JPL Open House
Matt J. McCullar
weekend. I'd never been there before but had always wanted to. A friend
who lives in the Los Angeles area told me about it in advance and invited me
over for it. (We watched the lunar eclipse Thursday night; it was already
total when it rose in the east in the L.A. area. The moon had a deep orange
color.) The weather cooperated (it was a trifle warm, but not hot) and what
appeared to be several hundred people turned out for it. The staff ran
several public shows in the Karman Auditorium and there we learned that
people had come from all over the world for this open house. Some came from
Great Britain, others came from Switzerland and Lebanon.
My hat's off to the entire staff! Only a few buildings were off limits, but
those that were open to the public had plenty of interesting things to see.
The staff to a person were very friendly, informative, helpful, and of
course more than willing to talk about their work. Talk about a fun place
to be!
JPL has the feel of a college campus. There are a couple of dozen buildings
scattered over several acres. Only most colleges don't have tanks of liquid
nitrogen attached to some of their buildings. :) JPL has a gift shop, an
employee cafeteria, an auditorium for visitors and media, and clubs for
their employees -- for example, a stamp club, an aviation club and an
Amateur Radio club. (I'm a ham myself, and I enjoyed chatting with the ham
club's representative. I think I saw the club's HF antenna system sticking
out of the roof of one particular building.) I saw several telescopes set
up for people to look at the sun (with filters installed, of course). There
was plenty of food on hand, as well as portable toilets. On sale were
videos, posters, DVDs, T-shirts, you name it. But the freebies far
outnumbered things on sale, and I loaded up a sack with brochures, handouts
and decals.
Visitors for open house got to walk through the machine shop, which was
actually in operation at the time. We got to see machinists and robots
shaping parts for various projects, as well as models and/or finished
products. I happen to repair CNC machine tool control systems for a living
and it was a joy to see these machines up and running and cutting metal.
The staff even had some special parts shaped just for creativity's sake.
I particularly enjoyed JPL's library/archive building. It contains records
of just about everything JPL has ever done since day one. I saw all kinds
of shelves, cabinets, drawers, books, pamphlets, software, maps, etc.
concerning the moon and the planets. The only sad part was learning that
some of the data that probes have collected over the years has been lost
forever due to magnetic tape deterioration. One employee told me that even
some Voyager data has been lost this way. Some projects' information has
been stored onto a particular form of media that is so obsolete that it's
becoming very difficult to even find a machine they can use to transfer the
data to other media.
The biggest surprise to me was the sheer size of the Cassini probe. This is
due to arrive at Saturn next year and will drop a probe into the atmosphere
of Titan, the planet's largest moon. The entire Cassini probe is a
monster -- about the size of a school bus. I had no idea it was over 10
feet tall. I hope it works!
We saw a large room meant to be a simulated environment for robotic
exploration devices... a room full of rocks and sand. I saw a lab-coated
technician hunched over some laptop computers off in the corner, so it
wasn't a vacuum-sealed room. But some wag had rearranged the biggest rocks
in the sand to spell out "UCLA." I'm not a resident of the area, and I
think someone said it was a poke at a recent basketball game or something.
No shortage of things for visitors to see, that's for sure --
thermodynamics, lasers, electronics, optics, guidance and navigation,
computers... There was even a separate outdoor display for local high
schoolers and their team robotic projects. Darned clever, they are!
On the whole, open house was a success! In the future, if you get the
chance to go, take it. You won't be sorry. Thanks to the entire JPL
staff!!!!
Matt J. McCullar
Arlington, TX
Pat Flannery
Matt J. McCullar wrote:
> (We watched the lunar eclipse Thursday night; it was already
>total when it rose in the east in the L.A. area. The moon had a deep orange
>color.) The weather cooperated (it was a trifle warm, but not hot) and what
>appeared to be several hundred people turned out for it. The staff ran
>several public shows in the Karman Auditorium and there we learned that
>people had come from all over the world for this open house. Some came from
>Great Britain, others came from Switzerland and Lebanon.
>
We had optimal conditions for it up here in North Dakota- cloudless sky,
temp in the mid 60's, no mosquitoes out- at totality it had a dark gray
pearly look to it- this was one of the best I've seen, and seemed to
have a sharper edge on Earth's shadow than most of the others I've viewed.
>
>The biggest surprise to me was the sheer size of the Cassini probe. This is
>due to arrive at Saturn next year and will drop a probe into the atmosphere
>of Titan, the planet's largest moon. The entire Cassini probe is a
>monster -- about the size of a school bus. I had no idea it was over 10
>feet tall. I hope it works!
>
I'm just drooling for those ring photo's that it should get, plus more
shots of the moons, and of course the photos from the Huygens probe as
it descends toward Titan... I'm still somewhat miffed that NASA didn't
put a camera on the Galileo probe....still, we did get to see the lava
down in the calderas on Io, and that didn't suck at all.
Pat
Henry Spencer
Pat Flannery <fla...@daktel.com> wrote:
>...and of course the photos from the Huygens probe as
>put a camera on the Galileo probe...
There was a proposal for one, but between the probe's quite low data rate
and the difficulty of building an image-compression system with 1970s
electronics (Galileo was designed a long time ago), it didn't make the
final cut.
--
"Bin Laden must be laughing his beard off." | Henry Spencer
-- Wes Oleszewski | he...@spsystems.net
OM
wrote:
>In article <3EC9EED1...@daktel.com>,
>Pat Flannery <fla...@daktel.com> wrote:
>>...and of course the photos from the Huygens probe as
>>it descends toward Titan... I'm still somewhat miffed that NASA didn't
>>put a camera on the Galileo probe...
>
>There was a proposal for one, but between the probe's quite low data rate
>and the difficulty of building an image-compression system with 1970s
>electronics (Galileo was designed a long time ago), it didn't make the
>final cut.
...And for that matter, if it *had* made the cut, the jammed HGA would
have probably prevented its use, or at least curtailed it to only one
or two images at the sacrifice of other telemetry.
OM
--
"No bastard ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb bastard die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society
- General George S. Patton, Jr
Pat Flannery
OM wrote:
>...And for that matter, if it *had* made the cut, the jammed HGA would
>have probably prevented its use, or at least curtailed it to only one
>or two images at the sacrifice of other telemetry.
>
Did the probe use the HGA antennae to upload it's data? This would mean
turning the spacecraft away from Earth and toward Jupiter, wouldn't it?
Pat
Jonathan Silverlight
<he...@spsystems.net> writes
>In article <3EC9EED1...@daktel.com>,
>Pat Flannery <fla...@daktel.com> wrote:
>>...and of course the photos from the Huygens probe as
>>it descends toward Titan... I'm still somewhat miffed that NASA didn't
>>put a camera on the Galileo probe...
>
>There was a proposal for one, but between the probe's quite low data rate
>and the difficulty of building an image-compression system with 1970s
>electronics (Galileo was designed a long time ago), it didn't make the
>final cut.
Didn't the total data from the descent probe amount to about a floppy
disk's capacity? Lots of room for temperatures and pressures and
composition, but a picture would have taken a huge byte (couldn't resist
that)
--
Greetings from Airstrip One!
Mail to jsilverlight AT merseia.fsnet.co.uk is welcome.
Or visit Jonathan's Space Place http:\\www.merseia.fsnet.co.uk
Henry Spencer
OM <om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_research_facility.org> wrote:
>>>...put a camera on the Galileo probe...
>>There was a proposal for one, but between the probe's quite low data rate
>>and the difficulty of building an image-compression system with 1970s
>
>...And for that matter, if it *had* made the cut, the jammed HGA would
>have probably prevented its use, or at least curtailed it to only one
>or two images at the sacrifice of other telemetry.
The probe-to-orbiter link didn't go via the HGA. Getting the stuff back
to Earth would have taken longer, but even a handful of images from the
atmosphere of Jupiter -- and realistically, that was all that could have
been managed -- would have had sky-high priority on it.
Doug...
>
> <snip>
>
> The probe-to-orbiter link didn't go via the HGA. Getting the stuff back
> to Earth would have taken longer, but even a handful of images from the
> atmosphere of Jupiter -- and realistically, that was all that could have
> been managed -- would have had sky-high priority on it.
This brings to mind a discussion that I've been wanting to instigate here
for a while. It's definitely a space history issue, with the added
benefit of being experience from which we can perhaps learn something...
Early lunar and planetary probes were influenced by what Don Wilhelms, in
his book "To A Rocky Moon," refers to as sky scientists --
astrophysicists who were far more interested in particles and fields than
in what they considered "worthless" imaging. If the astrophysicists had
gotten their way, the Ranger spacecraft would never have carried cameras,
and Mariner II didn't carry any cameras of any kind to Venus.
And therein lies the crux of the problem -- I personally think that
images are interpreted far more intuitively by the human mind than graphs
and charts of particle and field density readings. Many (if not most) of
the fascinating discoveries made by planetary probes over the past 40
years came from their imaging systems. Yes, the particles and fields
experiments yielded very important data. But the subtle clues that lead
to explanations of basic processes are not at all clear from such data,
while they sometimes become starkly obvious in images.
You can say that the Jovian entry probe might have "merely" given us a
couple of views of the atmosphere from within, and it may be that such
views wouldn't have been very instructive. But history would tend to
prove that the most unexpected discoveries have been *seen* and not
simply detected by a particular squiggle on a graph.
I'm glad that Huygens has a camera. I'm particularly glad that it will
be taking pictures as the craft descends, so that there will be an
increasing resolution and we will have a concept of the larger context
within which the later close-up images lie.
--
I don't expect life to be fair; | Doug Van Dorn
I expect it to be unfair in my favor! | dvan...@mn.rr.com
OM
wrote:
>The probe-to-orbiter link didn't go via the HGA.
...Never said it did. I was referring to the orbiter <-> Earth path,
which *was* crippled.
> Getting the stuff back to Earth would have taken longer, but
>even a handful of images from the atmosphere of Jupiter -- and
>realistically, that was all that could have been managed -- would
>have had sky-high priority on it.
...One picture, maybe. Looking at how restricted the data rate was by
the HGA hangup, I honestly find it hard to believe more than one photo
would have been allowed to be stored in the tape recorder as opposed
to the other data the reentry probe sent back. On the other hand, the
determiner would be the actual size an image would have taken up in
bytes vs the other data vs whether or not data compression would have
helped the situation.
Still, it would have been interesting if those "clear belts" that
Clarke theorized actually existed and an image was sent back to prove
it...
OM
wrote:
...I should have made it clear: the HGA fuckup wouldn't have prevented
a probe camera from sending an image to the orbiter - there *was* a
separate relay antenna on the orbiter to receive probe data - but the
question is whether the storage space for one image was worth
sacrificing other telemetry.
Proponent
> I'm still somewhat miffed that NASA didn't put a camera on the
> Galileo probe....
Just as Galileo itself is going to be ditched in Jupiter's atmosphere
in four months' time, I presume that when Cassini's time comes, it too
will be ditched. Is there any possibility of imaging on the way down?
How close to Saturn's cloud tops could Cassini keep functioning?
Henry Spencer
Proponent <Prop...@gmx.net> wrote:
>Just as Galileo itself is going to be ditched in Jupiter's atmosphere
>in four months' time, I presume that when Cassini's time comes, it too
>will be ditched. Is there any possibility of imaging on the way down?
>How close to Saturn's cloud tops could Cassini keep functioning?
For Cassini, there should be no particular problem with near-real-time
imaging, although the camera pointing direction will have to be chosen
to permit pointing the HGA at Earth. (Unlike Galileo, Cassini does not
have a scan platform and can't point its camera and HGA independently.)
Back in the days before Galileo's antenna problem appeared, one proposal
for its final day was a Ranger-style dive into Io, snapping pictures on
the way down. (This looked particularly interesting because the primary
mission's radiation constraints permitted only one Io flyby.)
Jonathan Silverlight
<Prop...@gmx.net> writes
This is probably on the Cassini web site or elsewhere, but is there any
reason to destroy Cassini? Galileo will be sent to Jupiter to avoid the
remote possibility of contaminating Europa, but AFAIK the Saturn system,
including Titan, has no prospect of supporting life.
Of course Cassini/Huygens may change that view.
OTOH, flying into Saturn (or something else) might be a useful way of
getting a final bit of science before the last reserves of fuel are gone
and they lose control.
Peter Stickney
Jonathan Silverlight <jsi...@merseia.fsnet.co.uk> writes:
> In message <HF71I...@spsystems.net>, Henry Spencer
> <he...@spsystems.net> writes
>>In article <3EC9EED1...@daktel.com>,
>>Pat Flannery <fla...@daktel.com> wrote:
>>>...and of course the photos from the Huygens probe as
>>>it descends toward Titan... I'm still somewhat miffed that NASA didn't
>>>put a camera on the Galileo probe...
>>
>>There was a proposal for one, but between the probe's quite low data rate
>>and the difficulty of building an image-compression system with 1970s
>>electronics (Galileo was designed a long time ago), it didn't make the
>>final cut.
>
> Didn't the total data from the descent probe amount to about a floppy
> disk's capacity? Lots of room for temperatures and pressures and
> composition, but a picture would have taken a huge byte (couldn't resist
> that)
Anyone who says "A picture is worth 1,000 words" has never tried to
send a GIF image via a serial line.
--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster
OM
Stickney) wrote:
>Anyone who says "A picture is worth 1,000 words" has never tried to
>send a GIF image via a serial line.
...Yet another Pete Stickney .SIG fodder submission :-)
Henry Spencer
Jonathan Silverlight <jsi...@merseia.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>This is probably on the Cassini web site or elsewhere, but is there any
>reason to destroy Cassini? Galileo will be sent to Jupiter to avoid the
>remote possibility of contaminating Europa, but AFAIK the Saturn system,
>including Titan, has no prospect of supporting life.
Titan is still somewhat of a question mark to the broadminded. :-) Life
exactly as we know it, probably not -- too chilly -- but in more general
terms, it's not out of the question. Of course, once you get out of the
"life as we know it" category, Cassini's ability to cause significant
contamination declines greatly, but even so, there's some reason to want
to steer it somewhere else.
OM
wrote:
>In article <u7vLtAFC...@merseia.fsnet.co.uk>,
>Jonathan Silverlight <jsi...@merseia.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>>This is probably on the Cassini web site or elsewhere, but is there any
>>reason to destroy Cassini? Galileo will be sent to Jupiter to avoid the
>>remote possibility of contaminating Europa, but AFAIK the Saturn system,
>>including Titan, has no prospect of supporting life.
>
>Titan is still somewhat of a question mark to the broadminded. :-) Life
>exactly as we know it, probably not -- too chilly -- but in more general
>terms, it's not out of the question. Of course, once you get out of the
>"life as we know it" category, Cassini's ability to cause significant
>contamination declines greatly, but even so, there's some reason to want
>to steer it somewhere else.
...Especially if there's enough fuel to steer it towards some of the
other moons, or to actually do a "Ranger Dive" across the plane of the
rings so we can see whether all those SFX shots were anywhere close to
being accurate :-)
Pat Flannery
OM wrote:
>...Especially if there's enough fuel to steer it towards some of the
>other moons, or to actually do a "Ranger Dive" across the plane of the
>rings so we can see whether all those SFX shots were anywhere close to
>being accurate :-)
>
>
> OM
>
>
>
The ring dive would be a blast to try...you might want to program it to
take a photo just as it crosses the ring plane, on the offhand chance it
survives the encounter, and can send the picture back...I don't know
offhand what the most recent estimate of the thickness of the rings is;
a few years ago I saw one estimate as low as around fifty feet.(!)
Pat
JGDeRuvo
imagery and get your picture shot in 3D (I'll have ours posted online
soon)? VERY COOL experience. I took the family again this year and
we just had a blast of a time. My 3 1/2 year old really loves going.
And as you know ... you gotta get em hooked young!
Keith F. Lynch
> This is probably on the Cassini web site or elsewhere, but is there
> any reason to destroy Cassini? Galileo will be sent to Jupiter to
> avoid the remote possibility of contaminating Europa, but AFAIK the
> Saturn system, including Titan, has no prospect of supporting life.
Henry Spencer <he...@spsystems.net> wrote:
> Titan is still somewhat of a question mark to the broadminded. :-)
> Life exactly as we know it, probably not -- too chilly -- but in
> more general terms, it's not out of the question. Of course, once
> you get out of the "life as we know it" category, Cassini's ability
> to cause significant contamination declines greatly, but even so,
> there's some reason to want to steer it somewhere else.
What about Huygens, which will land on Titan? Was it sterilized?
If so, why didn't they sterilize Cassini, too?
My hope is that when Cassini's mission is over, it can be put in a
long term orbit, so that it can be put into a museum after it becomes
practical to recover it in a few centuries.
--
Keith F. Lynch - k...@keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/
I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but
unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable. Please do not send me
HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.
Henry Spencer
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>> Titan is still somewhat of a question mark to the broadminded. :-)
>> Life exactly as we know it, probably not -- too chilly -- but in
>
>What about Huygens, which will land on Titan? Was it sterilized?
My understanding is that Huygens is not sterilized, for the same reason
that most current Mars landers aren't -- the probability that Earth life
will be able to *grow and spread* under those conditions is too low. That
being the case, any contamination is confined to the immediate vicinity of
the landing point, and this is thought acceptable. Measures are taken to
reduce bacterial load, especially on the exterior, but real sterilization
(which is expensive and hard on electronics) is not done.
It would be nice to avoid having Cassini hit Titan because that would
strew unsterilized debris over a wide, poorly-defined region, potentially
confusing future biology experiments.
>My hope is that when Cassini's mission is over, it can be put in a
>long term orbit, so that it can be put into a museum after it becomes
>practical to recover it in a few centuries.
I doubt that will happen. Even in the absence of planetary-protection
issues, there is considerable pressure on modern NASA planetary missions
to "go out with a bang", doing something spectacular and scientifically
useful which definitively ends the mission. This avoids having to find
funding for yet more extended operations, while avoiding the political
embarrassment of turning off a still-functioning spacecraft.
(Galileo is still functioning only because a previous attempt to kill it
by radiation overdose -- the two Io flybys at the end of the GEM mission
extension -- unexpectedly failed. The original thought was that even the
second Io flyby was iffy, that the spacecraft would be conspicuously dying
by that point.)
Chris Manteuffel
> My understanding is that Huygens is not sterilized, for the same reason
> that most current Mars landers aren't -- the probability that Earth life
> will be able to *grow and spread* under those conditions is too low.
I would imagine that any probe with a life finding probe would need
such sterliziation, right? Is that why the latest round of probes have
not brought life detection equipment to the surface after the vague
Viking results and the asteroid from Antartica issue? Cost of
sterilization?
It seems like its still a rather open question, and I can't remember
any probe since Viking looking into it.
I would also imagine that the paper-mission sample return flight would
need full sterilization, right? Would that be one of the reasons why
its questionable for funding? Or am I behind on my Mars probe news?
Chris Manteuffel
Jonathan Silverlight
Manteuffel <cman...@ozmail.cjb.net> writes
>he...@spsystems.net (Henry Spencer) wrote in message
>news:<HFro7...@spsystems.net>...
>
>> My understanding is that Huygens is not sterilized, for the same reason
>> that most current Mars landers aren't -- the probability that Earth life
>> will be able to *grow and spread* under those conditions is too low.
>
>I would imagine that any probe with a life finding probe would need
>such sterliziation, right? Is that why the latest round of probes have
>not brought life detection equipment to the surface after the vague
>Viking results and the asteroid from Antartica issue? Cost of
>sterilization?
>
One of the main aims of the Beagle 2 lander is a search for life, but I
don't know if they've used aggressive sterilisation on it. One problem
is that one of the "costs" of sterilisation is that you risk damaging
the probe - that happened with the early Ranger moon probes.
>It seems like its still a rather open question, and I can't remember
>any probe since Viking looking into it.
>
>I would also imagine that the paper-mission sample return flight would
>need full sterilization, right? Would that be one of the reasons why
>its questionable for funding? Or am I behind on my Mars probe news?
>
>Chris Manteuffel
--
Henry Spencer
Chris Manteuffel <cman...@ozmail.cjb.net> wrote:
>> My understanding is that Huygens is not sterilized, for the same reason
>> that most current Mars landers aren't -- the probability that Earth life
>> will be able to *grow and spread* under those conditions is too low.
>
>I would imagine that any probe with a life finding probe would need
>such sterliziation, right?
Generally, yes -- you can't reasonably do life-detection experiments,
especially extremely sensitive ones, without being sure that you didn't
bring any of your own along.
>Is that why the latest round of probes have
>not brought life detection equipment to the surface after the vague
>Viking results and the asteroid from Antartica issue? Cost of
>sterilization?
It's more a matter of there not having been very many landers, and of life
detection being given a low priority after the Viking flop. The meteorite
findings have not really affected this very much, because its features are
definitely ancient, and it's widely believed that any surviving life would
be found underground in geothermal regions... meaning that getting to it
would be very difficult, and until you're capable of doing that (perhaps
via drilling?), there's little point in doing life detection.
The cost of sterilization definitely runs up the overhead of including
life-detection experiments, but I don't think it's a big factor by itself.
>It seems like its still a rather open question, and I can't remember
>any probe since Viking looking into it.
Unless I've missed one, there have been only three Mars landings attempted
since Viking. Mars Pathfinder was originally MESUR Pathfinder, an
engineering test mission for the (since abandoned) MESUR project, and it
had no mass or money for major science payloads. Mars 96 was lost due to
an upper-stage failure, and while it had no life detection, it *did* have
a surface-chemistry experiment intended to clear up the Viking confusion.
And Mars Polar Lander's surface-related science focused on basic physical
analysis of the poorly-known polar region, rather than getting into
details like life detection -- the polar surface is a pretty poor bet for
life in any case. The 2001 lander used the same hardware design as MPL
and was cancelled after MPL's loss.
There just haven't been very many chances to pursue such investigations.
>I would also imagine that the paper-mission sample return flight would
>need full sterilization, right? Would that be one of the reasons why
>its questionable for funding? Or am I behind on my Mars probe news?
Yes, you'd probably want full sterilization for it, given that life
detection would certainly be on the agenda for returned samples. But I
don't think this is a major issue in its funding problems -- a much more
important reason is simply that it's a difficult mission.
(Especially so because NASA historically has thought of it as a one-shot
mission, rather than a series. That drives it into an accelerating cost
spiral, because it's costly enough that it *must* be capable of answering
major science questions all by itself, and that drives demands for rovers,
drilling capability, etc. to make sure that it gets the good stuff, and
those run up the cost farther and intensify the pressures...)
Pat Flannery
Henry Spencer wrote:
>(Especially so because NASA historically has thought of it as a one-shot
>mission, rather than a series. That drives it into an accelerating cost
>spiral, because it's costly enough that it *must* be capable of answering
>major science questions all by itself, and that drives demands for rovers,
>drilling capability, etc. to make sure that it gets the good stuff, and
>those run up the cost farther and intensify the pressures...)
>
>
What we need is some sort of "basic bus" Mars lander; small in size and
reasonable in cost, that provides both power and communications
capabilities for it's payload, and which can have variable payload
experiments plugged into it- then build twenty or so, each sent to a
different part of the planet with experiment packages optimized for it's
landing site, and what's being looked for at it...I am thinking of
something analogous to the Ranger/Mariner line here.
Chris Manteuffel
> What we need is some sort of "basic bus" Mars lander; small in size and
> reasonable in cost, that provides both power and communications
> capabilities for it's payload, and which can have variable payload
> experiments plugged into it- then build twenty or so, each sent to a
> different part of the planet with experiment packages optimized for it's
> landing site, and what's being looked for at it...I am thinking of
> something analogous to the Ranger/Mariner line here.
In order to make that work for NASA, you'd need consistent year to
year funding promises from US Congress, which is about as likely (in
the post-Apollo era) as my mom getting a flight into space. Possible,
but extremely unlikely. Even the battlecruiser probes suffered from
funding squeezes, and their would be a very great incentive for
Congressmen, when they needed a few hundred million dollars, to cut
that program to 2 rovers instead of 20. Not necessarily kill the
program, but scale it back a lot (like what happened to ISS all the
time).
Also that any public integrated plan would either openly or reading
between the lines involve a manned trip to Mars, and Congress has in
the past slashed budget massively when they believed that there was a
manned trip to Mars at the end of a NASA program (early in the Shuttle
program).
I think that that is the biggest reason that NASA doesn't have a more
coherent integrated plan for their missions.
Chris Manteuffel
Chris Manteuffel
> Generally, yes -- you can't reasonably do life-detection experiments,
> especially extremely sensitive ones, without being sure that you didn't
> bring any of your own along.
What is the current plan for when humans get there (in the mythic days
of fore)? I'd imagine that full sterilization of a human spacecraft
would be essentially impossible, because the humans would keep
repopulating the bacteria. And yet, humans are always treated as the
most likely mission to find life, because humans can cover the most
distance and bring along a lot of scientific instruments. So there
must be some plan for avoiding cross contamination? Or is that
something that is left as details to be worked out?
Chris Manteuffel
Henry Spencer
Chris Manteuffel <cman...@ozmail.cjb.net> wrote:
>What is the current plan for when humans get there (in the mythic days
>of fore)? I'd imagine that full sterilization of a human spacecraft
>would be essentially impossible, because the humans would keep
>repopulating the bacteria.
Quite so. Completely eliminating bacteria from both the ship and its
occupants is thoroughly impractical. Any manned landing *is* going to
contaminate the immediate vicinity of the landing site. About the best
you can do is to take precautions when doing things like drilling.
Contaminating the surface may not be that big a deal anyway, because the
surface appears to be very hostile to Earth-like life. More protected
environments would need to be treated with more care.
>...some plan for avoiding cross contamination? Or is that
>something that is left as details to be worked out?
At the moment, it's pretty much beyond people's planning horizons (in
addition to being a hard problem).
Keith F. Lynch
> ... there is considerable pressure on modern NASA planetary missions
> to "go out with a bang", doing something spectacular and scientifically
> useful which definitively ends the mission. This avoids having to
> find funding for yet more extended operations, while avoiding the
> political embarrassment of turning off a still-functioning spacecraft.
Why not turn abandoned probes over to hobbyists?
Henry Spencer
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>> ... there is considerable pressure on modern NASA planetary missions
>> to "go out with a bang", doing something spectacular and scientifically
>> useful which definitively ends the mission. This avoids having to
>> find funding for yet more extended operations, while avoiding the
>> political embarrassment of turning off a still-functioning spacecraft.
>
>Why not turn abandoned probes over to hobbyists?
1. Hobbyists have no way of communicating with them. DSN is notoriously
overcommitted as it is.
2. Past experience with such things -- the amateur-astronomers-on-HST
competitions of some years ago -- indicates that even sharp hobbyists
need a lot of assistance to get up to speed on the technical side of
such things. Worse, unlike HST -- which is a service facility used
by many astronomers, and hence has to be somewhat documented -- just
producing a complete and coherent user's manual for a planetary probe
would be a big job. Especially near the end of its life, when its
reserves have dwindled (putting a premium on efficient operation) and
various subsystems are broken or limping.
3. If hobbyists actually succeeded in continuing operations and getting
results, unfavorable comparisons might be made.
--
History is a start point, not an | Henry Spencer
end restriction. -- John Hare | he...@spsystems.net
Scott Hedrick
news:HFro7...@spsystems.net...
> (Galileo is still functioning only because a previous attempt to kill it
> by radiation overdose -- the two Io flybys at the end of the GEM mission
> extension -- unexpectedly failed. The original thought was that even the
> second Io flyby was iffy, that the spacecraft would be conspicuously dying
> by that point.)
Something to be said for Battlestar Galactica budgets...
--
If you have had problems with Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC),
please contact shredder at bellsouth dot net. There may be a class-action
lawsuit
in the works.
Scott Hedrick
> 3. If hobbyists actually succeeded in continuing operations and getting
> results, unfavorable comparisons might be made.
"We are the engineers that say NIH!"