And if ESA keeps claiming "firsts" that aren't, doesn't that constitute prevarication?

Sorry -- I guess I'm a little sensitive, yet, for being yelled at by a member of this forum for characterizing ESA's PR as including "little lies." But, but, but -- if these aren't self-aggrandizing lies, what in the Cosmos are they?

-the other Doug

One other little item about Apollo 14.

The delay resulting from the redesigns in the oxygen tanks and the addition of an extra oxygen tank plus an extra *big* battery to the service module meant the development of the SIM bay (flown on the J-mission CSMs) caught up with Apollo 14. They could have added a SIM bay to the Apollo 14 CSM, and seriously considered it when they began to re-work its SM.

But Al Shepard vetoed the idea -- he didn't want any added complexities in what amounted to a return-to-flight mission. And, honestly, I also think Shepard didn't want anything taking the spotlight off of him and the lunar surface activities. He pushed to have the TEI burn moved up a few revs so that, as soon as they were back onboard the CSM and had cast off the LM ascent stage, it was Time To Go. The "star" portion of the flight, his landing and moonwalks, would be over, and he didn't want to tarry in lunar orbit an hour longer than absolutely necessary. The SIM bay activities would have begged for an extra day or two in lunar orbit to make proper use of the cameras and instruments, and Al was having none of that.

-the other Doug

Too right -- for one thing, Apollo 1 was officially an open-ended mission, with a maximum length of two weeks but without a pre-defined date/time for splashdown. Its optics and navigation systems were somewhat different from the Block II design, as well, so there were to be fewer onboard navigation tests.

As for Apollo 13 v. 14, the ALSEPs were rather different; the experiment selections had been made well before the landing sites were chosen, and Apollo 14's ALSEP differed rather a lot from 13's. For instance, 13's ALSEP included a Heat Flow Experiment, complete with lunar drill, while 14's included the Active Seismic Experiment, complete with shotgun-shell-charged thumper and remote-launched grenades. The EVA plans were rather different, too -- 13's designated landing point was as much as 100 meters farther west than 14's, closer to Doublet Crater, with an ALSEP site expected to be on the west rather than east side of Doublet. If for any reason Lovell were to land long, past Doublet, a full work-up had been done for an EVA-2 visit not to Cone Crater to the east but to Star Crater to the west. And, of course, the 13 crew didn't have the MET, the tool-carrying wheeled cart, so in their Cone Crater traverse plan they figured on stopping at Outpost Crater and dropping all the equipment except what they would need on the rim above. They were going to pick up the dropped tools and such on their way back.


That was part of the planning for the wet workshop concept. A Saturn IB could only loft a wet workshop (with interior fittings covered over by some miracle covering that would protect it from the cryogenic rocket fuels). The ATM (which is actually based around an octagonal frame the size and shape of a LM descent stage) would be launched by a separate Saturn IB, and a third IB flight would carry a crew up on a CSM. The crew would rendezvous with the ATM, grab it and then bring it to the workshop, where it would be installed before the CSM could dock with the workshop (as the ATM would have been attached to the CSM via the docking mechanism).

The *very* first ATM concept was actually something thought up for the later-canceled Apollo I-missions. Those would have been lunar orbital with no landings, orbiting the Moon in polar orbits for up to two weeks. The LM would be replaced with a LM-based module in which the ascent stage would remain somewhat intact but the descent stage would be gutted of its propulsion systems and filled with cameras and remote sensing equipment. The cameras were telescopic in nature, and as soon as someone realized this could also be used in Earth orbit for astronomical or solar studies, the whole thing was dubbed the Apollo Telescope Mount. And for a while, two-week earth-orbital flights of Apollo CSMs with ATMs, sans workshop, were considered as part of the Apollo Applications Program.

-the other Doug

There is a truly excellent resource to answer all of these questions:

A Field Guide to American Spacecraft

This site identifies each and every mockup, boilerplate and flight-ready spacecraft and booster ever built for NASA, what flight (if any) it was used on, and, if it still exists and hasn't been scrapped, where in the world it is located and if it is on public display. When available, it provides links to pictures of each item.

To answer the general question, as of the end of the Apollo era, with the splashdown of ASTP, there were two Saturn Vs left over and two full CSMs left over. There were three full LMs left over, but one was LM-2 which suffered from so many problems it was pulled from consideration for even unmanned test flight. Of the two flyable LMs left over after Apollo concluded, one was an H-mission LM originally scheduled for Apollo 15, and one was a J-mission LM. Another two LMs, in J-mission configuration, were built; one is confirmed as having been scrapped, while the other's fate seems unknown.

-the other Doug

However, in discussion of Martian carbonates, I will note that ALH 84001 contains nodules of carbonates. Indeed, the purported bacteria-like structures found in that rock are evident *only* within those carbonate nodules.

Carbonates were formed on Mars, if you believe the accepted theories on ALH 84001. But we have no indication that they were extensively deposited. Why they were not, or if they were why we can't see them, is still a matter of intense discussion.

-the other Doug

In terms of the Saturn Vs for the later Apollo missions, the scoop is this:

In mid-1969, the Apollo Applications (later renamed Skylab) program management decided that the "wet workshop" concept, in which what would become the Skylab workshop would have been launched as a fueled and active rocket stage that would then have been outfitted as a workshop after it was orbited as the second stage of a Saturn IB, wasn't going to work. It was much easier to get a good, well-stocked workshop if you didn't have to fill it with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

Problem is, a Saturn IB wasn't capable of orbiting a "dry," pre-outfitted S-IVB workshop by itself. For that you needed a Saturn V.

So, in July 1969, just after Apollo 11 was completed, it was decided that the workshop needed a Saturn V. At that time, the Nixon administration had shut down the Saturn V assembly lines; there were enough built to fly Apollos out to Apollo 20, with none left over. If Skylab needed a Saturn V, that meant Apollo 20 would have to be canceled. Which it was, though the announcement of its cancelation was not made until January of the following year.

So, as of January of 1970, there were eight Saturn V rockets in various stages of assembly. None more would be built. They would have supported Apollo flights out to Apollo 19 plus a Skylab flight.

After the Apollo 13 accident, more conservative heads in NASA management and in the Nixon administration decided that we didn't need to make all that many more moon landings. (The NASA attitude was that we had been lucky, and if we kept flying these things indefinitely we'd start to lose crews. The administration attitude was mostly that they wanted more money to prosecute the war in Vietnam.) So, two Apollos were canceled as money-saving measures.

However, contrary to popular belief, the two missions canceled weren't Apollos 18 and 19. The missions canceled were actually Apollos 15 and 19. Apollo 15, up to that time, was scheduled to be an H mission like Apollos 12-14, with a lunar surface stay of around 45 hours, two 5-hour EVAs, and no lunar rover. After the cancelations, of course, the missions were renumbered and the first J mission, with extended stay times, 3 EVAs and a lunar rover, was moved up from Apollo 16 to Apollo 15, and the later missions renumbered accordingly.

Not that the crews were shuffled. Scott and Irwin simply began training for a J mission about a third of the way through their training cycle, and Young and Duke had the privilege of flying the first J mission taken away from them.

So, when Apollo and Skylab were finished, there were two complete Saturn Vs left over. Portions of them have been on display at KSC, JSC and MSFC over the years.

And in terms of mission costs, IIRC each Apollo mission cost roughly $100 million to fly, though I believe that included the amortized costs of the launch vehicles and spacecraft. That would be equivalent to something like two-thirds of a billion dollars in today's terms. If you just counted the costs that hadn't already been spent -- final assembly and test of the spacecraft/launch vehicles and actual launch and missions operations costs -- I bet the $10 to $20 million a mission would be about right. In today's dollars, less than $100 million per each additional flight.

The thing that really grates me is that, in the late '70s, some of the people on the Appropriations Committees were told what the actual costs of the additional missions would have been versus the potential for additional science, and a large majority indicated they would have been glad to support the appropriations for the additional missions. Such are the portraits we paint of lost opportunities... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

Also, your polar MSL would have to be able to travel *fast* if you didn't want it encased in dry ice after only a couple of hundred sols.

Seems a waste of an RTG-powered rover to land it somewhere that will render it immobile after only a few months.

-the other Doug

That is a somewhat enhanced version of that pic, Aldrin's face is a little more subdued in the original release of that image, so it's not surprising most people miss it.

I had never really seen the face in the visor until someone posted that enhanced image in the ALSJ, after which, of course, you can't help but see it. So, I'm with you, Stu -- I had indeed seen that image thousands of times and not picked out the face. Of course, we can be a little forgiven, since Aldrin is facing the LM and the image of his face looks a lot like it could be a reflection of the gold-orange kapton foil covering the LM's descent stage. It's only when you realize that the face sits on the *near* side of the reflection of the Sun, and the LM would be seen in reflection on Buzz' visor on the *far* side of the Sun's reflection, that you become certain it can't be the LM, and thereby *any* reflection on the outside of the visor.

Oh, and thanks! As y'all might notice, this is a topic I never tire of discussing...

-the other Doug

It's currently halfway through Sol 56. We have, to this point, accomplished the following (please correct me if I'm missing anything):

- Full Mission Success stereo color pan of the entire landing site

- Full RAC coverage of what it can view under the lander

- One TEGA run

- One WCL run

- Two OM images of soil

- Zero AFM images of soil

- Programmed observations of winds and temperatures

How far, with only 34.5 sols left in the 90-sol primary mission, does that leave us from accomplishing the Mission Success Criteria? (Capitalized so that, as Steve Squyres noted, if you fail to accomplish them you'll know that You Have Failed.)

I understand that things are working well enough that we can likely count on a good 30 sols of full mission activity past the base 90-sol mission. Even at figuring that in, we appear to be nearly halfway through Phoenix's entire useful lifetime.

Are we seriously in jeopardy of failing to achieve some of the success criteria?

-the other Doug

I just watched a decent mpg clip of the TV broadcast from during and just after the reading of the plaque during Apollo 11's EVA. And I must correct myself slightly. Aldrin started out that scene with his visor down, and pulled his visor up about halfway through Armstrong's reading. He then came over to the MESA, leaving his visor up, and at various times you could glimpse his head moving in his helmet. However, at one point he holds his gloved hand up to the TV camera, asking if Houston can see the dirt already on the glove. The lighting at that moment is such that you can see Buzz's eyes and forehead quite clearly (his upraised arm covered his mouth), and as he is asking if Houston has his hand in focus, you can see him blink his eyes. It's really, really cool -- and to tell the truth, I *think* I remember noting that when I saw the TV transmission the first time.

-the other Doug

Well, NASA TV ran their longer Apollo 11 documentary Sunday at noon, CDT, and of course the Apollo 11 anniversary was mentioned during their "This Week @ NASA" segment in which they point out anniversaries. But that's all I saw.

I was rather disappointed that they couldn't manage to run some time-synched tapes of the landing between 3 and 3:30 pm CDT yesterday. I ended up sync'ing (to within five seconds or so, anyway) an mp3 I have of the landing and listening on my computer. I was able to listen as they landed right around 3:17:44 pm.

Shame I had to set that up for myself. I mean, NASA has its own freakin' TV network, you'd think they could have just racked up some tapes and played them, eh?

-the other Doug

I've only seen Mercury once, to my knowledge -- via telescopic projection during a transit of the Sun back in (IIRC) spring of 1973. I believe Mercury was in mid-transit at sunrise.

As such, of course, I have no commentary on color...

-the other Doug

Schmitt kept his visor up (or, more of the time, half-up) because it had acquired some scratches early on, and Schmitt wanted to see the surface -- and the rocks -- as clearly as possible. For the most part, Schmitt seemed oblivious that the camera was even watching him, much less consciously aware of whether people could or could not see his face, I think.

He was cautioned several times by the ground to lower his visor, and at first he simply complained that the visor was scratched and hard to see through. Later on, he got sort of aggravated, and said something along the lines of "I think you can trust us to take care of ourselves, I'll wear the visor as I please, so shut up about it."



-the other Doug

Also, if you look closely on the Apollo 11 television record, you can see that when Armstrong begins to read the plaque, Aldrin in the background has his visor half-up, and as he moves into the sun and reaches to pull the visor down completely, his face profile is visible within the helmet. I'm also convinced he had his visor up earlier when he was working at the MESA, where a few smudgy images look to me as if we're looking right into Aldrin's helmet and at his face.

-the other Doug

In terms of being media-savvy, the NASA of the 1960s and early 70s was less concerned about the media than they are today, but then again, that was a time in which anything involved with the space program was news. Launches of *unmanned* probes rated live coverage. NASA didn't have to put forth any special effort to make its activities interesting or newsworthy, that just wasn't part of the equation.

Back then, NASA's problems with the media had more to do with keeping the media out of its hair as it ran the missions than it did trying to get the media to cover them in the first place.

Most of the things that the Apollo EVA crews did on the lunar surface that could be described as "PR" types of events were, indeed, done on the personal initiative of the individual crewmen. For instance, on Apollo 11, Armstrong's checklist merely instructed him to remove the foil cover from the commemorative plaque on the front landing gear. It was Armstrong's own idea, as appropriate for the moment, to describe the plaque and read the words etched into it. But, of course, later on in that same EVA, the White House media machine arranged to have Dick Nixon share the screen with Armstrong and Aldrin, which was pretty much the most blatant PR moment I can recall from the moonflights.

Gene Cernan created the most transparently PR-styled moment of the final landings with his "dedication" of a lunar sample to all the people of the Earth, but as you say, there were little things, like the golf shot and the hammer/feather drop, that were slightly more spontaneous and obviously the work of the individuals who did them. Some other things were planned and never accomplished, though -- for example, the Apollo 16 crew of Young and Duke had planned to do a "Lunar Olympics" demonstration of just how high and far one could leap and jump in 1/6 G, but their late landing and truncated third EVA resulted in the cancelation of that little demonstration.

As for outreach... NASA was always good at reactive outreach, providing ten pounds of information for every one pound requested by the media or just by the general public. Only in this more jaded world of been-there, done-that has NASA felt the need to put effort into a lot of proactive outreach. Overall, they're good at that, too, but there is always room for improvement.

-the other Doug

Well, in fact, it's not really true that Schmitt was the first to be seen on the lunar surface with his gold visor up. There are several images of Aldrin with his visor up in the video record of the very first moonwalk, all of which occurred early in the EVA when the camera was still located on the MESA, in the LM's shadow. Armstrong collected the contingency sample on Apollo 11 with his visor up, as well -- not visible on the TV, as he was out of the camera FOV at the time, but clearly visible in the 16mm film taken of those activities.

Two LMPs, Ed Mitchell and Jim Irwin, came down the ladder with their gold visors up, and the TV record shows this clearly. And at one point, on Apollo 17, Gene Cernan had his visor up while he cleaned the TV camera lens and you get a good view of his face as he finishes the dusting job.

So, between the film and video record, there are images of at least six of the twelve moonwalkers with their gold visors up and their faces visible.

Just FYI...

-the other Doug

And some people got offended when I mentioned the ESA tendency towards "little lies"?

If it ain't exactly the truth... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

Ummm... no. The images you're looking at in Meridiani show a *very* slow flow of fines along the sloped lower wall of Victoria.

The Martian hydrological cycle has been well characterized from orbit. It does not include jets of water vapor coming out of cracks in near-equatorial surfaces.

Remember, there are a lot of dry flow features on Mars. Don't mistake every little flow feature as an indication of flowing water or gasses.

-the other Doug

Well, Steve -- not that I doubt the presence of frozen volatiles under the footpads at the Phoenix site (obviously!), but I don't see any landform indications of what has been designated "layered polar terrain" at the landing site.

There is no doubt that water and other volatiles are trapped in the ground at the latitude where Phoenix sits, but I don't see any evidence thus far that this latitude sees the ongoing, annual, dynamic deposition of layering that is seen closer to the poles, where the image you posted is from. Layering may well have happened here long ago, at times when the various ices were deposited here more robustly, but for right now, I'm thinking that we're not actually laying down new layers of ice and soil every year at this site.

My take on the cycle seen at this latitude is that a seasonal layer of CO2 ice is laid down every year, which completely sublimates every spring. Whatever thin veneer of water ice that may exist in mid-spring after the CO2 ice goes away simply sublimates away, itself, as summer approaches. It's then carried in the air down to the other pole, where it's laid down in similar transient veneers near the south pole. As seasons change, that water makes a grand traverse from one pole to the other, with the maximum amount of water "in transit," carried in the Martian atmosphere, at equinox.

I just don't see landform indications that annual deposition of new permanent layering is actually happening at the Phoenix site. Further north, yes... but not here.

-the other Doug

Well, there is a small town in central Illinois named Oblong, maybe that could be part of his inspiration...

In point of fact, I was born in Normal, Illinois, which isn't all that far from the much smaller Oblong. One day, the local paper, the Daily Pantagraph, ran in its social pages a wedding announcement with the headline "Normal Man Marries Oblong Woman." I kid you not...

-the other Doug

I dunno -- I'm overwhelmed with an image of our intrepid rover cresting a hill with a golf club clutched in a manipulator claw, saying, "Hi, Mars 'Science Lab' Hope here. I thought I was here to do a USO show -- where are you hiding Jerry Cologna?"



-the other Doug

"Oh, we're off on the road to Pavonis! A chasm like none that we've seen..."

Well, Nick -- my admittedly imperfect memory tells me the following on the Viking site selection rationales:

For VL1, they wanted a landing site where the landforms showed that water had once flowed. Where you had water, you might have remanent hydrological cycles, the thinking went, and thus a higher possibility of finding life. The Chryse landing sites (both the original site that was disqualified due to overt roughness and the actual site) are located on the debris apron from one of the ancient catastrophic floods, and so are sites where water had, quite obviously, once flowed over Mars' surface.

Another reason for landing in a catastrophic flood plain was that rocks and soils from a variety of places on Mars would have been deposited in the lee of the flood. Boulders the size of Big Joe (and even larger) were likely transported to the VL1 site from many hundreds of kilometers away. It gave you the opportunity to look at a wide variety of Martian rocks, all in one place. At the, in hindsight, rather high cost of sacrificing any possibility of seeing the context in which these rocks were formed.

Note that the Pathfinder site, in Ares Vallis, is also located on a catastrophic flood plain, one that (if memory serves) simply diverges into a side lobe from the same flood event that so strongly altered Chryse. I imagine the reasons for its selection were pretty much the same as those for VL1.

For VL2, my memory is that they wanted to see what the northern plains looked like and were made of, to contrast against the geology seen on the flood plains. If those northern plains really were the dessicated ancient floors of a great Martian ocean, then you once again have a better shot at finding remanent water and life.

Also, the actual expectation for the fine-scale structure of the Utopia site was that the surface would be covered by relatively low-profile sand dunes, rather similar to what was eventually found at Meridiani. For the life detection experiments, digging into soil under a dune base was considered a better-than-average bet for finding moisture and microbes.

The actual character of the VL2 site was quite a surprise to the Viking team, in fact. It's the rockiest surface any successful lander has ever set down in, and had the team known how seriously rocky it was, they would have ruled it unsafe. Indeed, VL2 was lucky to have only landed a single footpad onto a rock, and that one a relatively small rock.

The rocks at the VL2 site are far more uniform in nature than those at the VL1 site. The VL2 site seems covered with the broken fragments of a once-contiguous lava field, the rocks most all look like chunks of basalt. Whether the site is actually sitting in the ejecta blanket of the crater Mie, or the thermal cycling that far north broke up the surface into the well-sorted, dense boulder population we see, hasn't been completely settled yet, I don't think.

What was curious and somewhat disappointing, of course, was how similar the soils at the VL1 and VL2 sites seemed to be. No matter how ubiquitous the global dust distribution, you would expect regional variation in the soil elements derived from local rocks and deposits. No real variations were found, within the ability of the Viking sensors to detect.

In summary, I'd say that the VL1 site was more similar to what was expected than the VL2 site, but that neither truly exhibited the characteristics for which they were selected.

-the other Doug

I can't believe that $65 million is the entire cost of Phobos-Grunt. That may be what Russia plans on spending on just the spacecraft development and construction. I can't imagine it also includes launch costs or operational costs of mission ops, and I bet it assumes that a good deal of the overall cost will be borne by international partners.

AFAIK, even for Russian launch vehicles, $65 million won't even cover the launch costs.

And, like anything, I will believe these projected budget numbers out of Russia when the craft actually flies. Russia has been known in the past to make rather wildly inaccurate statements in terms of projected costs, just to try and convince others to help fund their programs.

-the other Doug

Exactly. If our $10 billion would buy us 100kg of samples, gathered by and trundled back to the MAV(s) by capable MSL-type rovers, picked up from a variety of landforms and geologic expressions, then I'd be all for it.

But if our $10 billion buys us a kilogram or less of soil and a few rock chips from within a grab-sampler-arm's reach of the MAV, then I don't care if God Himself is going to analyze the samples, the chances of finding anything truly instructive about Mars would, I think, be far less than if we spent the same money on three or four more MSL-capable rovers.

I strongly believe in bringing samples back from Mars. But I don't think a kg (or less) for $10 billion is worth the money. Not even worth $6 billion. IMHO.

-the other Doug

Just exactly how much sample do you expect to return to Earth with a MAV that weighs, grand total with sample container and fuel, 100 kg?

No more than a gram, I would imagine -- and that would be pushing it.

Can I ask exactly what you think we can do with a gram or less of Martian surface materials? And why we would spend a billion dollars (or multiples thereof) for such a miniscule amount?

Just... curious.

-the other Doug