Lunar Lava Tubes via Clementine
Bill Bogen
Clementine probe for evidence of lunar lava tubes. The argument (by
Taylor and Gibbs) was that the usually-cited candidates for lava tubes
are the huge, apparently partly collapsed rilles visible from Earth or
in Apollo photos and that any tubes at these sites may be too deep to
use easily. The thought was that smaller tubes could be just as
useful (for radiation and meteoroid protection), more numerous,
possibly located near more interesting sites, and easier to access.
These smaller tubes might be discernable in some of the 1.9 million
Clementine images.
Did anything ever come of this? If not, did anyone ever begin a
_manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light
Clementine images? This sounds about right for a small NASA grant or
for a volunteer, distributed project among interested space cadets.
William Elliot
> It was once proposed to do an automated search of images from the
> Clementine probe for evidence of lunar lava tubes.
> Did anything ever come of this? If not, did anyone ever begin a
> _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light
> Clementine images? This sounds about right for a small NASA grant or
> for a volunteer, distributed project among interested space cadets.
>
Manual search isn't needed. The L5 society Portland Chapter
http://www.oregonl5.org got data and image software years ago but couldn't
get it running. Legal or technical problems or both.
Thomas Billings
wbo...@visteon.com (Bill Bogen) wrote:
> It was once proposed to do an automated search of images from the
> Clementine probe for evidence of lunar lava tubes. The argument (by
> Taylor and Gibbs) was that the usually-cited candidates for lava tubes
> are the huge, apparently partly collapsed rilles visible from Earth or
> in Apollo photos and that any tubes at these sites may be too deep to
> use easily. The thought was that smaller tubes could be just as
> useful (for radiation and meteoroid protection), more numerous,
> possibly located near more interesting sites, and easier to access.
> These smaller tubes might be discernable in some of the 1.9 million
> Clementine images.
>
> Did anything ever come of this?
Our research team at Oregon L-5 attempted to start preparing for such a
search, back in 1993-4 using some software from a Caltech/JPL project in
pattern recognition. The originating software team had used it to search
out small volcanic features in the Magellan Radar data, and we thought
of using it on Clementine data. We knew it might be marginal, because of
the resolution of the Clementine sensors on the lunar surface, but
figured it was worth a try.
Unfortunately, the software (unnamed, to protect the guilty) turned out
to be such an unusable lash-up of previous academic projects that we
never found anyone outside of that particular Caltech/JPL team who had
gotten it to work, either. We once met someone at a conference who also
tried it, and he was awed that we'd once gotten as far as getting a user
interface screen! We banged away for about 5 years, on and off, as
volunteer teams must.
The head of that software project quit Caltech and joined Microsoft in
the middle of our efforts. 'Nuff said!
>If not, did anyone ever begin a
> _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light
> Clementine images?
We looked at this, and looked at our local support group, and quailed!
We haven't found that purely iternet organized projects, where people
never meet physically, have enough credence with team members for any
single person to take "ownership" of this sort of project.
>This sounds about right for a small NASA grant or
> for a volunteer, distributed project among interested space cadets.
It still tweaks my interest quite strongly, but more through the
possibility of using better pattern recognition software ( JPL has
touted their "Diamondeye" since then, but only on their machines, IIRC)
and the higher resolution data from Transorbital, if and when it becomes
available.
Regards,
Tom Billings
--
Oregon L-5 Society
Bill Bogen
Um, then it sounds like a manual search _is_ needed (or some other software method).
Bill Bogen
Any idea how many person-hours were consumed?
>
> The head of that software project quit Caltech and joined Microsoft in
> the middle of our efforts. 'Nuff said!
>
> >If not, did anyone ever begin a
> > _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light
> > Clementine images?
>
> We looked at this, and looked at our local support group, and quailed!
Why? Isn't the human eye&brain a wonderful pattern recognition
device? Maybe I'm being naive here but I'd set up the project this
way: 10 people each sitting in front of a PC for about 2 hours a day.
Display an image. The person decides whether it is a possible
lavatube and flags it with a keystroke. Since the vast bulk of
pictures will be rejects, I'd expect an average rate of about 1
sec/image. We'd be done in 9 days. Let's triple that and let each
image be seen by 3 people; we'd rank each image by consensus. Let's
pay each person $10/hr: labor cost = $5,167. Even adding costs for
software to present the images and record flags, project management,
etc, this still seems pretty cheap.
Oregon L-5 has some experience in NASA grants, doesn't it? Would this
be an unreasonable grant proposal?
Gordon D. Pusch
Yes --- It's =FAR= too cheap a proposal to ever be accepted by NASA! :-/
You'll need to first raise the project cost by several orders of magnitude,
and find some way to distribute the project over several NASA Centers,
before it has even a small _chance_ of being approved !!! :-I
-- Gordon D. Pusch
perl -e '$_ = "gdpusch\@NO.xnet.SPAM.com\n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;'
Sander Vesik
>
> Unfortunately, the software (unnamed, to protect the guilty) turned out
> to be such an unusable lash-up of previous academic projects that we
> never found anyone outside of that particular Caltech/JPL team who had
> gotten it to work, either. We once met someone at a conference who also
> tried it, and he was awed that we'd once gotten as far as getting a user
> interface screen! We banged away for about 5 years, on and off, as
> volunteer teams must.
>
But since then image recognistion software has become considerably more
everyday matter than even back then, so surely doing it from scratch would
not be an impossible hurdle?
>
> Regards,
>
> Tom Billings
>
--
Sander
+++ Out of cheese error +++
Bill Bogen
Info on the great work the Oregon L-5 Society has done on lava tubes
can be found at:
http://www.oregonl5.org/lbrt/l5ombrr1.html
Access to the Clementine data is also available from that website.
Thomas Billings
Between our team, the very nice Sun Software Engineers who volunteered
their time from their Portland area office, the company that donated the
Suns, the Caltech Grad students who tried to help us after their team
leader left for Redmond, and a few others, probably about 150-200+
manhours.
Sigh!
>
> >
> > The head of that software project quit Caltech and joined Microsoft in
> > the middle of our efforts. 'Nuff said!
> >
> > >If not, did anyone ever begin a
> > > _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light
> > > Clementine images?
> >
> > We looked at this, and looked at our local support group, and quailed!
>
> Why? Isn't the human eye&brain a wonderful pattern recognition
> device? Maybe I'm being naive here but I'd set up the project this
> way: 10 people each sitting in front of a PC for about 2 hours a day.
We didn't have 10 people.
> Display an image. The person decides whether it is a possible
> lavatube and flags it with a keystroke. Since the vast bulk of
> pictures will be rejects, I'd expect an average rate of about 1
> sec/image. We'd be done in 9 days. Let's triple that and let each
> image be seen by 3 people; we'd rank each image by consensus. Let's
> pay each person $10/hr: labor cost = $5,167. Even adding costs for
> software to present the images and record flags, project management,
> etc, this still seems pretty cheap.
This is true with sufficiently fast download times. Back then we didn't
have that for our team. For some on our team, we don't today.
> Oregon L-5 has some experience in NASA grants, doesn't it? Would this
> be an unreasonable grant proposal?
Today? I don't know. Maybe so. In the years after SEI was toasted by
NASA's 400 billion dollar estimate, nothing involving the Moon was being
accepted willingly by NASA, IIRC. Lunar Orbiter was only done to
pre-empt Clementine II, while placating certain space advocates, or so
I've been told.
Bill Bogen
> In article <de488a4f.04021...@posting.google.com>,
> wbo...@visteon.com (Bill Bogen) wrote:
>
> > Thomas Billings <it...@teleport.com> wrote in message
> > news:<itsd1-23D9F4....@news2.west.earthlink.net>...
> > > In article <de488a4f.04021...@posting.google.com>,
> > > wbo...@visteon.com (Bill Bogen) wrote:
> > >
> > Any idea how many person-hours were consumed?
>
> Between our team, the very nice Sun Software Engineers who volunteered
> their time from their Portland area office, the company that donated the
> Suns, the Caltech Grad students who tried to help us after their team
> leader left for Redmond, and a few others, probably about 150-200+
> manhours.
>
> Sigh!
>
> >
> > >
> > > The head of that software project quit Caltech and joined Microsoft in
> > > the middle of our efforts. 'Nuff said!
> > >
> > > >If not, did anyone ever begin a
> > > > _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light
> > > > Clementine images?
> > >
> > > We looked at this, and looked at our local support group, and quailed!
> >
> > Why? Isn't the human eye&brain a wonderful pattern recognition
> > device? Maybe I'm being naive here but I'd set up the project this
> > way: 10 people each sitting in front of a PC for about 2 hours a day.
>
> We didn't have 10 people.
Maybe, if done as an Internet project, enough people could be
recruited to make this happen.
> > Display an image. The person decides whether it is a possible
> > lavatube and flags it with a keystroke. Since the vast bulk of
> > pictures will be rejects, I'd expect an average rate of about 1
> > sec/image. We'd be done in 9 days. Let's triple that and let each
> > image be seen by 3 people; we'd rank each image by consensus. Let's
> > pay each person $10/hr: labor cost = $5,167. Even adding costs for
> > software to present the images and record flags, project management,
> > etc, this still seems pretty cheap.
>
> This is true with sufficiently fast download times. Back then we didn't
> have that for our team. For some on our team, we don't today.
Nowadays, with DSL and multi-gig hard drives, I'm not so concerned
about whether people and hardware can be gathered. A bigger question
may be: is this neurologically feasible? IOW, do you think that the
photos are of sufficient resolution, contrast, etc that
properly-trained people might actually detect signs of lava tubes? If
so, how might the people be trained, assuming this were done via
Internet? Perhaps work up a quiz/tutorial of images (some suspected
by experts of showing signs of lava tubes and some not) and only
select the highest scoring individuals? Or better yet, let anyone
play but, when later forming a consensus/score for a given Clementine
image, weight that person's choices by their score on the quiz?
Thomas Billings
wbo...@visteon.com (Bill Bogen) wrote:
Indeed, there's the rub! Even though Dr. Shoemaker was very encouraging
when he visited us in late 1994, he did warn us that the photos were
optimized for geochemical sensing, not for detecting terrain
differentials. They tried for direct overhead shots at local noon, for
maximum reflection for their suite of multi-spectral sensors. This makes
for few, if any, shadows, the keys to terrain. We have too little
experience with the larger suite of Clementine photos to know for sure
how easy others will find it. I found it hard, by eyeball.
> If
> so, how might the people be trained, assuming this were done via
> Internet? Perhaps work up a quiz/tutorial of images (some suspected
> by experts of showing signs of lava tubes and some not) and only
> select the highest scoring individuals? Or better yet, let anyone
> play but, when later forming a consensus/score for a given Clementine
> image, weight that person's choices by their score on the quiz?
Unless someone out there has done more than the minimal amount of
eyeball work we did with the pictures in finding terrain features, this
last idea seems a bit more hopefull to me.
I would recommend starting at :
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/clementine.html
There is a browser for the images, as well as much Clementine
information in links and pages.
Charles Buckley
>>If
>>so, how might the people be trained, assuming this were done via
>>Internet? Perhaps work up a quiz/tutorial of images (some suspected
>>by experts of showing signs of lava tubes and some not) and only
>>select the highest scoring individuals? Or better yet, let anyone
>>play but, when later forming a consensus/score for a given Clementine
>>image, weight that person's choices by their score on the quiz?
>
>
> Unless someone out there has done more than the minimal amount of
> eyeball work we did with the pictures in finding terrain features, this
> last idea seems a bit more hopefull to me.
>
> I would recommend starting at :
>
> http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/clementine.html
>
> There is a browser for the images, as well as much Clementine
> information in links and pages.
>
Has anyone taken the shots of known rilles and what appeared to
be collapsed tubes to find out if there are any discernable signatures?
I recall using normalized vegetative data indices on Earth sensing
to bring out subtle differences. It seems to me that the thermal
equilization might be just a bit off between a near-surface tube and
it's immediate surroundings. Admittedly though, the lunar regolith
is a pretty good thermal insulator so it's a low percentage angle.