No.

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The most appropriate possible award to a guy 33% responsible for UMSF

Zero G?

I wanted DJE - but it was taken So it ended up being 'Doug E'. I must admit - Delta Golf Echo is better than Delta Juliet Echo.

Well - I passed the foundation licence (24/25...ARHGHG...gutted) - And my callsign M6DGE

I'll be starting an intermediate course in January - and I'm picking up a Yaesu 817 on Monday

AWESOME - the only thing I would ask for.... is the observation ID's so we can go and see more

According to Twitter - the first thought is that they were on the wrong Antenna.
http://twitter.com/messenger2011

A quick stop - image it, and drive on. That's about as much as I could probably handle

I just merged two threads about it.

Thanks for the torrent - it's coming down now, and I'll be seeding it all night if anyone wants to try and grab it - for about the next 14 hrs.

If you can suggest a method by which they can suddenly appear, in a cluster, with ejecta and occasional airburst patterns....go for it.

Yes, and yes.

It's just not a risk worth taking, Europa is too important.

Nancy talked about it on Universe Today, Emily did the same on planetary.org/blog

Has it shown up anywhere else? It'd be cool to know.

I HAVE noticed that it's jumped to 9000 views on Youtube. I beat the 5000+ Helen got for her world record Thriller dance routine

1080 Full HD version
http://www.archive.org/details/ColumbiaHills2009DemAnimation

Thanks to Gary Murphy for suggesting archive.org as a place to put it

Sorry - I just don't seen enough to get excited about. I found the MRO tele-conf that followed far FAR more exciting.

This is the only way I know - so far - and it's very long, convoluted, and I'm SURE there is a better way to do it - but it works.

1) Install ISIS 3 - instructions here http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/document...uide/index.html
2) While letting that happen - grab one of Randy's DEM's - I'm using the Victoria Crater bundle as an example
3) Find DEM_1m_VictoriaCrater.cub.gz (it's in the ISIS_EQUI360_OC folder ) and expand it
4) Run isis2raw
5) In the 'FROM' window - point to the .cub
6) Copy and paste the path and filename into 'TO' - but change the extension to .dem or something simiar
7) U16BIT data type ( screenshot attached)
8) Hit Run.... if this bit doesn't work - it's almost certainly your ISIS3 installation that needs looking at, make sure you got all the Base Data.
9) Find the .cub and open in text edit and find this part...

/* Core description */
CORE_ITEMS = (1278,1694,1)

10) Open Photoshop, and open the .dem.raw that ISIS3 produced
11) Width is the first of those three figure under CORE_ITEMS. Height is the second. Depth should be 16 bits, Byte Order as IBM PC, Header as size 0
12) Hit OK
13) Save out as 16 bit PNG, celebrate, have lunch, dump into your favourite animation package.

I'm hoping to figure out a workflow that involved just ImageJ or Photoshop without ISIS3 (as it's a hell of an install, and a pain in the butt to get running for a temperamental artists like me )

They did explicitly mention figures like that, several times. If it is basically solar 'rain' so to speak, then I can well imagine it being little more than atomic icing. There, clearly, lots more study to be done.

We're almost 500m west of Block Island already.

Like Greg - I'll say up front, I hope I've not screwed up any decimal places here.....

1kg of water per m^3 of soil.

They said figures like 1mm, 2mm, a few mm. I'll go with 2mm.

Thus - 1000 x 1000 x .002 m (i.e. farming 1 sq km) - is 2,000 kg of water.

Looking at something like the Mars Direct ISRO numbers - taking 8T of H2 and working with in-situ CO2 to make methane and O2. - 8T of H2 as water would be a further 64T of O2 - for a total of 72T of equivalent water, as it were.

That's 36 sqkm of farming, or, from a landing site - every scrap of surface regolith to a radius of 3.4km


Alternatively - taken an MSL sized rover - with some sort of soil harvesting combine harvester style rig on front - shall we say 3 x 1m wide grabbers ( like a big gang-lawn mower).

It would have to travel a total of 12,000km of 3m wide stripes to cover 36 sqkm. Quite by chance - that's about 1000km further than a circumnavigation of the whole moon.

At a brisk rover of, say 2.5m/sec (just over 5mph) - operating a 50% duty cycle for the day/night cycle - 110 days. But of course, you can't have a rover that just end up dragging a 70 ton sack - it'll have to get it bit, return it to be stored, go get some more, return it. Say you farm a 6km square, and can get one 3m x 6,000m stripe in one 'store'. It would be an average drive out of 3km, an average drive back from the end of 6.7km. Plus farming of 6km. 2000 times - 31,400km. Basically - a year of driving.

Harvesting at that higher figure, though, of 2.5m/sec - perhaps taking the top cm of soil (can't imagine how you'd take the top 2mm) - and a regolith density of 2.9g/cm^3 - that, amazingly, is 4.5 CuM or 13 tons of regolith per minute, producing (as only 1/5th of our 1cm harvest is 1% water) basically, 1 litre per minute.

I have no idea what sort of energy will be involved in getting that water out. Latent heat of vaporization is 2257 kJ/kg - 37 kWatts of energy required. (330x the RTG power of MSL, or a solar array about 9x9m at 30% effic)

As a comparison - to get 72,000kg of water up at Phoenix's landing site - taking, say, 30cm trough, at 500kg / m^3, at 3m wide, is only 160km of trough - 75x less than the lunar combine harvester.



Nor me. Interesting - but not a resource.

Cool though.

I want my solar powered MSL sized water farming soil munching robot

About as appropriate a word as the BBC saying "Damp" for the new moon discovery.

That was the lunar press conference.

Right NOW - there is a teleconference about MRO -
http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro20090924.html

They have spotted ice in fresh craters. Not 1% ice in Moon soil. 99% ice in mars soil

Would you like some ice with your lunar regolith? How about some martian regolith with your ice.

Ahhh - ok. I guess they didn't have much choice really.

And thus officially, still breach the embargo which doesn't expire for another 15 minutes.

I can only find ISS data from Cassini for the earth flyby - nothing from any other instrument (using http://starbrite.jpl.nasa.gov/ ) so working on the assumption that this is VIMS or CIRS data -then yup - it's not been in the PDS.

I'm finding it hard to get excited about this. We're talking about something two to three times, possibly 30 times drier, than dry concrete - and even then - if I'm not misreading stuff, just in the top few mm of the regolith is this 'damp' (BBC's choice of word there)

So you might get a few tens of tons of water out of ploughing through an entire square km of surface. I'm struggling to imagine that as being useful for, err, anything.

It may well be that this surface smattering of H+O is all there is to the water on the moon story (given the none too positive results from radar mapping of the moons poles) - so I'm going to stick my neck out and predict a very dry LCROSS event.

http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/missions/epoxi/index.html

Nothing.