[X] My Assistant

[The Messenger]

According to him, Ball Labs' relative incompetence compared to most other aerospace firms has been a legend in the industry for years.  After this stunt, it's hard not to reach the conclusion that something might be a wee bit amiss there.

Well, optical coatings and any other known cause of lense distortion should pop-up during any and every NASA design specification review. (Somewhere in this process, the use of non-metric engineering terms should have triggered a campaign to rid not only NASA, but the entire USofA of arcane units.) BASIC QC101.

Meanwhile searching on Deep Impact, I came across Hoagland's log (http://www.enterprisemission.com/weblog/weblog.htm), and I was a little angry:

Bruce, I do sound like Hoagland, and what is worse, his take on the Lisse interview is very close to my own: Hoagland has highlighted the same counter-indicative evidence I am having a hard time digesting. He bends the evidence to match his own theory (he ignores spectral bandwidth resolution), but he is correct in questioning Lesse's 50% water release, when other scientist at other telescopes have reported that the net quanty of H20 was unchanged by the impact.

The surprising results of Deep Impact on one comet don't unravel basic theory. Tempel 1 could be a rouge, but the analysis should not be coached into the most supportive interpretation possible of any prior expectations: As near as I can tell, no one was right about Tempel 1.

Edited to admit: I guessed Tempel 1 would be high in METALLIC nickel and iron

[Decepticon]

I just read some of his blog and noticed that his upset with the lack of RAW images from the deep impact mission.

Is this true? No Raw Images made available to the public?

The deep Impact websites has no area containing Raw Images.

[djellison]

Of course, we all know that that's complete rubbish - because people HERE were making composites from the raw imagery put on the DI website.

What he's moaning about is spectral data I assume. But that's just not something joe-public understands and is probably being held back for a Nature / Science special.

Doug

[tty]

Well, optical coatings and any other known cause of lense distortion should pop-up during any and every NASA design specification review.  (Somewhere in this process, the use of non-metric engineering terms should have triggered a campaign to rid not only NASA, but the entire USofA of arcane units.) BASIC QC101.

Can anybody tell me why NASA didn't simply prohibit the use of non-SI units by their contractors after the MCO debacle?

tty

[mike]

I suspect that as the rest of the (metric unit-using) world becomes more and more economically powerful, the US will be forced by simple commercial pressure to switch over to SI units. The Olde World unit system is just too nonsensical to last much longer.. And of course, scientists in general have been using the metric system for quite some time, and guess who discovers all the things that are later used by Jim and Jill Everyperson U.S.A.-- scientists.

[djellison]

At this point - I'm going to register my objection to the use of the phrase "English Units" when describing feet, inches etc.

They are IMPERIAL units.

And you can be damn sure that there isnt an aerospace firm in the whole EU that would dream of using them for a second.

Of course, there is another form of units that NASA uses for describing things - it has 5 different units....Golf Cart, School Bus, 12 story building, Utah, and Continental United States. Anything space related can be expressed as fraction or number of one of these

Doug

[ElkGroveDan]

Of course, there is another form of units that NASA uses for describing things - it has 5 different units....Golf Cart, School Bus, 12 story building, Utah, and Continental United States. 

You forgot the unit of "Manhattan" which came into popular use during the Eros mission.

[djellison]

Ahh yes - Manhattan - and of course there's Volkswagen Beatle as well.

Of course, in the UK we have Phonebox, Double Decker Bus, Nelsons Column, the M25 and Wales

Doug

[dvandorn]

I think that's the new DDU measurement system -- Dumbed-Down Units.

-the other Doug

[Bill Harris]

Of course, in the UK we have Phonebox...

Ah, yes, didn't Doctor Who travel in one of those?

The Brits have quaint money, too...

--Bill

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

It's going to take a lot more than a (current) disagreement over the amount of water vapor released by the impact to start making me throw current conceptions of comet nuclei completely out the window; there are more than enough ambiguities in the initial interpretations of the measurements from different spectrometers (in different places) to explain that, I think. Especially since there were several predictions from various people before the impact that the impact might actually do little to release water from Tempel 1, or to punch down below its outer mantle of dried rock dust.

As for the "UV flash" supposedly showing something unusual, I'll have to listen to that interview -- but the DI researchers have already said that the sequence of events from the impact was EXACTLY what their ground simulations had shown would happen if the Impactor hit a deep, loose, powdery surface. It would tunnel a short distance below the surface before exploding (like a bolide entering Earth's atmosphere), then there would be a brief, narrow jet of ejecta spurting straight up through the tunnel it had dug into the surface -- and then the shock from the shallowly buried explosion would fling a far bigger cloud of ejecta in every direction. As of yet, the carbonates remain the only major surprise that I think this mission has turned up, which is why I'm waiting to hear from Lisse on just how good the spectral evidence for them really is.

[The Messenger]

Can anybody tell me why NASA didn't simply prohibit the use of non-SI units by their contractors after the MCO debacle? 

tty

NASA has what can only be termed a pathologically impairing fear of making changes in the manned flight program. Both shuttle disasters can be directly traced to known failure modes, but NASA told engineers to stay the coarse...I think it has something to do with being based in Texas

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

"Messenger" is right about the ejecta temperaure reported by Lisse in that abstract actually being that 24 hours after the impact. Since the temperature in the immediate vicinity of the impact was fully several thousand degrees, it would still seem possible that the carbonates were synthesized by the heat of the impact themselves -- depending on just how much of them ws actually detected by deep Impact. I have yet to hear from Lisse on these subjects, and it looks as though I'll have to phone him.

As for the press release about the "Swift" data supposedly indicating impact into a hard surface, however, I think the article's phrasing may be misleading. What it actually says is that Swift detected a UV flash indicating that the Impactor did not hit "a soft, SNOWY surface". The latter adjective can perhaps be interpreted as meaning that it did not hit easily volatilizable ices -- but it could still have hit fine rock powder that resisted flashing into vapor and in the process absorbing much of the heat of the impact , so that more of the energy of the impact went into heating local rock powder to the point of its glowing incandescently.

[The Messenger]

Hoagland took Lisse to task for saying the Deep Impact observer did not have the 'best angle' for viewing the results, but my take on that was that Lisse was implying that observer had a narrow view, that was also screened by dust. Hoagland is correct, though, the integrated patterns from earth can't distinguish between native and induced water vapor.

The question is, was there significant water vapor emitted by Deep Impact, or was the water vapor already being released elsewhere on the comet irradiated by a an extremely bright UV flash? I am also of the impression that only the DI observer witnessed the full intensity of the flash, as I have not found any reference to it in ground based observations.

In any case, it is back to the drawing boards: Perhaps an observer that will hang around long enough to figure out what is happening during impact, with a second passive observation platform, and a pair of stereo lenses...sigh...it is a shame when your local 7-ll is better equipped for radio observations than a space observation probe.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I plan to call Lisse tomorrow to try to get the straight dope on the following questions:

(1) How firm is the carbonate detection, and how big a fraction (roughly) of the surface material does the team think they constituted?

(2) How can the near-absence of carbonates on the surfaces of comet nuclei -- and in interplanetary dust -- be explained?

(3) How does he explain the apparent disparity in the measured amounts of water released by the impact?

(4) Did they detect formic acid, or not?

(5) Can finer particles in the exposed subsurface material actually account for a lot of the IR spectral differences that are currently being explained as actual compositional differences? (Thanks to Jeffrey Bell.)

Cany anyone think of any more questions?