Very true -- but then again, against all odds, Clancy is a very entertaining and compelling storyteller. You all have been able to tell, I'm sure, that I'm not exactly a political conservative. But I've read, and highly enjoyed, every book Clancy has written. And anyone who can present such conservative views in such a way as to keep me from tossing the book against the nearest wall must have some really good storytelling techniques going for him...

Besides, the film versions of Clancy's stories (with the possible exception of "Hunt for Red October") have gutted his core statements, just as Hollywood has carefully avoided Dick's core statements. This isn't a matter of Hollywood preferring liberal or conservative authors -- it's a matter of the Hollywood blender removing controversy from most of its products in order to maximize blandness -- er, non-offensiveness.

-the other Doug

While I really can't explain the popularity of Phil Dick's stories as the (extremely loose) basis for a number of Hollywood films, I don't think that political content is the major factor. Face it, Poul Anderson's works tend to be of vaster scope than Dick's (dealing with great historical trends and mapping such trends against possible future histories). As such, they're not as conducive to nice, edgy, self-contained 93-minute screenplays.

Anderson's future histories, including the van Rijn stories and the Flandry stories, would far better suit themselves to longer, episodic forms. Like episodic television, or a brace of mini-series.

And for all of those who saw "Ensign Flandry" as thinly-disguised justification for the war in Vietnam, I'm sorry to say that I found more parallels with the expansion and maintenance of the Roman Empire in the Flandry series than any statement of political views relating to 20th-century America. But, of course, that could just be my own perception.

-the other Doug

He keeps trying, but no one listens, so the discussion tends to die off. There was so much noise to the signal, though, even at s.s.h., that I finally got disgusted and stopped hanging out in those groups a while back, myself. This forum is so much better, anyway -- the whack jobs seem never to get started, here.

Again, congratulations on maintaining such a high-quality and entertaining forum, Doug! I'm ever grateful that it exists.

-the other Doug

I do want to remind everyone that institutions are institutions, regardless of whether they are "scientific" or "engineering" or even "commercial" institutions. And the corporate mentality is quite capable of reacting harshly to anything that they even *suspect* will put them in a bad light.

There was a case of a fellow who used to post regularly to the Usenet group sci.space.shuttle, who worked for the guys who refurbish the Shuttles and got them ready for re-launch. He also had a website, in which he talked about the daily challenges, joys and frustrations of his work.

He was fired by the company (I think it was Alliance Space Systems, or something like that -- I know I ought to remember the name of the company, but it's late and I'm tired). One of the reasons was that the information he shared on his website and in his Usenet postings could "violate safety and corporate security clauses" in his contract. That was a lot of horse manure, of course -- but it didn't stop them from firing him.

So, don't ever think that *any* institution is incapable of firing people for sharing information about their jobs. It's more the rule than the exception.

-the other Doug

NASA has top men working on it...



I only have one other thing to add to this -- the sampler was indeed flown on Apollo 16, and the description of the sampling process that Young and Duke gave during the EVA was that only one corner of the velvet actually touched the surface, because the surface was very uneven, even at small scales.

So, they did get a sample and it was returned, but it covered less than a quarter of the collector cloth. I *seem* to recall a description of the time the very top layer of the regolith at that location had been in place, based on this sample, but I'd be at a loss to tell you where I might have read that, or when.

-the other Doug

Thanks! I won't be awake for it (I work second shift, basically, and to give you an idea, I just got home from work about 10 minutes ago, and my local time (CST) is 2:40 a.m.).

But, through the miracle of DVR, I have it all set up to record. This may be one that I'll copy permanently to tape.

-the other Doug

I'm not sure we can say with any certainty that the evaporite bedrock is "in place." As in in place exactly where it was laid down. We're getting close to the rim of Erebus, the evaporite here might well be the eroded-flat remnants of jumbled ejecta.

I just don't want everyone to get their hopes up that the evaporite paving is actually an in-place rock bed, when it's still quite possible that it's been as jumbled and broken up as the deposits we've seen in and around smaller impact craters.

-the other Doug

I completely agree. The stretched image, especially, shows that Home Plate most definitely has a bowl shape, and that the sourrounding "pedestal" or "scarp" is arrayed radially, at a different "shell" of the bowl. (I think I'm going to call it Home Plate's "outer rim," for want of a better term.)

It looks exactly like an exhumed crater. And the white rock looks like it could be where a pond inside the crater dried up (perhaps several times), leaving evaporite or just plain salt deposits. If it is salt deposition (either as evaporite or as just plain salt), then the crater would have to have been filled by artesian pressure from the water table, since captured rainfall ought to create fresh-water lakes.

It's interesting that the "outer rim" looks like it's an exhumed portion of the bedrock shocked and radially uplifted by the cratering event, but on its downslope side this "outer rim" breaks circularity and leaves trailing arms down into the Inner Basin. That might have something to do with the aquifer present back when Home Plate held a pond, and how the surrounding waters of Gusev Lake seeped in to fill it. Or, as you say, Bob, it could be evidence of shatter cones.

-the other Doug

There is an interesting anecdote about that first Energia flight. It happened fairly soon before a major set of arms control talks between Gorbachev and Reagan, and Gorbachev was trying very hard to get Reagan to put "Star Wars" on the negotiating table. He wanted to convince Reagan that the Soviets had absolutely no interest in developing similar technologies for space-based warfare.

According to the anecdote, Gorbachev was informed of the test-flight of the Soviet battle station about fifteen minutes before it was launched. He was aghast -- the Americans would definitely know about the launch, since it was the first Energia launch of any kind, and the Americans were, as always, very interested in Soviet space launchers. And it wouldn't take the Americans long to figure out exactly what the payload was -- a test of the very same technologies Gorbachev didn't want Reagan to think the Soviet Union was developing!

So, again according to the story, Gorbachev instantly ordered the launch stopped. His orders came too late -- the vehicle was already on its way -- and so the ground controllers did the only thing they could do, they aborted the final stage and allowed the payload to fall harmlessly into the south Pacific after a suborbital flight. It was a successful test of the booster, and its failure to place its payload into orbit was unplanned but commanded.

It's a fact that the flight ended as a suborbital lob of the payload -- that much is verified by American monitors. Whether or not it was planned to end that way, however, is still the source of apocrypha...

-the other Doug

Sur there are, Dan. If you're in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, anyway -- you can get pence from a number of different exchange counters out at O'Hare, which is probably about three to five miles away from you...

I used to live even closer to O'Hare, in Mount Prospect. But I've been up here in Minne-snow-ta for the past ten years...

-the other Doug

The problem is, we don't have any real data on how much gravity the human body needs to stay healthy, and for how many hours in a day it needs that gravity.

Some astronauts who suffered mild SAS symptoms on their way out to the Moon felt much better after landing on the Moon. It only took 1/6G for them to feel completely normal and comfortable.

While that's anecdotal information at best, there is still, as of right now, *zero* research data on micro-gravity deterioration effects at 1/6G, or 1/3G, or even 1/20G.

And physiology, like most things in the real world, doesn't follow nice, clean curves. A body can take some conditions a fairly wide degree out of "normal" for quite some time without showing any real degradation. But change the degree just slightly, or change another parameter in addition, and the body hits a "trigger" and starts reacting in ways that are ultimately destructive (loss of bone mass and minerals, etc.).

It's possible that 1/6G might be more than enough gravity for the body to retain normal bone density levels indefinitely. Maybe, though less likely, 1/20G will be enough to do the trick.

It seems to me the *only* way to get this data is by flying spacecraft (in LEO, for ease of the commute) which can be spun at different rates to create different gravity levels (via momentum / centripetal force). Heck you could create different levels at different distances from the rotational center.

Then put people aboard those spacecraft for three months, then six months, then nine months, then a year... do direct observational science on physiological reactions to spending extended periods at whatever gravity strength you want to create.

It wouldn't be all that hard to put together -- just build a central control bus and attach two TransHabs to it. Balance the weight in the TransHabs properly, set the whole thing spinning on the ends of a truss. Put solar panels near the center of the control bus, and keep your consumables down at the ends of the Habs. Cheap (relatively speaking), easy (relatively speaking) little station, which can support (with refurbishment/resupply) a crew of 3 to 6 for up to a year.

Run it for a year at a 1/3G speed, then for a year at 1/6G speed, and then for a year at 1/20G speed. Test crews in all three modes. Get your baseline data.

THEN start planning what kind of spacecraft you need for really long journeys.

-the other Doug

Had Apollo 13 not aborted, I think it's possible that we would have seen the program go through Apollo 18.

The decision to delete Apollos 15 and 19 and move the J missions to Apollos 15-17 was made in July, 1970, about a year prior to the flight of Apollo 15. Had Apollo 14 not been delayed by the Apollo 13 abort, it would have flown to Littrow or Censorinus in October, 1970. Apollo 15 (the original H mission) would have then flown in sometime between February and April, 1971.

After the 13 accident, of course, the Apollo 15 flight date slipped back to midsummer 1971, and since the J mission elements were planned to be ready by about that time, it seemed a no-brainer to jump directly to them. But had 13 not aborted, moving to the J missions starting with 15 would have required not only delaying 15 several months, but also bringing Scott's crew online with the new equipment after they had already completed half a training cycle with the H-mission equipment and capabilities.

So, I think it's possible that if Apollo 13 had landed, the preparations for Apollo 15 would have been so far underway by the time the bean-counters were trying to save a few bucks, in July, 1970, that they would have left it alone and simply canceled Apollo 19.

Landing site selection would have changed, too. Had Apollo 14 landed at the mare/wrinkle ridge location near Littrow (about 50 miles due west of the eventual Taurus-Littrow site visited by Apollo 17), the origins of the dark mantling in the area would have been discovered (black volcanic glass from fire fountains that was emplaced more than 3 billion years ago). So this "presumably young" volcanic unit would have been identified, found to be old and not young, and the allure of Taurus-Littrow would have been lost.

An H-mission Apollo 15 would *not* have landed at Hadley -- that was a J-mission site. It might well have ended up landing at the Davy crater chain, where an H mission would be able to determine whether or not the craters in the chain were impact craters or diatremes.

Apollo 16 was going to land at Descartes, regardless -- that was a certainty. So the first J mission would have gone to Descartes, and Young and Duke's explorations would have been exactly the same as they were in real life.

Apollo 17 might have gone to Alphonsus or the Marius Hills. I think that Apollo 18, with Dick Gordon and Jack Schmitt as the LM crew, would have visited Hadley-Appenine. And it would have been a remarkable wrap-up to the Apollo program.

-the other Doug

And as the hardy Europan explorers approach the Blue Planet, a mysterious signal arrives to greet them...

"All of these planets are yours,
Except Earth.
Attempt no landings there.
Use them together.
Use them in peace."

-the other Doug

Leaving the HTC at Flank was always a crew-discretion thing. If Haise and Lovell felt comfortable carrying it all the way to the top of Cone, they had that option. The issue was the weight of the samples collected en route, and Al Bean's comments on how heavy and hard to carry the HTC got when he carried it "around the circle" during Apollo 12's second EVA. (His in-flight comment was "You oughta tell Fred Haise to stop workin' on runnin', and start workin' on holdin' things in his hands. Your legs don't get a bit tired, but your hands get tired carryin' things, particularly this hand-tool carrier.")

I can't imagine that toting the MET along behind you was any less taxing on the hands than carrying the HTC, though. The glove on the Apollo suit was very hard on its wearers' hands, especially if you had to keep holding on to something for long periods of time. It naturally popped into an open-finger position, and took positive muscle action to move and hold the fingers in any other position. While they offered fairly decent dexterity, they left every Apollo surface crew's hands aching and bloody. And on the trip up to Cone, one of Ed Mitchell's gloves had popped into an "alternate stable" position in which the hand wanted to stay bent down about 90 degrees at all times, so he had extra force to fight against when he used that hand to pull the MET.

But speaking of the difficulties of working in the Apollo EVA glove... on Apollo 17, a little procedural error resulted in Jack Schmitt carrying one of the explosive packages on his lap during a 15-minute drive. He had to keep fairly tight hold of it, and his hands and arms were both sore when they finally got to the next station. At another point during the EVAs, Schmitt had to hold his camera together (after its handle started to fall apart) for a good 25 minutes during a drive. He complained loud and long about that at the mission debrief.

John Young probably said it best during the Apollo 16 debrief, when he said (and I'm paraphrasing from memory here, but I think it's pretty close to the exact quote), "When it comes to designing a glove for the pressure suit that you can really do real work in, all I can say is that we ain't there yet."

-the other Doug

Getting *really* crowded! My certificate number is 421919.

-the other Doug

You don't need to be old to be ornery (though it helps). I'd say the orneriest person I ever met was Harlan Ellison, back in the late '70s when he was a rather young man. He was ornerier then than most people get to be in their advanced years...

-the other Doug

Amen, brother. Amen.

For want of a better term, the lawyers who decide on the fundings for these things think of them all as "rocket science." That's a paradigm statement for something that only a few people really, truly understand. If rocket scientists get it *wrong*, then it's got to be so hard to understand that maybe we shouldn't spend good money on it, eh?

Yeah -- let's not give the lawyers more ammunition than they already have.

-the other Doug

In this perspective, the "dark mound" behind Home Plate looks more and more like an erosion-resistant tongue of the rock beds uplifted when the Columbia Hills were formed. It has a strike very similar to the hills themselves, and its strike is also very similar to those of the other outcrops we can see in this view that poke up, here and there, in the inter-hill valley of the Inner Basin and up the sides of Ramon Hill.

Home Plate itself -- it looks very much, in this view, like the remnant of an old impact crater. The way it sits on a little pedestal in the middle of the basin, and the way the edges of the pedestal sort of peel down, just remind me strongly of a rockbed that's been deformed and brecciated by an impact.

Now, that fascinating non-circular ring that makes up Home Plate's perimeter -- well, if Home Plate was a crater that's mostly been eroded away, then that feature represents some kind of cross-section of the crater floor. Or possibly of a portion of the brecciated, shocked and impact-melted rock directly below the floor of the crater.

It seems to me that if the Columbia Hills were uplifted *before* Gusev became a lake, it's possible that craters within the uplifted hills (especially in valleys between the hills, like the Inner Basin) may also have filled with water. Home Plate may have been a pond within the otherwise high-and-dry Columbia Hills, fed by either rainfall or artesian water pressure through fractures leading up into its brecciated floor unit.

If so, Home Plate may be the most exposed version of evaporite outcrop available for examination within Gusev Crater. Especially, within reach within Gusev Crater.

Of course, it might not be evaporite. But it might be the cross-section of lacustrine materials, or even a layer of highly altered rock that used to lie within the Columbia Hill's aquifer. In any event, a close look at Home Plate might be the biggest scientific payoff of the entire MER mission.

-the other Doug

This image also makes it very clear that Erebus' rim is defined, on its north side, more by large drifts than by any elevated rim material. I imagine those drifts are piled up against some slightly elevated evaporite rim material, but I frankly don't see anything elevated on the north rim except for large (one to three meter tall, I'd estimate) drifts. It's possible that these drifts are hiding an evaporite rim from our view, but looking at the MOC imagery, it seems unlikely.

The south rim looks like it may have some semi-elevated evaporite rim. But to be honest, seeing how relatively quickly the evaporite seems to erode (witness the erosion of crater ejecta out on the plains into flat "paving stones" with little relief), I guess I'd be surprised at this point to see much in the way of elevated outcrop associated with the Erebus rim.

-the other Doug

You will also note, very much evident in your enhancement and, I believe, a real feature -- a large circular feature that the last small bright circle you mention lies within. The boundary between the light and dark terrain directly to the north, and to the northwest especially, of that bright crater-like circle describes the upper third of a larger circular feature. That feature continues into the dark terrain as a series of darker arcs that are near-continuous with the arc above, forming the largest circular feature in the entire image.

Basin? Huge caldera? Volcanic collapse feature?

-the other Doug

Hmmm... I don't see a lot of albedo difference in the top images between the depression fill and the general fine fill between the two ends of what may well be a contact binary.

The bottom image seems to show, to my eye, a large dark fine fill that could well cover the contact between the two main objects in the contact binary. Yes, there is a rougher and somewhat darker fill in the upper part of the image, and yes, that does look like a somewhat rougher part of the fill between the two bodies. But it very much looks to me that the darker, rougher fill and the slightly lighter fine fill are both performing similar functions, covering the contact point between the two larger masses within the asteroid.

We can now also see many small craters, and it almost seems like these are the largest craters that this body could withstand before it would blow apart into smaller fragments. I'm also thinking that the fine fill might not show craters -- any impact would blow the fines away, and the asteroid's microgravity would, over the course of centuries, draw the fines back into place, obscuring any crater that might have formed.

We need to model the gravitational and trajectoral influences on very small pieces of rock dust liberated from very small bodies, I think. Over the course of centuries and millennia. It would be very instructive to see if rock dust ejected by small impacts on small bodies would tend, over long time periods, to gather back onto those bodies as fines. Because we need to have some decent theories to explain the abundance of fines we're seeing on the surfaces of the asteroids we look at...

-the other Doug

I have a feeling the tires failed within months of being left on the lunar surface. They were filled with plain old air (regular Earthly composition), such that they would have an inflation pressure of about 20 psia in a vacuum. They also had to undergo the temperature extremes of lunar days and nights. And they were made pretty much like any tubeless tire from the early 1970's -- vulcanized rubber, with no steel treads or metal banding.

I would imagine that the thermal cycling (of the rubber and the air inside) caused the rubber to crack and lose pressurization within a few months of exposure, and the unfiltered UV probably caused the rubber to disintegrate over the course of only a few years. Of course, there are probably portions of the tires that have been consistently shadowed from the sunlight, and hence have not disintegrated, but I doubt there's much left of the tires that look like tires...

-the other Doug

Actually, I did a lot of research on this a few years ago, and the MET wasn't ready for Apollo 13. They flew 13 without a MET. (There is absolutely no mention of the MET in Apollo 13 press materials, whereas it's featured as a great new improvement in the Apollo 14 press materials. It's also not mentioned, even once, in all of the Apollo 13 briefings and de-briefings.)

In fact, if Apollo 13 had landed in roughly the same place that 14 landed, the plan was for them to haul the hand-tool carrier and a set of tools that strapped onto the CDR's PLSS. They were to drop the HTC at Flank Crater, leaving them unencumbered for the final trip up the hill to the rim of Cone. (In fact, a small crater on the rim of Flank was called Outpost Crater in early Apollo 13 maps -- that was where the HTC and the samples collected during the outbound traverse were to be left while Lovell and Haise went up to Cone's rim.)

Apollo 13 was not "wedded" to the landing spot between the Triplet and Doublet craters, by the way -- the computer's landing point was designated to the west (downrange) of Doublet, and Lovell was supposed to re-designate short of Doublet if the ground looked good. If they had landed west of Doublet, they wouldn't have even tried to walk to Cone -- they would have done a westward traverse to Star Crater, about a kilometer to the west of Doublet.

Getting back to the MET, I've never been able to determine whether the MET was originally planned for 13 and just wasn't ready in time, or if it was only ever planned for Apollos 14 and 15. I do know that none of the Apollo 13 press materials ever mentioned it.

Oh, and I believe that the Apollo 12 EVA-2 only covered a little more than one kilometer, although the crew never got more than about 300 meters from the LM. The traverse was a big rough circle, visiting interesting-looking craters and culminating with the visit to Surveyor III. This was an example of how the planning on Apollo followed incremental increases -- if the 12 crew could walk about a kilometer in a 3.5-hour EVA (while staying carefully within a 5-minute walk distance back to the LM), they could clear 13's crew to walk a kilometer or more away from the LM. While the 13 crew never got a chance to take that walk, the 14 crew did it.

-the other Doug

Yeah, but I'm afraid that Marvin's virus didn't work exactly like he intended. I keep hearing this tinny little voice from the sky saying "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!"

-the other Doug

True, Bob -- but we're not comparing the pristine surface to a concrete roadway planted on top of it. If tracks are getting filled in, it's more than likely that the remaining landscape is being affected by the same forces, too. And if the tracks are being completely obscured in a matter of months, I'd say it's well-nigh impossible that the scene we see around us is static and unchanging over thousands of years, much less millions.

-the other Doug