You feel old?

I remember the most exciting days of my life, waiting (with little patience) for the biggest thing that would happen during my lifetime.

I remember it as if it was yesterday.

It was 36 years ago.

Old, you say?

-the other Doug

I grew up as a science fiction fan -- the town library in Normal, IL had a "young people's" section, and I had devoured its science fiction shelves by the time I was eight. I got an adult library card at age 10 and had read Welles and Verne, as well as Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke, by the time I was 11. I had read and enjoyed everything from space opera to cutting-edge speculative fiction by such writers as Ellison and Dick.

I had watched all of the awful sci-fi on TV (and some of the better stuff available at the movies) since I was a small child. I remember Fireball XL-5 (although I was a bigger fan of "Supercar"). My favorite science fiction TV show when I was little was a syndicated piece called "Men Into Space." It was hard sf, following the adventures of one Colonel McCauley as he spearheaded America's first forays into space. I believe it was produced in the late 1950s.

And then, when I was a month and a half short of my 11th birthday, Star Trek premiered. I remember watching the very first episode aired, "The Man Trap," and thinking that this show had some real potential. It was good, entertaining space opera from the get-go, and it had a structure that allowed for the exploration of some fairly intelligent science fiction themes. I was hopeful.

While there were some really poorly-written episodes, there were also some real gems, and I looked forward to seeing Star Trek every week as I grew up. Even the third season, when Roddenberry had abandoned the project and it sank to some new lows, it was still a fun and entertaining show.

And then, just a couple of months after the final original episode of Star Trek was aired, men first walked on the Moon. It seemed appropriate -- we had graduated from the fantasy of space exploration to the reality of men exploring other planets.

We didn't need Star Trek any more -- from now on, we'd be doing it for real.

Yeah, right.

Pardon me while I hunt through my 377 channels for an old Star Trek re-run... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

One more little note of interest -- since the LOK/LK was set up such that there was no connecting tunnel between the orbiter and the lander, the LK crewman had to transfer to and from his craft via EVA. That's why the very first Soyuz mission was planned to demonstrate EVA transfer between two vehicles. It wasn't accomplished until the dual Soyuz 4/5 flight, but it was originally the plan for Soyuz 1/2 to perform a crew transfer.

-the other Doug

A slight etymological aside, here -- just as LM stood for Lunar Module, LK was an acronym. It stood for (if I'm remembering the spelling right) Luniy Korabl. The O in LOK stood for the Russian word for "orbiting," I forget the word right now...

In the Soviet spacecraft designation game, "Korabl" (which best translated into "cabin") was used most frequently to refer to unmanned tests of manned spacecraft. Several test flights of the Vostok were given the name "Korabl-Sputnik." And while it was flown under the more generic "Cosmos" name, the LK was indeed test-flown twice in Earth orbit.

The LK would have ridden a crasher stage down for the majority of its descent, and had about 100 seconds between separation from the crasher and ignition of its terminal braking rockets to when it had to touch down. It had very, very limited ability to redesignate its landing point, and the braking engines were throttled using a manual throttle-arm which reduced or increased fuel flow into the combustion chamber. Because the odds were fair that an LK would land on a slope (craters being omnipresent), it had "settling rockets" attached to the leg struts which ignited upon lunar contact to push the LK *down* into the dust, ensuring that it would sit upright, even on slopes of more than 30 degrees.

And yes, the Soviets were very concerned about a person being able to walk properly on the Moon, and what might happen if he fell over. With only one landing crewman, if someone fell over and turned turtle, he might die without ever being able to get back up (at least that was the Soviets' fear). They had a contraption that looked like an elderly person's walker, that the moonwalking cosmonaut would carry with him to lean on. There was also a plan for a Lunokhod to scout out a landing area and provide television coverage of the landing of the LK. The cosmonaut would then attach a seat to the Lunokhod and drive it around the landing site, taking pictures and collecting rocks from the comfort of his "travel chair."

I believe the Lunokhod was to be more than just transportation, it would have contained an emergency oxygen supply in case of a backpack failure -- generally, it was a way of making up for there only being one guy out there, with no one within a quarter of a million miles to help him.

There is also a speculation (discussed at Mark Wade's excellent Encyclopedia Astronautica) that, when they were certain that the N-1 wouldn't be ready in time to fly an LOK/LK flight prior to Apollo's first landing attempts, the Soviets may have gotten close to giving the green light to an alternate mission, assembling the entire N-1 TEI package in LEO from separate Proton and Soyuz booster launches. It was during this period, in early 1969, that the LK was first test-flown. But the LOK variant of the Soyuz hadn't yet flown, the Kontakt docking system had not been flight-tested, and the LOK heat shield and return trajectory hadn't been tested successfully (the Zond tests having failed in some crucial manner each time). The best "guess" is that the Soviets were assembling the pieces and might have attempted such a multi-launch LOK/LK flight had Apollo failed to land by the end of 1969 -- but they knew there was a great amount of risk, with so many of the components and flight operations untested.

My best guess is that, if the Soviets had indeed tried to fly a multi-launch LOK/LK mission, it had no better than a 50/50 chance of getting its crew back alive, and probably less than a 20% chance of actually achieving a manned landing and return.

-the other Doug

Now it's off of "Momentarily" and back to telling us it's supposed to start ten minutes ago... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

Yes, but an average day on Mars would be considered tremendously dank and humid (and air-filled) on the Moon, and you see lunar dust forming cracks like this, too. In the complete absence of air and water.

It has to do with the grain size and morphology -- fine powders become somewhat self-cohesive, especially in a vacuum or under low pressure. That's what causes the cracking action. As I said, it even works in our own atmosphere with most fine powders.

-the other Doug

Has anyone heard anything in regards the mini-TES work they did at Purgatory? If anything showed up as characteristic of this particular soft powder, that would help a lot in being able to plan a safe route, regardless of the drift morphology. Just do mini-TES sweeps of various potential routes, and avoid those that traverse through areas with the same characteristics...

-the other Doug

A fine enough powder acts like this in the complete absence of moisture -- in fact, moisture keeps a fine powder from acting this way. Try pressing some flour down onto a plate and see what it looks like... you'll get cracks like this.

-the other Doug

Yep -- my local cable system carries a NASA TV signal that originates from one of the local high schools. The high school brought in the signal for educational purposes and shared it with the cable company.

But today, the channel is blank. So, obviously, the high school couldn't afford the digital coverter.

So, I guess I'm SOL when it comes to further NASA TV coverage -- except on the web feeds, that is.

-the other Doug

We got to know ye better than I ever wanted to!



-the other Doug

That looks less like a dust devil and more like a Death Ray...



-the other Doug

Examples of American news people of the first category -- Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid.

Examples of the latter category -- Bill O'Reilly, Anderson Cooper, Britt Hume.

First category -- legends in their field. Second category -- hacks.

You're probably right that the bottom-line news organization owners are only interested in giving people what *they* think the people want, but that fact hasn't changed in the last 50 years. What *has* changed is that news organizations have been vetted by their wealthy owners such that organizations like CBS News no longer are alllowed to report the atcual facts of the great and important stories of the day, for fear that more people want to hear what someone "above" them tells them is important than what is *really* important...

-the other Doug

Those are exactly the conclusions to which I'm coming, Edward -- that the models we have of how such dunes and drifts are built up are lacking.

Notice that, despite the name I gave to this thread, I don't insist the granule-sized objects are hematite concretions -- the granules *look* a lot like the granules in the concretion paving we saw out on the plains, but in the MI images, the drift material looks almost exactly like the floor material of Eagle Crater. The relative abundance of granules is quite similar to what we saw at Eagle, and the grain size of the dust "matrix" in which the granules are embedded (and upon which they sit) is also similar.

Somehow, I think maybe there is a process of questions we need to have answered about how these drifts are formed and how they evolve, and instead of asking the first question in that process, this is something like question number 23... for example, what is different about this terrain that caused greater drifting than we observed out on the plains? Drifts and dunes develop based on the aerodynamics of the local terrain features, so there must have been something very different about the terrain that underlies these drifts, as compared to the flat terrain to the north.

I'm on record here, in several threads, proposing that the etched terrain was originally the complex ejecta blankets emplaced by a crater cluster, of which Terra Nova and Erebus are near the northen end. (Another large crater, probably the oldest of this cluster, lies north of Erebus and Terra Nova, a series of lighter dunes -- of which Purgatory is a member -- appearing to define the northeast arc of its rim.) I'm going to call this the Southern Cluster, for ease of identification.

We've seen examples of relatively fresh and unaltered ejecta blanket patterns on the Moon, and while conditions on Mars (especially the volatiles content of the target rock) would result in some differences, we can speculate on how the large impacts that created the Southern Cluster affected the surrounding terrain. We can also speculate on how things like the presence of standing water, subsurface water or ice when some or all of these large craters were formed might have affected the resulting terrain.

When you come up with models of the evaporite terrain, after most or all of the craters in the Southern Cluster were formed and after water and ice alteration processes have basically ended, *then* you can start to ask how aeolian processes can be modeled that will result in the terrain as it appears today.

So, for example, if it *is* true that the series of lighter-colored, fish-scale shaped drift forms, where Oppy got stuck, define the northeast rim of an ancient crater, then it would make sense that the formation of these drifts was, at least to an extent, controlled by the underlying rim crest. You could argue that the more jumbled the terrain, the higher the drifts built up, and over millions of years the drifts have been cyclically deflated and reformed, each time allowing the underlying jumble of evaporite and basaltic rock that made up the ejecta blankets of the Southern Cluster craters to be eroded down some more. Each cycle of deflation and deposition would then be enriched by the primary erosion of the original evaporite and ejecta-altered terrain.

But we have a long way to go before we can believably model the original evaporite terrain, much less speculate on the ages of the components of the Southern Cluster and how their ejecta was originally emplaced. Or what its constituents were. And maybe we need to answer that question number one before we can successfully develop a model that explains what we're seeing.

-the other Doug

I'm watching NASA TV at the moment, and Michael Griffin, the new NASA Administrator, is speaking to a panel in Congress. (It *may* be a taped presentation, although NASA TV usually puts the date of taped replays in the corner, and there is no date here...)

Griffin presented them with a message, co-signed by Condoleeza Rice, which recommends that the Iranian Nuclear Proliferation Act, which prohibits the American government from having any business dealings with Russia until and unless Russia stops providing Iran nuclear power plant technologies, be amended. As it stands now, as of April of next year, NASA would no longer be able to purchase Soyuz or Progress support for any American space activities. In other words, in Griffin's own words in fact, there could only be an American presence on the ISS while the Shuttle was present at the station.

The recommendation takes into account that this act has not been effective at chaniging Russia's policies, and apparently asks for all space co-operation funding that ought to go to Russia to help us continue to operate the ISS be exempted from the ban.

Depending on your views about the ISS and our relationship with Russia, this could be good news. At the very least, it assures that we will be able to keep ISS going on a reasonable basis for a while, yet...

Oh, OT for this particular board, Griffin just said it would be "rather dumb" to turn off Voyagers 1 and 2. GOOD!

-the other Doug

With regards to Bruce, I'm not asking why there are blueberries paving the ground -- we've already discussed the "wash" of basaltic dust.

As far as I can tell, Martian winds *cannot* transport grains the size we see in the top layer of Purgatory (which are similar in size to the blueberries and blueberrie fragments that form the flat plain "paving"). Even during global dust storms, even with the highest straight-line winds we see on Mars, the atmosphere is too thin to pick up and suspend grains of that size. At least, this can't happen according to current theory.

And yet, if you assume that what Oppy has been traveling over are simply wind-blown drifts or dunes (as they appear to be), the grains would have to have been transported by the same process that built the drifts. Occam's Razor, right?

My own theory is that some of these drifts will be found to have a relatively high large-grain content, and some will not. This is because the lighter dunes in the etched terrain are the remnants of big piles of evaporite outcrop, and that the wind erosion has reduced the evaproite to big, wind-blown piles of powder -- but has left a concentration of these harder grains (concretions or whatever) as wind-sculpted piles, left pretty much in place where there used to be large piles of evaporite. So the wind sculpted piles of larger grains in-place and *also* deposited lighter grains of evaporite dust, mixing them as the concretion piles were covered with evaproite dust. These drifts are, therefore, not primarily constructional features, but deflationary features -- they have been sculpted into drift forms, but in fact display more deflation than deposition in their processes.

In other words, it's something like the same process that we see out on the plains, where evaporite is stripped from around the concretions. Except that the current stretch of land was a lot bumpier than the plains, once, due to the piles of ejecta thrown out from the ancient crater cluster of which Terra Nova and Erebus are a part. Outctop was sculpted into drift-like forms as a deflationary process, with evaporite and basaltic dust mixed in through an associated deposition process.

The only other explanation I can think of is that, somehow, we're wrong about the grain size that can be transported by Martian winds, and that these are simply broken-up concretions (or grains made of some different material) that have been blown non-preferentially into the same drift structures made by the much, much smaller evaporite dust and basaltic dust that make up the remainder of the drifts. But if that's the case, why haven't the blueberries paving the plains been swept away? They seem to form a very solid pavement -- if the winds can transport grains of that size, why haven't they been incorporated into the drifts on the plains, or blown away entirely, as the evaporite dust has been?

-the other Doug

OK -- does anyone have a good theory for why we seem to be finding a nice, uniform population of what appear to be blueberries within the upper layers of the drifts? And possibly shot throughout the drift material?

I would think that, whatever they are, they would be far too massive to be blown into the drifts by the Martian winds.

I have my own theory, I just want to hear what y'all think first...

-the other Doug

I think the great human adventure of "naming the nameless things" goes on every moment of every day, and it is at least *partially* arbitrary. But there are non-arbitrary pressures to it -- many "new" nouns are built upon existing nouns for things that are already named. Many others are named for people or places associated with the "discovery" of the new object (or concept) -- for example, we speak of the differences between a Newtonian world and an Einsteinian world. Granted, these are adjectives, but the process is similar (although rather more robust for adjectives).

We make words as we need them, though, you're both absolutely right. The Inuit natives of Alaska have more than 50 words for various types of ice, after all, and only one or two words for "flower."

Interesting -- I had never really come across that as a "rule" before. I just use the form that "sounds right" in my head.

I'm somewhat amazed by the process of creating speech (or writing), because while I know most of the rules (and can even state some of them... ), I don't consciously *think* of the rules as I write or as I speak. I just know what sounds right, or reads right, and that's what I do. (I also deliberately break certain rules, for effect. Like sentence fragments. Things like that... *grin*...)

When people ask me how I can write like I do, I ask them if they can read. They always say yes, of course. Then I ask them why they can't just copy the forms of what they read, and they say that just doesn't work -- they can *see* the correct forms and understand them, but they can't *create* using those same forms. And that always makes me confused -- if you can read and understand something, why can't you use that same form yourself?

And then I think of a painter -- if I tell a painter that I just can't see how she takes her paints and brushes and makes something that looks like what she's portraying, she'll ask me if I can see what she's painting. I'll say yes, I can see it. She'll then ask, if I can see it, why can't I paint it? And I say that just doesn't work; I can see it, but I can't paint it.

So, that's the rational answer to my amazement. It's not a matter of copying forms, there is a process that must occur somewhere below the conscious level, in both the painter and the writer, that allows each to manipulate their raw materials and create something that many others simply can't. Or can't nearly as easily, or as well.

But I still wonder why so many people for whom English is their first language simply cannot manage to effectively express themselves, either verbally or in written form. I understand why on a rational level, but on the emotional level, I continue to be amazed...

-the other Doug

On the first point, I have what I *think* is the right answer -- as with any plural noun that ends with an "s" sound, the proper way to indicate a possessive is to simply add the possessive apostrophe -- for example, "The Japanese' city planning now takes earthquake survival into account." Unlike the way it is written, this would be pronounced with a subtle but still stated double-s at the end. Either that, or you would modify the statement to remove the problem, i.e., "The Japanese building industry now plans for earthquake survival."

As for the second and third points, I can't cite rules. Rummaging through my usage of a variety of verb forms and adjective forms, I'm pretty certain the usage is arbitrary in each case. In the case of the verb form, though, I think the "reported" case is the rule, and the "gave" case is the exception. By far, more verbs which require you to specify the "target" of the action use the prepositional format ("I gave the book to Ted"). Only a few verbs, including "gave," allow an "understood target pointer" structure ("I gave Ted the book").

In re the adjective comparative forms, I will disagree that most of us make the "right" judgment when speaking -- I've heard people use terms like "He's the intelligentest guy I know" or "That color is goldener than the other one." I think it's a matter of the size of your vocabulary -- the larger your vocabulary and the more forms you've heard used correctly, the more of the arbitrary assignations you memorize. I'm sure that's how it works in my own head.

-the other Doug

Remember, too, that while there are a number of final failure modes for the rovers, one of the more likely sets of failure modes would leave us with a working rover that can't move -- or at least can't move very far.

The time to study changes over time is when we can't move and have very little left to do except scan our surroundings for changes. In fact, I think perhaps that the final extended mission for the rovers ought to be such a thing -- measuring local rates of erosion and deposition. That will be especially useful at Meridiani, I think.

-the other Doug

Because of the focus issue with the HRI, images taken by it have to be mathematically deconvoluted to give them proper focus. That deconvolution process is time-consuming. So, I imagine they are taking pictures with the HRI -- it is just taking some time for those pictures to be processed such that they are in focus.

-the other Doug

Very nice analysis, JRehling. I really enjoy the breadth of knowledge evinced by the contributors to this board.

I understand the argument that the Romance language use of gender is simply an arbitrary noun-classification system. And I admit that, when one sloppily uses multiple subjects and unclear sentence structures, such a classification system can help ease confusion.

I only have two remaining points.

One -- I was glad to hear you use the term "arbitrary," since that confirms my suspicion that there is, in fact, no rational basis for the assignation of gender identity in Romance languages.

Two -- I am a writer, and I have never had a problem crafting any message in English that avoids the issue of noun/pronoun confusion. You just have to keep your sentences simple -- it's not that difficult. Heck, sometimes you don't even have to keep your sentences simple, you just have to pay attention to your references. Now, if you want to say that an arbitrary set of noun classifications helps keep *poor* writers from descending into noun/pronoun confusion, I guess I would agree. But I would also say that, as a professional writer, I think poor writers should stick to other pursuits and allow us professionals (who know what we're doing) to craft important documents...

Finally, I want to thank Richard for his contribution to this discussion. It's good to hear from someone who grew up with French as a first language. It's especially informative to me to hear that the French themselves, while they find the structures and protocols of their language to be far more natural than I might, still find some of the irrationalities amusing and, well -- irrational. I, for one, readily admit the irrationalities of English -- especially the emotional loading of English structures in which some unseen "they" are responsible for just about everything that happens. It was refreshing to hear someone fondly admit to the craziness of his own language...

Overall -- good discussion!

-the other Doug

A seismometer network is an absolute requirement to understanding Mars' inner structure. The problem with the type of emplacement Viking attempted was that the instrument was mounted to the lander, not in actual, physical contact with the ground.

What with the current state of the art in remote manipulation, do y'all think it would be worth the extra weight to deploy seismometers by unshipping them from the landers and actually emplacing them onto/into the soil? I'm guessing it would require some kind of deployment arm -- but depending on the rest of the science package on a lander (even a netlander-scoped device), such an arm would be useful for other tasks, as well.

-the other Doug

I'm sorry, I guess I haven't stated my point of view about "irrationality" clearly.

I find the *requirement* of assigning a gender identity to each and every noun in a language an irrational approach to communication. There is simply no rationality that I can see to the requirement of assigning a male or female identity to a chair, a keyboard, a leg, a cloud, a window frame, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, when those objects do not have any intrinsic gender.

The Romance languages require such a set of assignations because of the way in which the *article* part of speech (in English, the words "a" and "the") is used. In every Romance language, you must use "la" as the definite article for feminine-assigned nouns, and "le" for masculine-assigned nouns. The indefinite article, "a" in English, varies a little more, but in French the masculine is "un" and the feminine is "une".

You cannot just say "the" and let it go at that. A proper English translation of a French phrase commonly translated as "The sky is blue" would have to be worded something like "The sky, she is blue." Because the word you use for the definite article "the" either has to call the sky he or she -- there are no other choices.

In what manner does this add to the amount of information conveyed, or the quality of that information? It conveys a cultural set of assumptions about the gender identities of inanimate objects, is all I can see that it does. And is it just me, or is there something a little *odd* about making cultural assumptions as to the gender attributes of inanimate objects which have no intrinsic gender? And not just a few objects -- every object for which the language has a noun.

As a French student in high school, the most absolutely *absurd* thing we tried to absorb was the whole issue of which nouns were feminine and which were masculine, since there is almost *never* an apparent rhyme or reason for the specific assignation.

If someone can explain to me in rational terms why it is in any way poetic *or* rational that a pencil *must* be referred to as a male object, while a chair *must* be referred to as a female object, I'll be happy to consider their arguments -- I generally have an open mind.

But, from the point of view of someone who grew up with a language that lets you use gender-neutral articles and pronouns for inanimate objects which *have* no intrinsic gender, the requirement for such assignments seems irrational.

And, by the way -- who sits around in Paris deciding what gender attribute get assigned to new nouns? I mean, is a personal computer male or female, and who decided which it was? And what genders are assigned to the individual components -- the keyboard, the monitor, the mouse, the CPU, etc.? And do the French make the same gender attributes for these new nouns as the Italians or the Spaniards, or are all of the new nouns for new things that never existed 100 years ago getting completely garbled between the various Romance languages these days?

-the other Doug

p.s. -- You'll remember that this thread began when someone asked which gender-related pronouns we should use for the rovers, and I chimed in with the feminine. Yes, that's sort of counter to my arguments above. But my feeling about the gender of the rovers is that there are traditions that govern certain things, and the naval tradition of giving ships (both of war and of exploration) the feminine gender attribute ought to apply here. I'll go along with tradition -- but I still think that languages whose very structure require giving every inanimate object in Creation a gender identity are at least *slightly* irrational...

Maybe flying one MSL at a time is a good idea. Look how badly stretched and incredibly exhausted the MER Team has become, as their babies have survived far longer than anyone could ever have dreamed.

If it were up to me, if I had a mandate to fly a single MSL, I would build two of them and tell people we're going to use one as an engineering testbed. After a successful first MSL flight, we go to Congress and say "Well, jeepers, we have this whole second vehicle that's nearly ready to fly -- how about letting us launch it in 2011?"

That way, the MSL Team would only have to plan and execute an exploration plan for one mission at a time. I know we like all the data the dual MERs have handed us, but face it, it's been hard on the MER Team and their families.

-the other Doug

Yes, English got the concept of neuter pronouns from the Germanic (upon which English is largely based). But German is not a Romance language, after all. French, Spanish and Italian are the primary examples of Romance (i.e., derived from the Roman) languages.

And true, the pronoun for "you" (either polite or plural) tends not to be assigned gender in any language, because speaking directly to someone, you never need to specify gender. Referring to a soft chair, for example, you would say in English "It is soft," while in French, you would say "She is soft." But referring to someone with whom you are speaking, you would say "You are soft." Or, in Southern American English, you would say (in singular or plural) "Y'all are soft." If the adjective has a masculine or feminine form (as is often the case in the Romance languages), you would simply use the appropriate form based on the sex of the person to whom you're speaking. Deliberate misuse of such forms then becomes either insulting or comedic, such as telling an American man to "not get your panties in a bunch." (Panties being the American term for female underwear.)

The British, American and Western European traditions of giving vessels female pronouns, though, is probably applicable here, even though the MERs are only "vessels" in a very liberal sense of the word. No one is riding within them, after all. But in a very real sense, these plucky rovers *are* vessels -- of our imaginations, hopes and dreams.

Oppy, she is a good ship. Spirit, she is a good ship, too. May they sail the ochre sands of their new homes for sols and sols to come...

-the other Doug