken as truth, even though it is not possible to prove.

As such, ID is not, cannot be, and will never be a theory. It must either be accepted on faith, or not. As it can *never* be proven (as with any matter of faith), it cannot *ever* undergo tests of proof, and therefore cannot be a theory.

Period.

End of discussion.

Now, the reason why some people here in the U.S. want to have ID taught as science, when absolutely no stretch of scientific process can make it such -- that's another matter. The reasons behind it are the stuff of what Doug doesn't want this board degenerating into... i.e., politics. But, no matter how energetically some people may wave their arms in support of their point, ID simply is not, cannot be, and never will be a scientific theory, or *any* kind of theory -- not as long as its basis is a matter of faith.

-the other Doug

Agreed. And amen.

-the other Doug

Just to clarify my comments in re a relatively superheated probe floating about in Titan's atmosphere, descending to touch down in many different, widely separated places...

Let's say you were tasked with investigating Africa, and the easiest and most convenient way for you to do this would be to dispatch a large metal balloon that maintained an *exterior* temperature of, say, 400 degrees Celsius. You'd have relatively little effect landing it on the sands of north Africa -- although the sands would tend to melt a bit, and you'd have a harder time establishing the sands' physical characteristics in their natural state.

But everywhere you tried to land this thing in or near vegetation, you'd set fires. Depending on the climate, these fires could spread and have an impact far beyond your local landing site.

Now, it's not like Africa hasn't seen fire before. On Earth, you don't even need to wait for meteors to set fires, lightning does it all the time. But your exploration program would probably get un-funded because you're being irresponsible about destroying pieces (even little pieces) of the place you're trying to explore.

I freely admit that you're not going to set a forest fire on Titan. However, we do *not* understand the conditions on the surface of Titan well enough to be able to predict whether or not there is any kind of cryogenic *analog* to a forest fire that *can* be set off.

Yes, such effects would also occur naturally, for example, when a meteor strikes.

But that wouldn't make it *right* to go ahead and set off some "forest fires" of our own, completely unwittingly, in an attempt to explore Titan. Just as it would be irresponsible to use a superheated probe to explore Africa.

The reason the Africa scenario would be considered irresponsible is that we *know* such a thing would set off fires and damage the African environment, at least to some degree. And yet, we're talking about sending a relatively superheated probe to Titan, have it float in a mix of complex hydrocarbons at cryogenic temperatures, and have it touch down in dozens of places, possibly right on top of potentially complex hydrocarbon solids, taking measurements and images. And, as far as I can tell, *no one* has even *thought about* what effect these touchdowns might have on complex hydrocarbon structures (organic or not) that may have formed at the surface -- structures we want to examine, not destroy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we ought to abandon exploration of Titan. I just think that we ought not get so caught up in "go fever" that we don't at least think through some of the potential risks a given set of exploration strategies might impose on the world we want to examine.

-the other Doug

I find the application fascinating. I've been able to find all of the places I've lived for the past 20 years...

However, I recall that Mapquest used to offer a similar capability (though not with all the great features). You could get aerial photographs of most every place where Mapquest could draw a map. The aerial photos were removed due to a request from the Department of Homeland Security. Seems terrorists could use the aerial photos to plan air attacks a la 9/11/01.

So, while I'm glad to see this kind of application out there, I'm a little surprised that it's as detailed and complete as it is.

-the other Doug

I still wonder whether or not we ought to be careful about waste heat from any probes we send to Titan. It's a cryogenic environment, and tooling around -- even a click or two up in the air -- in a relatively superheated craft will inevitably alter the environment we're trying to observe. And if there *is* some form of life on Titan, our probe might induce a vast die-off.

So, I think the matter of waste heat ought to be at least considered when designing a Titan probe.

-the other Doug

In reality, more about how we live has been captured in the past 100 years than has ever been captured by previous generations. True, the media of storage are not as permanent as we might like, and most of the information captured is at least "flavored," if not actually skewed, depending upon the reason for the capture (news, entertainment, amateur photography, etc.).

What it comes down to, I guess, is what you define as "what it's like to live in these times." That's a really variable thing in the first place -- it depends on where you live, how much money you have, how well connected you and your family happen to be, etc., etc. In fact, "what it's like" varies from person to person, and I doubt we have the desire or the resources to record fine details about six billion lives.

The things that will give future generations a better idea of what life was like in these times are the cultural elements that are shared by larger and smaller groups. Those tend to be captured on film and video more often than not, if only because film and video are the primary means by which people experience the world beyond their own neighborhoods. So, since what we share as a people is already disseminated by film and video, it's already captured.

As much as we might not want future generations to judge us by episodes of Seinfeld, it's a fact that Seinfeld both disseminated and reflected elements of culture that are shared by millions of Americans. A small fraction of American culture, yes, but Seinfeld was a small fraction of the information captured during its run.

I have just recently celebrated my 50th birthday. I can tell you that American media has not always reflected the ways in which I have lived over that half-century, but it has provided the backdrop for the world in which I live. Future anthropologists will have worse things to look at than the volume of media stored from film and video.

I'm not the guy y'all probably would want to pick and choose what we should save for future generations -- but then again, no one else is, either. That's why we want a LOT of people making those decisions, and saving what seems important to them. That way, what is saved will better reflect who we were and what we went through...

-the other Doug

Hmmm... spherical concretions occur in lots of places here on Earth, too. I guess the first set of questions to ask includes the following:

1) Are there any terrestrial concretions that display similar chemistry, i.e., hematitic?

2) If the answer to the above is Yes, is there an accepted theory that organics played a role in their formation?

I know, I know, the Apollo 16 lesson is learned well, here -- that assuming terrestrial-like processes to explain observed phenomenah on other worlds can lead you down the wrong path. But if we're talking about organics here, we need to at least compare the situation at Meridiani to anything and everything even remotely similar in our terrestrial experience.

-the other Doug

That's why James Cameron (who, among other things, made the film "Titanic") was a member of the panel that reported back to NASA about how NASA could get more public support for their programs. A very large part of the recommendations of the public hearings and investigations NASA put together to support Bush's Moon, Mars and Beyond initiative was to make use of Hollywood and other professionals to make people aware of the truly great things NASA is up to...

-the other Doug

Yep -- it took me forever to figure out that this "Go-erd-the" fellow people talked about was really that "GO-thee" person...

-the other Doug

Thanks -- though on re-reading I note that I was probably assigning an outlook to Mr. Markley that really was being presented by Mr. Grinspoon. So, consider my remarks appropriately adjusted...

-the other Doug

I don't know if each of the larger pieces is monolithic. Each seems to be "prickly" with large boulders sticking out -- at least in those places where the regolith doesn't bury everything.

It's possible that the two larger bodies, and whatever mid-sized bodies create the "bridge" between them, are all themselves rubble piles. This could be a loose accretion of three or four rubble piles... with the seismic "shaking" needed to smooth out the regolith surfaces being provided by the very slow contact/accretion process that has loosely glued the pieces together.

In other words, three or four rubble piles have accreted, and the "collision" (I hate to call it an impact, it's so slow and low-energy) that causes each new rubble pile to "stick" to the overall body has shaken the material enough to redistribute and smooth out the fines-sized particles. Thus, we have no "one large crater" that accounts for the shaken-smooth quality of the regolith.

-the other Doug

I've always felt that if you're going to fly two of a given probe, you ought to fly them at roughly the same time. As has been said here before, when NH gets to Pluto it will be using instruments and data systems that are 15 or more years out of date. Why fly a duplicate of such a spacecraft in a few years, when for not much more money we could design and build a more capable spacecraft? At least, a spacecraft that has the benefit of those extra years of improvement and enhancement of the sensing packages?

If you're going to fly NH2, I'd select another one or two KBOs (or other objects) it could reach, and launch it ASAP. That would cost the least amount of additional money and put the existing hardware to the best use. But if you're planning on missions to fly in 5, 10 or more years, I'd simply leave it to a newly-designed probe that will have greater capabilities and give more "bang for the buck."

-the other Doug

Markley has a point -- and yet, he doesn't. He seems to see the "Follow the Water" mission as a negative, limiting definition of the MER mission, as the antithesis of the scientific method. "Why look for water, which we know was there, when we should simply be looking for the real story the rocks tell us?" seems to be Markley's basic point.

There are two problems with Markley's question. The first is that we did *not* know for certain that water formed the large-scale physical features revealed by Mariner 9, the Viking orbiters, and so on. There have been very elegant theories put forward that purport to explain every feature we see by the action of CO2 phase changes (the "White Mars" theories). These theories have been more or less discredited by the results of the MERs, true -- but that's why you get ground truth, to prove or disprove various theories about the world we observe.

And that's the other problem with Markley's main point -- you do *not* always just investigate what's there, with absolutely no pre-conceived notions as to what you'll find. Sure, if we could just pull limitless chunks of Mars from wherever we wish on the planet and bring them back to Earth for whatever investigations we can think of to run on them, we ought to just grab whatever we can and follow whatever story the rocks tell us. But we can't do that. We can only place a very few sensors on the surface, and only on one or two spots on the surface, and we have to select those instruments, and those spots, based on *something*.

And so, when we have to make these kinds of decisions -- what instruments to fly, where to land them -- we have to try and base those decisions on our best theories as to what we're likely to find. And we have to drop the high-minded approach of "let's just gather all the data we can about the rocks and let them tell their own story," we *must* try and either prove or disprove current theories.

Hence, we get "Follow the Water." It's the same reason the major part of the Viking landers' science payload was designed to look for extant microbial life that, for the instruments to detect it, must be almost identical to terrestrial microbial life. They designed the instrumentation the way they did because, as with the MERs, the Viking landers couldn't carry enough instrumentation to determine exactly every chemical compound in the rocks and soils, exactly how old each piece of rock and soil is, exactly where each rock formed, how and why... and because it was felt that the most important theory to prove or disprove, at that point in time, was whether or not terrestrial-type organisms lived on Mars.

Viking found a situation that didn't fit into the theories; some of the life detectors got positive results, but others (especially the organics detector) did not. Some, Markley possibly included, might say that the Vikings were a complete waste of time, since they were designed to find things that weren't there. But the mixed results of the Viking experiments did not derail investigations of Mars -- they served to re-define the debate.

So, Squyres and company were given a set of goals, primary of which was to determine ground truth on the issue of Mars having once supported open bodies of liquid water. Prove that, and you can proceed on to further investigations, like looking for organic materials (which is, of course, the primary mission of MSL). *Disprove* it, and you reach another of those points where you must re-define the debate.

While it may be noble to believe that researchers always approach their investigations without pre-conceived notions of what results they will find, the bare reality is that almost all scientific investigation is undertaken, and *designed*, to either prove or disprove a given set of theories. The results achievable by most experiments and investigations are usually defined such that they will either strongly prove, or strongly disprove, whatever theory is being tested.

Methinks Mr. Markley might need to descend from the ivory towers and take a realistic look at how and why scientific investigations work...

-the other Doug

I read all about the planets and the asteroids and the stars back when I was a wee lad... and back before I had a clue as to how Latin and Greek were pronounced.

I did my best, but for a long time, I horribly mis-pronounced most of the names when I read them. (I never had a lot of opportunities to speak them.)

So... I had a lot of interesting (and wrong) pronunciations in my head. Like EYE-oh (Io), en-sell-AH-dus (Enceladus), DYE-own (Dione), bet-el-GEEZ with a hard 'G' (Betelgeuse), and my favorite, oh-FIE-u-kus (Ophiuchus).

Even though I know better now, some habits die hard. I still have a hard time reading the name Io as "EE-oh." It'll always be "EYE-oh" to me...

-the other Doug

I think we need heat flow measurements from several thousands locations on Mars, and seismometers in several hundred locations, before we can even start to theorize about the current state of Mars' mantle and core...

-the other Doug

I imagine that $111 million figure is for the cost of flying Shenzhou VI only. It's not the cost of the entire Shenzhou program.

About how much did it cost to fly a single Gemini mission (to which the Chinese flight is comparable)? In today's dollars, of course. I bet the costs are similar...

As a comparison, it cost about a quarter of a billion dollars, in 1969 dollars, to fly a single Apollo lunar landing mission. Those were a lot more complex, and used more resources, than a simple two-guys-in-orbit-for-four-days kind of flight, of course.

-the other Doug

Oppy is at the rim of a very old impact crater. Notice how the layering in the "pavement" rocks is no longer primarily flat -- it's all jumbled, with adjacent pieces of rock showing far different orientations in the layers.

The pavement rocks here are the remains of the jumble of ejected rocks created when Erebus was formed. It's all been weathered down to nearly flat, and then covered over with dust drifts... but this was all once the rocky, jumbled ejecta from Erebus.

What I'm *really* interested in is the dark rock unit that seems to underlie the evaporite unit, as seen in the Mogollon and Vermillion Rims (and also in a smaller outctop of the original crater rim fairly close to our current position). I'm thinking that this is rock from the unit that underlies the evaporite across this entire area, and it will be *very* interesting to see what was here before the seas came and went.

-the other Doug

Sounds like several of these new team members will be able to stay busy for a year or two analyzing the results thus far. I'm unclear as to how many of them will be involved in day-to-day operations -- it seems it would take them some time to correlate already-gathered data and arrive at recommendations for current rover ops.

-the other Doug

Unfortunately, Richard, the American Congress passed the Iran Non-Proliferation Act a few years ago, which stipulates that the U.S. government cannot do business with any country that provides Iran with technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons. And since Russia has sold technology to Iran for building nuclear power plants (and that can be adapted for building nuclear weapons), the U.S. will not pay Russia for launch vehicles. (This, by the way, has made ISS operations very difficult -- the U.S. can't pay for Russian services with money, so they pay by giving up crew slots, experiment time, etc., on board the station.)

NASA's new administrator, Mike Griffin, has argued in front of Congress that the law has not changed Russian policy and has hurt the cause of American-Russian space co-operation. He has asked for the law to be amended, if only to exempt purchases related to space co-operation. Has anyone heard whether or not the Congress has passed such an exemption? It seemed to be accepted well in the committee where Griffin presented it...

Anyway, until such an exemption is passed, it's literally illegal for NASA to purchase launch services of any kind from Russia.

-the other Doug

It's just hard to imagine subsurface sapping that would extend up into a fluffy drift and create a dimple in its side or crest.

If they're from impacts, do they have to be from *meteor* impacts? What is the largest grain size particle that can be lifted to any significant height by Martian winds? Especially by mega-dust devils, which might pull small stones kilometers in height and toss them out more kilometers from the top or side of the funnel?

Perhaps there are localized extremely high winds or pressure gradients within Martian dust storms, not easy to observe from above, which would tend to pick up stones large enough to create these dimples?

I'm just trying to think of *anything* that could toss a small stone into a fluffy drift and make a nice little dimple "crater"...

-the other Doug

Most of the other dark features seen in the MOC imagery aren't at *all* obvious from the ground, at least at Gusev. Maybe it's mostly a matter of the dark sands collecting in crater bottoms, and the crater bottoms sitting low enough as to be hidden by the rims when seen from any real distance. But even when we've looked directly into craters that look very dark-floored in MOC images, like Bonneville, they just aren't nearly as dark from the MER perspective.

These patches are the first things I've seen that look *exactly* as dark in the MER images as they do in the MOC images. That's what perked up my interest.

-the other Doug

"Strange" in two ways:

1) There are a lot of little veinlets that run through the rock face, reminiscent of materials that are more resistant to erosion than the matrix in which they formed. In some places, the veinlets appear branched, even dendritic.

2) The whole rock face, at the MI scale, is shot through with tiny little spherical voids. A *very* few small spheres are visible still in the rock face, of about the same size as all the voids. Several of the remaining spheres are at the end of "stalks." like we saw in Pot of Gold and other rocks, both at Gusev and at Meridiani.

It looks like a form of concretion development, with veinlets sometimes feeding spheres and sometimes not, the whole thing encased in a more erodable matrix. A matrix that looks a lot like finely layered sediments (very, very fine layering is visible in the matrix, all along where it's eroded in corners).

I'm sure it's a product of erosion of a highly altered rock (maybe even lacustrine materials), but the whole thing has a very organic look to it.

-the other Doug

There are some really strange looking rock forms in that last pic...

-the other Doug