We all know that the most common theories to explain the Viking wet chemistry results depend on a high peroxide content in the soils, both in the mid-latitudes (Chryse) and northern latitudes (Utopia).

As I understand it, Phoenix will be able to identify peroxides in the soil and directly test this keystone to the current interpretation of the Viking results.

So... what happens if we find little to no peroxide content in these soils?

Do we just assume that these soils are fundamentally different from the Viking soils? If so, what model predicts this?

Or do we actually begin to re-evaluate the Viking results?

What do y'all think?

-the other Doug

So -- are we seeing all these super-tight-orbit planets (less than 10 days for a complete orbit) simply because they're easier to spot? Or are the vast majority of planets out there (rocky or otherwise) in super-tight orbits?

Might be difficult to find life, much less civilizations, on planets so close to their primaries that their atmospheres are composed of heavy metal vapors...

-the other Doug

Hey -- we can nitpick Nick's and Don's theories on the emplacement processes for this ice layer that we seem to be literally unearthing, here. But at least they're dealing with potential deposition and emplacement processes.

I think it's important to have some well-nitpicked theories for emplacement processes as we start looking at this ice layer in detail. As much as models can put blinders on investigators, they are also incalculably helpful in interpreting empirical results.

In my mind, each of the observations we've been making on this apparent ice layer bring up questions on how such a layer could exist during the present day. And those questions can only be answered in the context of a model of ice deposition, sublimation and maintenance.

I'm looking forward to hearing more from Nick, Don and all others on how our observations fit with various ice emplacement models.

-the other Doug

In all seriousness (well, at least partial seriousness), I'd love to see the MSL team have the guts that the MER team lacked, and go ahead with the most obvious and appropriate name possible for MSL:

Marvin.

Of course, when MSL radios back a request for a PU238 explosive modulator, I'm not quite sure what we're going to do... except to duck, cover and wait for the Earth-shattering kaboom...

-the other Doug

I can hear the commercials now....

"SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY! Come see the Monster Martian Rover, laying WASTE to Mawrth Valley! SUNDAY! Watch while it blasts rocks to bits with its bitchin' LASER BEAM! SUNDAY!"



-the other Doug

Stuart! You *cannot* seriously tell me you've never heard of the Animaniacs?

They were part of a set of cartoon shows created by Steven Spielberg back in the 90's that were often written to appeal to a wide range of audiences. Animaniacs featured a wide variety of short features, including the infamous Pinky and the Brain.

Spielberg brought a lot of keen insight into the genre to these shows. I was in my 40s when they were on the air, and I never, ever missed them.

In addition to Animaniacs and the later spun-off Pinky and the Brain, Spielberg also produced a show called Freakazoid that featured a truly deep set of referents within its referential matrix. For example, one episode was "sponsored" by the grocery store chain Anubis Foods, whose slogan was "Shop at the sign of the jackal-headed man!"



-the other Doug

Oh, and Advil is an American brand name for ibuprofen, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, aka an NSAID, aka an over-the-counter pain reliever.



-the other Doug

I don't know, Stu -- there was a delightful Python-esque quality to Stephen's logic. Or should I say, Bruce's logic?

You don't mind if I call you Bruce, do you, Bruce? Eliminates confusion, mate!

(That and referring the everything as "thingy" -- definitely a lurking Monty Python dementia being acted out, here... )

-the other Doug

I will point out that tests to make general-to-specific characterizations of large, complex systems don't lend themselves well to double-blind testing concepts. I mean, would you have the MERs bring along a suite of various rock types with them to Mars, selected by a group of people who have no communication with the PIs, and have every measurement taken on Mars include this test suite, with the PIs not being informed of which set of results belonged to native Martian rock and which to the terrestrial samples?

As you see, the specific double-blind process doesn't lend itself to the work at hand. Not that I don't see a need for some way to try and reduce the Rosenthal effect.

That said, what I note strongly in the process of designing science payloads for planetary probes is that it seems to reward those who have developed very detailed models of their expected findings, and have thence designed their instruments to most effectively collect the expected data.

It seems as if any experiment proposal that includes the phrase, in any form, "We don't know what we'll find" is automatically rejected because of the possibility that, by not meeting some preselected expectation, the experiment runs a high risk of being viewed as a "failure."

That's a process that not only allows a fair amount of the Rosenthal effect, it fairly demands it. When you design your instruments to show you only what you expect to see, it's awfully hard to see those things that *are* there that you never expected.

One of the worst examples of this effect, I think, was the life detection suite aboard the Viking landers. They were designed to say Yes or No to a very specific (and very terrestrial) set of life-bounded conditions, so the PIs didn't look closely enough at what Maybe results might mean, or how they might be interpreted.

I think the worst unflown example of this effect would have to be a contender for the 2001 lander program who, if I'm remembering the details from Squyres' "Roving Mars" correctly, wanted to devote an entire science payload to positively identifying amino acids within the Martian regolith. That would have been a good portion of a billion dollars to answer what is probably not *nearly* the most useful question to be asking.

The spacecraft that suffered the least from this effect? IMHO, at least for fairly recent probes, I would say Stardust. Yes, the designers of the Stardust collectors had to make some assumptions about the size of the particles they were going for, and the density of particles in their collection location. But the whole point of Stardust was "Let's go grab some comet dust, bring it back, and then see whatever we see when we get our hands on it." That mission design, since it brought samples back to where a great multitude of tests could be run on them as appropriate, was able to follow a more simple paradigm of "grab what you can and then see what you've got."

It seems to me, though, that until we can bring samples back and have the luxury of running whatever tests on them that seem appropriate (to answer all the new questions that the the initial test results pose), you have to narrow your data collection based on some form of triage theory. You can't fly all of the tools you want to fly that would truly enable you to just follow up on what you find rather than looking for what you expect. That's a given, considering mass budgets and funding budgets.

So, you *have* to narrow the focus to what you can afford to place in situ. Granted, the current process encourages that narrowing more than it should... but I'm not coming up with any good ideas on how to change the process to reduce the Rosenthal effect.

-the other Doug

I have read that Mars' nighttime atmosphere is almost always at or near 100% relative humidity, not because there's very much water vapor but because the thin, cold air can only hold a tiny amount of water vapor.

Since the polar regions are always cold, I'd guess that the RH at the Phoenix site is somewhat on the high side, pretty much all of the time. I'll be interested to see what the TECP shows.

-the other Doug

Kewl -- thanks, Mark!

I surely wasn't trying to be nasty or anything. I just took a look at the image product and nothing in my mind could figure out of what use it might be. I'm glad to hear it's not nearly so badly artifacted in the raw data.

-the other Doug

Well, yeah -- but this is a downsampled image, and so heavily jpegged that there is literally no usable information, at least in this raw form.

I guess I would have thought that the SSI team would have been able to predict that the combination of a very poor-resolution image and the heavy jpegging from the downsampling process would render such an image scientifically marginal. Then again, I really have no idea whether the very heavy artifacting is also present in the actual raw data, or if it's as much a result of the stretching for presentation on the web as it is due to anything that happened aboard Phoenix.

I was just struck by the apparent utter uselessness of the image, I guess...

-the other Doug

Can anyone venture a guess as to why anyone, anywhere would even *bother* to transmit an image product like this all the way from Mars to Earth?



I mean, quite frankly, there was just as much useful information in that Mars 3 surface image...

-the other Doug

The real story of Glenn's problems wasn't told as well as it could have been. For one thing, they insinuated that Glenn was never told why they wanted him to enter with his retro-pack attached. In fact, while he was told that they had "no reason for this at this time, this is the judgment of Cape Flight" by the California CapCom, as soon as he came into contact with the Cape, Cape CapCom Al Shepard explained exactly what was happening, why they wanted to try to re-enter with the pack on, and that they thought it was the safest alternative available.

In fact, just as Cape began to lose contact with Glenn as black-out began, Shepard tried to tell Glenn he could in fact jettison his retro-pack after the point-five-gee light came on, Max Faget having decided that the shield would stay on fine with the amount of aerodynamic force present from .5G onwards. However, blackout began before Shepard could get the message through, and Glenn never actually performed the retro-pack jettison.

I suspect that had Kraft told Shepard not to inform Glenn of the technical situation, Shepard would have ignored him and done it anyway.

As for the problem, at the end of the first orbit Cape controllers saw a meter for one of the telemetry frames -- the meter for Segment 51, Landing Bag Deploy -- was reading plus-25 and not minus-10 as it should have. (Each data frame was expressed in banks of meters, back at old Mercury Control... ah, the old days...) This indicated that the switch that reported the status of the landing bag deployment latches was either malfunctioning or, in fact, reporting that the latches had opened. If that *had* been the case, then yes, the metal straps holding down the retro-pack would indeed have been the only things holding the heat shield in place.

Post-flight analysis of Friendship 7 showed that the microswitch responsible for the Segment 51 reading had indeed malfunctioned, and that the latches had always been properly in place. A normal re-entry would have been possible.

The upshot of all of this was that Chris Kraft felt like he and his team were blindsided, that they had responded awkwardly and made decisions that might have endangered Glenn. The event crystallized his thinking about mission rules, about go and no-go criteria, and about methodical, painstaking and grueling simulation sessions for the flight controllers as well as for the crews. More than anything else, this incident molded American flight control philosophy into the form it has retained ever since.

-the other Doug

I was doing the "director's cut" monologue for the thing, filling in the juiciest little tidbits, for my roommate as we sat and watched it, yes...



-the other Doug

Well... I'd judge the first two installments as better than average.

There wasn't really much of anything on the show that I've never seen before, but there were a lot of things I haven't seen in an awfully long time. And some things were sort of "created" a bit -- a few shots of generic Gemini spacewalkers shown during the description of Cernan's EVA troubles (of which there is almost no movie film), for example. (The one actual shot of Cernan is taken from inside the cabin by Stafford, and is a short clip of film of Cernan sort of wheeling across the field of view. That and some partial-body shots as he struggled with his umbilical are really the only shots of Cernan's GT-IX EVA in existence.)

They also trimmed the story a little *too* much, in places, I thought. For example, after the discussion of Gemini IV and White's EVA, they state "The next thing for Gemini to prove was rendezvous, and they turned to Frank Borman and Jim Lovell to help do it." No discussion of the real purpose behind Borman's GT-VII (long duration flight), no discussion of GT-VI's original mission plan and the loss of its Agena... like I say, nothing inaccurate or criminal, just a touch incomplete.

But all in all, one of the better efforts. In fact, I was not only impressed that they got Armstrong out to comment on his flights, I was even more impressed that they got John Young out to do some, as well. Young is always tongue-tied in front of a microphone and has refused many prior requests for this kind of thing. I'm pleased to see he's finally getting over his shyness and is willing to add to the historical commentary.

-the other Doug

But just remember -- when the only tool you have is a hammer, most everything begins looking like a nail...



-the other Doug

Isn't this the kind of thing that the atomic force microscope could help settle? Silica flakes and salt crystals have rather unique and recognizable structures at atomic force scales, don't they?

-the other Doug

Yeah, they said it's open, but the hatch is still closed.

They do have the camera inside Kibo operating, though. Very, very empty-looking module at the moment.

Now the hatch is open. We're in business!

-the other Doug

That was my father's generation, Dan. He was born in 1924, and the first Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon books and comics began to appear around that time. He lived to see men on the Moon and space shuttles landing on runways like airplanes.

I do get some of my interest in space from my father. He was a pilot and a bombardier on B-17s back in WWII, and shared his love of flying with his sons. In fact, the only magazine my family got in the mail as I was growing up was "Flying." Dad watched the early Mercury flights with great interest, and my brother and I emulated him... that's one reason I remember things like Freedom 7, even though it happened when I was only five years old.

I can still remember, very clearly, the evening of July 20, 1969. My mother's parents were visiting that day, and as we waited in the family room for Neil Armstrong to crawl out of Eagle and step onto the Moon, Dad almost whispered "now, pay attention. This is the real thing -- this is history."

Yep -- I got to watch the first Moonwalk with my grandparents, who were both born before humans had flown in powered aircraft.

-the other Doug

Fascinating. As far as I know, it's always been a given that barred spiral galaxies are the result of galactic collision and coalescence. More recently, it's been suggested that every spiral galaxy of whatever form is the result of close encounters between galaxies, if not downright collisions.

So -- it becomes obvious that our own Milky Way is the result of at least one major collision between two galaxies. When you look at it that way, the Magellanic clouds become very understandable -- they're the outlying detritus of a collision (perhaps more than one), left gravitationally attached to our galaxy but flung out far enough to appear separate.

Next thing is to see if we can model the Milky Way backwards in time and get a rough idea of how many billions of years ago our most recent galactic collision occurred. (The next one, of course, is in about 2.5 billion years, when M31 collides with us.)

If the last collision occurred, say, six billion years ago or more, it's only of academic interest to us. But what if it occurred about 4.5 billion years ago? Or 3.5 billion years ago?

Is it possible that the LHB was the result of a gravitational shake-up of our solar system caused by the general upheaval of the collision? Or is it possible that our very own star and planets were formed when the last collision occurred? We do observe vast fields of star formation where other galaxies' gas and dust clouds collide with each other.

Just some cosmological images flitting through my fever-oppressed brain, here (been home sick the last few days with a flu bug that just doesn't seem to want to go away...)

-the other Doug

And there, my friend, you have an excellent point. I should also note that Discovery took off, cleared the tower, and immediately rolled onto a northern heading, which is not the most common heading for an ISS mission. Could be that the pitch onto the preplanned flight path, from the camera angle I was watching, gave the optical illusion of the slowing of the stack's rise when nothing of the sort was actually happening.

-the other Doug

Yeah, well -- I could change mine to "older than Sputnik," if I wanted to. I actually could change it to "as old as the MX-774," but most people would miss the reference.

To get a really good fix that most people here would likely understand -- I was born two weeks before Marty McFly appeared in Hill Valley in his DeLorean time machine...

-the other Doug

Yep -- this is what's called a stable matrix. You can change the stable matrix out from under an inertial system without re-aligning the platform(s) and expect accuracy to remain within less than a tenth of a degree.

Remember, changing the matrix is something that is done in software, not in hardware. The platform(s) remain inertial, with the same angles relative to the spacecraft body, before and after a change to the stable matrix. The only difference is how the "body angles" are intepreted relative to the stable matrix. I would expect greater deviations based on "gyro drift" than due to changing the stable matrix.

In Phoenix's case, they had two platforms, so the gyro drift should have been minimal (and easily predictable) after the final star alignment. Regardless of the amount of movement by the spacecraft. Heck, the deceleration of atmospheric braking probably introduced more drift to the system than motions on 'chute. That's why the event triggers were based on deceleration rates and atmospheric pressure, and why final maneuvers were based primarily on radar data. The landing site stable matrix was likely a relatively crude approximation of the actual landing site/spacecraft geometry, especially in terms of exact location of the ground relative to the spacecraft.

-the other Doug

Good. I was concerned that the meet-and-greet after hatch opening Monday was going to consist of Volkov saying "Hello, welcome to Alpha. Now get out of the way, we need to use your toilet!"



-the other Doug