[X] My Assistant

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

All those scientists who came within a hair of lynching Cleave and Dantzler today, however, had better make up their minds just what the hell they are actually going to demand as a remedy for the situation. Are they going to demand an increase in NASA's total budget, or are they going to demand that money be pulled out of Shuttle/Station and moved to NASA's other branches? Well, you all know what I favor -- but the longer they can't decide which of these courses to recommend, the longer they will be relatively ineffective.

And being "polite" to this particular administration -- in the event there's anyone out there who has failed to notice by now -- doesn't produce much in the way of results. Angry yelling and threats occasionally do.

[edstrick]

Not that it helped much under the previous administration, either, where the post-inflation NASA budgets decreased each year except the last, when, like pretty much all administrations with somebody up for re-election, they boosted the budget to buy votes.

I want to vote for Teddy Roosevelt... He'd fund space exploration properly! (last (expletive-deleted) competent president we had, I'd swear!)

[volcanopele]

Not sure which session Emily was in this morning, but I was at the Titan session. Took about 6 pages worth of notes. I will try to get those typed up and posted in the Cassini forum either tonight or tomorrow. I'll do the same thing with the Icy Sat session this afternoon.

I even asked my first questions during a session. Hopefully they at least reminded the audience that ISS can see the surface, albeit at lower spatial resolution than SAR imaging or the very highest res VIMS stuff. But keep in mind that at the 2 km/pixel scale, we have seen far more of the surface.

BTW, the snail is called Tortola Facula now. Did the VIMS folks not get that memo?!?

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Phil Plait has a new update on "NASA Night."

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

At the Europa Focus Group meeting, Torrance Johnson told me a tale which may explain why Pres. Carter never backed a US Halley's Comet mission. After considerable effort, Univ. of NM comet specialist Jack Brandt finally got an audience with Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and gave him the full-court press, ending by showing him a spectacular photo of Halley. Brzezinski looked at it and grunted, "Hmmph. Looks like a [vulgar term for significant portion of the male anatomy]." That was his only comment during the presentation, and probably his only comment to Carter on the subject later -- and Brzezinski was hardly reflexively anti-science. (Eight years earlier he had written a book called "Between Two Eras: America in the Technetronic Age".)

Space scientists are advised to keep this story in mind whenever they're tempted to believe that their subject absolutely MUST be of interest to the general public.

[Stephen]

All those scientists who came within a hair of lynching Cleave and Dantzler today, however, had better make up their minds just what the hell they are actually going to demand as a remedy for the situation. Are they going to demand an increase in NASA's total budget, or are they going to demand that money be pulled out of Shuttle/Station and moved to NASA's other branches? Well, you all know what I favor -- but the longer they can't decide which of these courses to recommend, the longer they will be relatively ineffective.

I'd have thought there was a simple principle space scientists should all be following here: Don't do unto others what you would not want done unto yourself.

If space scientists don't like the prospect of (say) a future Europa orbiter's budget being raided to help fund a Titan balloon mission they should not start the ball rolling by raiding the shuttle and/or ISS's stash to fund the Europa orbiter.

That said, calls to lift NASA's total budget seems unlikely to be heeded any time soon either, at least by any substantial amount. Congress may increase it for favoured projects like the New Horizons Pluto mission or the VSE, but not overall. But then the reverse also applies in a sense. If the shuttle, ISS, and VSE were all abolished tomorrow most of the money allocated to those would not go to NASA's "other branches". The lion's share would go back into general revenue for funding other areas of government or for distribution to the voters as tax cuts.

Like it or not, putting people in orbit (or on the Moon or Mars) is what gets Congress to open its cheque book. They will not pay the same amount of money to put little robots up there no matter now clever or photogenic they may be.

======
Stephen

[Guest_RGClark_*]

I'd have thought there was a simple principle space scientists should all be following here: Don't do unto others what you would not want done unto yourself.

If space scientists don't like the prospect of (say) a future Europa orbiter's budget being raided to help fund a Titan balloon mission they should not start the ball rolling by raiding the shuttle and/or ISS's stash to fund the Europa orbiter.

That said, calls to lift NASA's total budget seems unlikely to be heeded any time soon either, at least by any substantial amount. Congress may increase it for favoured projects like the New Horizons Pluto mission or the VSE, but not overall. But then the reverse also applies in a sense. If the shuttle, ISS, and VSE were all abolished tomorrow most of the money allocated to those would not go to NASA's "other branches". The lion's share would go back into general revenue for funding other areas of government or for distribution to the voters as tax cuts.

Like it or not, putting people in orbit (or on the Moon or Mars) is what gets Congress to open its cheque book. They will not pay the same amount of money to put little robots up there no matter now clever or photogenic they may be.

======
Stephen

The only difference is the people who support the shuttle and/or the ISS are not scientists.


- Bob

[ljk4-1]

At the Europa Focus Group meeting, Torrance Johnson told me a tale which may explain why Pres. Carter never backed a US Halley's Comet mission. After considerable effort, Univ. of NM comet specialist Jack Brandt finally got an audience with Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and gave him the full-court press, ending by showing him a spectacular photo of Halley. Brzezinski looked at it and grunted, "Hmmph. Looks like a [vulgar term for significant portion of the male anatomy]." That was his only comment during the presentation, and probably his only comment to Carter on the subject later -- and Brzezinski was hardly reflexively anti-science. (Eight years earlier he had written a book called "Between Two Eras: America in the Technetronic Age".)

Space scientists are advised to keep this story in mind whenever they're tempted to believe that their subject absolutely MUST be of interest to the general public.

Wait a minute - what photo of Halley did he show? The Giotto mission wasn't until
1986, when Reagan was in office.

And don't you love the arrogance of power - the guy couldn't even make some
courteous comments about the presentation, even if he wasn't into the subject.

And for the scientist - the public doesn't always want or need every little detail
on a subject. I've seen that in way too many lectures for the public by scientists
who are only used to talking to their fellow scientists.

Jimmy Carter is proof that just because you are an intelligent person (at least
more intelligent than a lot of other presidents) does not automatically equal
support of the space sciences. Even Carl Sagan could not convince Carter
to give funds for planetary missions. And to think his message is the one on
the Voyager Interstellar Record. Just like Nixon's signature is on all those
Apollo LM plaques, I suppose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record#Contents

[dvandorn]

Like it or not, putting people in orbit (or on the Moon or Mars) is what gets Congress to open its cheque book. They will not pay the same amount of money to put little robots up there no matter now clever or photogenic they may be.

Thank you, Stephen. Exactly spot-on.

-the other Doug

[The Messenger]

...

Like it or not, putting people in orbit (or on the Moon or Mars) is what gets Congress to open its cheque book. They will not pay the same amount of money to put little robots up there no matter now clever or photogenic they may be.

I can't help but get a visual image of a sow drying up, and all the piglets squealing. The in-fighting is indeed dangerous. I know, for example, Cassini benefitted directly from shuttle dollars. It can be argued that Robert Park's campaign to put a hole in the bulkhead of the ISS has lead indirectly to the dry-up of science funding. For a politician, where half the people love dogs and half the people hate them, the best thing to do is stay out of the limelight on the issue...and quitely pay the bills for both the dog catcher and the shelter.

Ironically, Carter was a true conservative, and very concerned about the future and US dependence upon foriegn stuff. The shuttle was tailored to his style: reusable and (it was sold as) relatively cheap. I suspect that if he had a chance to do it over, he would have pushed a well funded planetary exploration program - what a great legacy!

[djellison]

Wait a minute - what photo of Halley did he show?

It would have been a ground based image (going on his response)

Doug

[Bob Shaw]

The only difference is the people who support the shuttle and/or the ISS are not scientists.
- Bob

And the people who pay for the things ain't either!

More's the pity...

Bob Shaw

[Bob Shaw]

In the absence of a dedicated LPSC thread, there's an interesting article in today's New Scientist (18 March 2006, p10):

A two page spread describes a rewriting of Mars geological time, with a new period - the Pre-Noachian - inferred from MOLA data indicating a new population of ancient large-scale cratering events which have been hidden beneath later impacts. "The early impact rate was quite a lot higher than we expected" according to Herb Frey of GSFC. The article also describes a turnaround in interpretations of crater rates in more modern eras, with most small craters now being seen as secondaries from a few larger events. One of the upshots of this is a suggested three-fold reduction in cratering rates in the last three billion years as compared to previous models.

And:

"The atmosphere that was

The atmosphere of Mars, which is so thin that on Earth it would be considered a hard vacuum, was once as thick or thicker than Earth's. At least that's the accepted theory, based on the abunndant evidence of river valleys on Mars's surface, suggesting that it must once have had air thick enough to support evaporation and rainfall. However, the idea has remained controversial.

Now a study of meteorites lends further support to the theory. John Bridges and Ian Wright of the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, have found that the proportion of carbonates in some of the 32 known Mars meteorites found on earth suggest that the atmosphere originally contained carbon dioxide at pressures somewhere between 2.3 and 2.6 bars, compared with roughly 1 bar at sea level on Earth today.

The meteorites also reveal that by 670 million years ago the atmospheric pressure had come down to about 50 to 100 millibars and then fell further to today's level, which varies from virtually zero to 30 millibars depending on variations in the shape of Mars's orbit. Bridges and Wright presented the work at the lunar and Planetary sciences Conference in Houston, Texas."


Bob Shaw

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Michael Carr's excellent 1995 book "Water on Mars" cites the much greater erosion rate of craters on Noachian terrain -- not the existence of valley networks -- as proof of a dense Noachian atmosphere. Noachian terrain has far more big craters than Hesperian terrain; but most of its big craters are consistently eroded vastly more than the big ones you find in Hesperian terrain -- so much more as to suggest that the erosion rate was up to 1000 times higher in the Noachian. This indicates at least powerful wind erosion, regardless of whether or not Noachian Mars was also warm enough to have substantial amounts of fluvial erosion.

As for my reply on the funding of manned vs. unmanned space programs: it's coming.

[CosmicRocker]

I wasn't able to make it to that presentation Bob, but Golombek mentioned the secondary cratering in his paper on observations from Spirit's traverse in Gusev. He said that it has been observed that most of the craters there are relatively shallow compared to their width, and that is interpreted as evidence that they are secondary impacts from larger impacts elsewhere. He specifically mentioned Bonneville, Lahontan, and Searles, but said generally that most craters in Gusev were secondary.

The picture he painted of processes in Gusev since it was flooded with basalt was that it is essentially a sediment starved basin with little geologic activity, aside from the dust blowing around. When the secondary impacts occurred, the ejecta created temporary sources of sediment which was transported by the wind until it was eventually trapped in the bottoms of craters and other aeolian cul de sacs. After that, the only thing that occurs is the monotonous movement of dust until new secondary impacts again disrupt the equilibrium and create temporary sources of aeolian sediment. He mentioned sand ripples like Serpent and noted that they appear to be inactive, with surfaces armored with granule-sized clasts and dust depostited between the granules. However, someone else (forgot who) mentioned that El Dorado was thought to be active, since it's surface remains dark, while light colored dust is deposited around it. I'm not sure how convincing that is, though.

I'll try to post my notes from the other MER papers in appropriate topics in the MER section as time permits, unless people think it would be better to start a dedicated MER LPSC topic or a more general LPSC topic. I wasn't able to stay for anything other than the MER papers. I'd hate to post too much in here, since most who read the MER topics probably don't often look in here. Interesting about "the atmosphere that was." I hadn't heard about that.