The linked web page is there, but the image link within that web page is now broken.

-the other Doug

The only one that I even begin to like is "Journey." Brings to mind visions of seeing what's beyond that next hill, into the valley beyond...

I especially dislike trying to name spacecraft from a list of noun-form adjectives. Curiosity? I'm sorry, I think in terms of the diffident statement "Well, that's a curiosity," referring to some trivial, poorly-understood situation or even device. You know, as in the exchange, "What is that?" "Oh, nothing -- just a curiosity."

Why not some *exploratory* names, like Perseverance, or Far Horizon? But "Curiosity" and such as names, are just... I dunno... lame.

"Vision" might be nice, if the whole point of MSL was to see things. While I'm sure the cameras will be quite important in its science mission, I don't think that "Vision" is an accurate portrayal of the geological mission of the new rover. So, I can't get behind that one, either.

"Amelia" is fine, except that there is that nasty little connection between Earhart and "mysterious disappearance." For the same reason, I don't think anyone would have suggested Nungesser and Coli for the names of the MERs, no matter how accomplished the pair were before they disappeared on their trans-Atlantic attempt. And remember, Amelia Earhart wasn't the only one on that final flight -- to honor her navigator, ought the Descent Stage be renamed Fred?

Just my opinions -- y'all are more than welcome to disagree, as always.

-the other Doug

Naw -- I'd more imagine "Dweezil." After all, Moon Unit in this context would actually make a certain amount of sense...

-the other Doug

I have to say, I'm surprised that any of the tracks from either MER are still obvious, after that global dust storm they endured. I think it says a lot about the deposition mechanisms that some tracks have been erased, some partially erased, and some hardly erased at all. And that while some seem to have been swept clean, others are fully or partially buried.

There are obviously dust traps and dust scourers set up in the ground-level microclimate by the landforms and such; I wish we understood them well enough to be able to maneuver poor Spirit into a scouring location, ASAP!

-the other Doug

Especially since it has rather obvious layering, which happens to lie parallel to the ground right now. Likely a serendipitous attitude.

The holes could be vesicles, or they could be remnants of inclusions that have either fallen out of the matrix or eroded out of it. The matrix is so highly eroded, especially in planes around its structural layering, that it's not easy to tell.

Looking at the rock in the anaglyph, I dearly want to turn it on its side and look into the crevices, to see the actual thickness of the layering and to try and see if there is any constructional relationship (i.e., alternating hard and soft layers) that would account for the rather obvious layer peel-aways.

-the other Doug

Seconded! That splat is quite remarkable. Makes you wonder whether a darker, redder body impacted Dione, or an impactor exhumed a darker, redder layer out from under the bland icy crust.

Doesn't look like a deeper or fresher crater than others which left no splat, so I'm leaning towards the former.

-the other Doug

I don't know that the landforms are in notion... and like I say, they resemble, to me, what we see in some of the polar areas. For example, here's an image of an area where several types of north polar terrains are exposed. I see a lot of resemblance here to what you've pointed out in Hellas and what we see in the polar regions:

Polar terrains

See what I mean? There are a lot of places in current polar terrain that look like this, too...

-the other Doug

Thanks, Ted -- that's exactly what I was struggling to say, that Sojourner acted a lot more like a really long robotic arm than like a true rover.

The only true rovers that have been actually deployed, IMHO, are the Lunakhods and the MERs. All of which worked (or are working) pretty well, all things considered.

BTW, I had not heard that there had been significant information returned about the rocks under the dust on Sojourner's APXS. Well, OK -- I had heard that the only "clear" patches they had tested indicated andesitic basalts, but there was a lot of discussion at that point as to whether this reflected composition of the rocks or the dust. Especially since andesites weren't exactly expected.

-the other Doug

I have a hard time defining MPF as a "rover mission." It was basically a technology demonstrator for the airbag landing technique, with a rover technology demonstrator.

Sojourner's science package was, to be honest, next to useless. Its cameras returned poor images with poor resolution, and its APXS took some great measurements of the dust on the outsides of some rocks (without a RAT or any other way of removing dust from the rocks, it never got a really decent look at the composition of the rocks themselves). The best science of the mission, IMHO, was done by the Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP) camera on the lander.

Not that MPF was a failure -- it just wasn't really a mission designed to land a rover and then do science with the rover. It was a mission to validate the airbag technique and to pioneer wheeled-vehicle operation at a Mars-to-Earth remove. It was an engineering mission, with a few science instruments added on to take advantage of anticipated engineering successes.

In purpose, it was rather like Surveyor I, which had all scientific instruments stripped off so it could serve as an engineering test. The only "science" payload on Surveyor I was its TV camera, which was used as much for engineering analysis of the Surveyor itself as it was for scientific analysis of the lunar surface. And looking at it, the only real science payload on MPF consisted of the IMP camera, the meteorology boom, and the APXS on the rover. The (rather deficient) wide-angle navigation cameras on the rover were designed solely for engineering/operational purposes; rather as with the MERs, these hazcam-like imagers weren't designed to do science, they were designed to help the operators drive the rover.

So, it's not like MPF and Sojourner were failures, it's just that it wasn't what I would call a "rover mission." The Mars 2001 lander wouldn't really have been a "rover mission," either, IMHO, even though it was scheduled to carry Sojourner's sister-toaster, er, rover, Marie Curie. It would have done more of its science from the lander than from the mini-rover, and once again would have been more like an engineering demonstration than a full-fledged rover ops mission.

-the other Doug

You and me both!

To me, this looks like Hellas was once situated on or near a pole. That looks like the polar layered terrain, except that all the ice has been removed. You see a lot of that taffy-like look at the edges of some of the polar layered terrain, it's highly reminiscent of these images of Hellas.

I would be very, very skeptical of the idea that you're seeing old terrain that used to underlie Hellas. When a basin that large is formed, you pretty well demolish the entire target, sometimes to depths well into the mantle. These landforms are far more well preserved than anything I would expect to see underneath the basin floor. Also, on Mars, a basin like this would fill in over time, not be continually scoured down to below the original basin floor. I'd almost have to believe that anything we see on the floor of Hellas has been deposited since the basin's formation.

-the other Doug

I do own (I think, I haven't cataloged in a long time) two different VHS videotapes labeled "Neptune All Night" which contain the live PBS coverage of the 1989 Neptune encounter by Voyager 2.

I have no idea whether it would even be legal (PBS copyrights, etc.) for me to try and convert these tapes into a digital format and upload them. And like I say, I've moved a couple of times since the last time I can guarantee that I saw those tapes. But I'll look around, see what I can find in my videotape boxes. (I don't even keep them on shelves anymore...)

-the other Doug

Let's face it, guys -- anything that has moving parts can fail. And a bunch of stuff without moving parts can fail, too.

There is a difference between equipment that fails because it's poorly designed and equipment that fails because it's poorly made or just because things happen that you can't prevent and wouldn't be expected to foresee.

It's not, I don't think, that anyone thinks that any given organization is incompetent at making any given piece of equipment. I think Steve is right, we tend to get more nervous about devices with more moving parts than we do about devices with less moving parts (witness the greater worries about Sterling RTGs and their moving pistons vs. the more classic thermocouple-based RTGs with no moving parts).

It is important to remember that almost all moving parts on almost every spacecraft we've ever launched have worked perfectly. My feel for it is that more spacecraft have died because of electronics failures than have died because a moving part broke or stuck. But we seem to remember and worry about the moving part failures more than about fried electronics...

-the other Doug

Interesting! Although I note that over longer timeframes, he shows five different solution sets based on five different sets of assumptions.

These projections could also be significantly altered if there has been any crustal movement over the projected timeframes (i.e., the Tharsis volcanic pile acting to move the entire crust such that Tharsis' most massive build-up is now sitting over the equator...)

-the other Doug

And it's dawn at Fra Mauro, Bonpland and Parry...

-the other Doug

I'd enjoy seeing the rationale by which a given rayed crater was determined to be 1.25 Ma in age. I take any absolute dating, in the absence of sample examination or in situ radiometric dating, to be speculative at best and a WAG at worst.

Also, there is during the current epoch a remnant CO2 polar cap at both poles in mid-summer, which could be more extensive at Mars' current axial tilt, but completely absent during higher-tilt eras. That CO2 would perforce add more gas to the atmosphere, raising pressures which are already just barely below the important triple-point of temperatures and pressures required for liquid water on the surface. (I'm assuming that the winter pole would not grow significantly larger with higher axial tilts, or would at least account for less additional freeze-out than the residual cap's sublimation would account for added atmosphere gas.)

I bet you get liquid water in some locations (and possibly in minuscule quantities) when Mars' axial tilt goes into the 30-plus degree range -- which could be responsible for some of the gullies we see.

I know that a number of models predict wide fluctuations in Martian axial tilt, but I've never seen anything worked up that attempts to determine how frequently the planet sees high tilt angles, and what the approximate timing has been since the last high-tilt epoch... or until the next one.

-the other Doug

Yeah -- I've been meaning to ask when Phoenix was going to move to Past Missions, but figured that ever-optimistic Doug was waiting to make sure that Lazarus Mode failed before taking that step...

-the other Doug

Yep -- it's one of my favorite science histories. If you add in Paul Spudis' book on lunar science, you have two volumes that cover pretty much everything you'd ever want to know about our ideas of the Moon before, during and after Apollo.

In fact, "To a Rocky Moon" was such a favorite, I re-read it often and managed to lose my copy a couple of years ago. So, thanks, Paolo -- now I can read it again!

-the other Doug

Although, I have to wonder -- what are the odds against an unguided impact by Chang'e (or anything else, for that matter) hitting an area of historical importance?

How many of these locations are there? Six Apollo sites, five Surveyor sites, two Lunakhod sites, three Luna sample return sites and two simple Luna lander sites -- a total of 18 sites, over the entire surface area of the Moon. (This assumes you're not going to count impact sites -- many of them unidentified -- of other hardware, from Luna 2 through Chandrayaan's MIP. I find it hard to imagine a tourist viewing platform to observe what appears to be just another crater out of quadrillions, just because it was made by a man-made vehicle. Though I might make an exception for Luna 2.)

I understand that a vehicle in polar orbit does eventually overfly most all of the Moon. But that also means it has the entire surface area of the whole body on which to impact, raising the odds significantly against an unguided impact coming within a hundred km of *any* given spot.

The idea of historic site preservation is a good one, but I just have to wonder what the odds of an inadvertent impact really are...

-the other Doug

My understanding as to why Spirit has not moved much beyond Home Plate is that it's the result of two major factors:

- The loss of the RF wheel, the dragging of which makes it difficult for Spirit to move very far in any one drive, and impossible to climb very much or move through loose, sandy soil. In other words, Spirit can't move very fast or very far in a given period of time.

- The severe loss of power following the global dust storm Spirit barely survived a while back has made it very difficult for her to do much of anything beyond sit quietly and talk to Earth every few days. We've just recently seen some very minor cleaning, but the old girl is still running at less than 300 watt-hours a day, with precious little energy for extensive driving.

Spirit was hobbled by the loss of the wheel shortly after finishing its first major recon of Home Plate, and dust deposition since then has conspired with now-impassable terrain to keep her from moving very far afield since.

-the other Doug

In the U.S., pre-college education is usually arrayed into 12 school years plus Kindergarten. My own school system, in Central Illinois in the 1960's and 70's, consisted of the following classifications:

Grade School -- Begins with half-day Kindergarten classes for 5-year-olds, and Grades 1-6 for 6- to 11-year-olds. (There are some vagaries depending on birthdates; some people are 10 when they graduate Grade School, others as old as 12.) Classes are usually in a one-teacher-one-overall-class format, where a single teacher teaches the same group of children throughout the day, covering all of the subjects.

Junior High or Middle School -- In my school system, it was called Junior High School but in many systems it's called Middle School. Where I went to school, Junior High was Grades 7 and 8. Classes were in the more standard High School / College format, in which the students would attend a different class in a different room with a different teacher for each subject studied. You didn't have any influence over your schedule, though -- everyone basically took the same classes, just at different times of day and with different fellow students. In some parts of the U.S., Middle School serves as the same type of transition, but often includes three grades, 7-9.

High School -- With a two-year Junior High or Middle School, High School is a four-year institution, covering Grades 9 through 12. The grades are referred to as Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior. In areas with three-year Middle Schools, High School consists of grades 10 through 12, usually called Freshman, Junior and Senior. Classes are in full HS/College mode, and where I went, by the time I was a Junior I had some leeway in scheduling my own class schedule, deciding which classes I wanted to take, etc. (In my Senior year, I put my two study hall sessions between 8 and 10 am, and just didn't have to arrive at school until 10 am... *grin*...)

I'd be interested in knowing how this varies from European and Asian systems from then and now, and also how it compares to the current American organization...

-the other Doug

I had been noticing that while it has been working just fine for every other website I visit, Internet Explorer was really bogging down on any Invision Board site -- most specifically, UMSF. It was taking a good 30 seconds to move from one page to another. I'm certain it's an issue with IE on my own machine, since I can access UMSF nice and fast on other machines.

So, when I went out to download the latest Google Earth update (complete with 3D Mars!), I found the GE update link also included an option to dl Google Chrome. So, I downloaded it.

This thing just rips through UMSF! Very fast page-turns. Looks just fine and nothing I've run across here yet has failed to load.

So, while I still use IE for most of my browsing, I'm now using Google Chrome exclusively for UMSF.

Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience?

-the other Doug

I'm absolutely sure. They were running live coverage of splashdowns since Gemini. There was nothing especially special about the 17 coverage, it was from a helicopter, but that had happened many times before.

If you do a cursory search for pictures from Apollo 13, for example, you can see the image of the MOCR in pandemonium, while the huge eidaphore screen at the front of the room shows the live image of Odyssey descending on her three main chutes...

-the other Doug

Exactly -- recall that NASA tried to turn the ALSEPs back on in the early 1990's and none responded. The best theory as to why none responded was that the voltage being generated by the RTGs, less than 25 years after emplacement, had fallen below minimum levels for operating the transmitters.

-the other Doug

You know, I've read every history of NASA in the 1950s and 1960s that has ever been published, I think, and I've never ever run across any cites to the theory that Kennedy was trying to move the Space Task Group (STG, forerunner to the Manned Spacecraft Center) to MIT. In fact, I've read that there was considerable negative reaction to locating any major new NASA centers at existing universities, since NASA was to be concerned with practical engineering R&D and not "ivory tower" scientific pursuits.

The only reason NASA accepted the "loan" of land from Rice University upon which the MSC (now JSC) was built is that this land was located relatively far away from the existing Rice campus, and that there would be no Rice presence at the new Center. MSC was, however, built to resemble a college campus on the off chance that NASA might decide to give up manned space flight within a few years, at which point they could give Rice back the land, and the buildings would be usable as college campus buildings.

-the other Doug

Ummm... no. The only Apollo flight on which there was no live video of the CM descending on its parachutes was Apollo 8, and that was because it splashed down in the pre-dawn darkness (a consequence of designing the flight to reconnoiter Apollo Landing Site 1, in the eastern Sea of Tranquility, rather than the eventually selected ALS 2, where Apollo 11 landed). Apollo 8 could have had a daylight splashdown if they had orbited the moon 12 times instead of 10, but Frank Borman was adamant that he would rather splash down in darkness than spend one more second in lunar orbit than absolutely necessary.

Heck, on Apollos 14 and 16, they had live video of the CM on its two drogue chutes, before the three main chutes were even deployed.

-the other Doug