LPSC is coming up in mid-March. I just submitted my abstract - and I'm a coauthor on another one which should go in shortly.

Is anyone else from UMSF going ?

Phil

I'd really love to, but I think I would need to finagle a relative into coming down to watch my son, since I doubt he would be quiet or still for the presentations. In another few years, hopefully.

On a related E/PO note, we did visit the AstroZone: Austin held before the AAS annual meeting here in Austin. My wife and I were a little underwhelmed at what we saw. Most of it was activities for children, which I don't have a problem with, but it would have been cool to see more of the "adult" E/PO we could have provided.

What was present: WIRE, Stereo, Chandra, Hubble, McDonald observatory, NRAO, giant MER 3-D panorama of Spirit near Home Plate, and a wheel mockup, SLOOH.com, a couple of others
What was missing: New Horizons, Cassini (!), Mars Science Lander, Mars Reconnaissance orbiter, Messenger, Phoenix, and plenty of others.

I imagine it's driven by what teams create, and how much time they can afford to give, so it's understandable.

More information: http://www.imascientist.org/astrozone

Schedule:
Future AstroZone dates:
St. Louis, MO: June 2008
Pasadena, CA: January 2009
Long Beach, CA: June 2009
Washington, DC: January 2010
Miami, FL: June 2010
Seattle, WA: January 2011
Boston, MA: June 2011
Austin, TX: January 2012
Anchorage, AK: June 2012


Maybe for their next AstroZone we can try to get some exhibit space for www.unmannedspaceflight.com, and show stuff. It was only a 4 hour deal for one afternoon, so lining up UMSF volunteers for that shouldn't be a big deal, should it? Any takers for St. Louis? Here's my dream exhibit for UMSF:

Trifold posterboard with UMSF greatest hits
Poster handout pictures of the best images from www.umsf.com
Laptop running MMB tied to a projector, with kids moving around the panorama and making movies on their own.
Bags with the UMSF logo (I noticed they didn't have anything to carry the loot around. Can get these for ~$1 a bag, minimum order 100 with 1 color)
Volunteers to talk about space exploration missions, where they are, what they've found out, etc. I kinda got the feeling the volunteers were just that, volunteers, not necessarily familiar with the missions. (Not to disparage the volunteers, they did give their time, after all)

I'll be there Monday and Tuesday. I have an abstract in for a poster. Hopefully it's Tuesday rather than Thursday night.

Almost inevitably. Hopefully will have Cassini T41 results in hand from a
couple of weeks prior to the meeting...

The LPSC abstracts are online... and is there ever a lot of juicy stuff!

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2008/pdf/program.pdf

Phil

Thanks for the heads up, Phil!

There is a possibility that I will be able to abandon the baby with her aunt for long enough to attend one day of the meeting, which will be the Monday, which contains MESSENGER results all day, overlapping(!) with Kaguya results in the afternoon. So for those legions of you who will be attending the other days and seeing the neat stuff from Enceladus and Titan and the Moon and Mars and NASA night and elsewhere, and who have been dying for a chance to enjoy worldwide fame via a guest spot on The Planetary Society Weblog, please send me an email!

--Emily

Events conspired to prevent me from attending LPSC this year, and I am experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Thankfully Emily has been able to post some early summaries on her blog. The folks at The Martian Chronicles have promised to post some LPSC highlights, but they haven't yet, as Monday rolls over to Tuesday in Houston time.

If anyone knows of other blogs or sites posting news from LPSC 2008, please post links here. If you are fortunate enough to be attending the conference, please send summaries to Emily, so she can publish them on her blog.

Live blogging from the conference here.

Thanks, Stu. I've been refreshing Emily's blog, Astronomy Cast, and The Martian Chronicles all day and night, watching for updates.
I am a little disappointed that so far no one has summarized any of the MER papers.

I'm at LPSC. And this just in - Kaguya has obtained beautiful images of the interior of Shackleton crater using light reflected off its uppermost rim.

Phil

[quote name='Phil Stooke' date='Mar 12 2008, 01:43 PM' post='110728']
I'm at LPSC.
/quote]

Phil, has somebody been advertising this forum at the conference? I couldn't get in for a while and now I find we have 194 online users. This despite relatively few posts today. What's going on?? Doug???

No idea. Nothin unusual in terms of bandwidth, nothing unusual in terms of visitor numbers, nothing unusual on google analytics. Occasionally a search engine bot will trawl thru and as it works from multiple IP's - it can look like a lot of visitors ( currently 60ish )

I'm one of the authors at The Martian Chronicles; all three of us had travel delays, so we missed monday, but we are at the conference now and blogging as much as possible!

"Phil, has somebody been advertising this forum at the conference?"

Well. I wore the T-shirt.

Phil

Special Correspondent Stooke reporting from LPSC with a hot image tip:

HiRISE image PSP-004847-1745 was taken without the usual 14 to 8 bit compression, so it preserves the full dynamic range of the data. And it shows the floor of Jeanne, one of the pits on the north Arsia flank, illuminated by reflected light. Nice! It's reported in a poster by Cushing et al.

Phil

I enjoyed reading your blogs... they let me know what's going on without making my head hurt.

I don't know if you know that Don Burt has debated his base surge hypothesis here at unmannedspaceflight.com
rather extensively. He varies his posts a little more now so as not to be labeled a "one trick pony".

Seriously, we're happy for his contributions. Not that I can speak for everyone here, but his posts seem to be
welcomed for the knowledge he brings even if many may not agree with all of his conclusions.

This is becoming quite a conference theme - floors of dark hollows seen by reflected light. First Shackleton crater, now Jeanne.

The t-shirt:- we suddenly had 168 visitors at about 2:45 GMT today. Where exactly were you shortly before that?

That's not unusual - there's no traffic over and above the norm - hasn't been since the basalt-bigfoot.

Doug

"The t-shirt:- we suddenly had 168 visitors at about 2:45 GMT today. Where exactly were you shortly before that?"

I think I was dancing on a table at the Outpost about then...

Phil

Nice Poster, Ted and Phil; it made up a bit for the relative dearth of outer planets coverage...

Simon

Thank you. I will post our actual poster when I get back.

Edit: I do have a version to post. There may be some typos still lurking, but this is pretty much it. I will post the images used later.

Click to view attachment

Great poster and excellent blog articles at TPS - much appreciated.

Does anyone have news from the latest Titan SAR presentation? I can't look on most NASA sites from my 'weekend' computer so interesting image crops posted here would be more than welcome.

Got this off of the BBC via Google News (with LOTS of concurrent articles). Dr. Griffin basically stated that US UMSF Mars exploration will flatten out over the next decade, and NASA's emphasis will shift to outer-system missions:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7298608.stm

I sent some stuff about Titan to Emily that should appear on Monday.

I had mixed feelings when I read this. My instant, gut reaction as a lifelong "Mars nut" was "NOOOOOOO!!!" ... but then the more reasonable part of me took over and I began to think "Hmmm, ok... fair enough," because - and I never thought I'd find myself thinking this thought or typing these words - maybe it is time to not focus quite so much on Mars, and strike out a bit for the Farworlds.

It actually makes a lot of sense. MSL will - hopefully - trundle around Mars for several years at the least, so there's no urgent need to send more rovers after it for a while. And with a fleet of orbiters circling Mars - among them the MRO "martian spy-sat", which as we all know here can pick out individual boulders with HiRISE - there's no pressing need for a flagship new orbiter either. Phoenix will "do" the polar environment; MRO wil let us map the surface in amazing detail; who knows how much longer Spirit and Oppy will keep doing their Duracel bunny act... There's actually plenty going on on Mars to keep us, and martian scientists, busy for the forseeable future. If ExoMars makes it to Mars that will further surface studies. As far as NASA is concerned, the next logical Mars mission is a sample return, right? And there's obviously no money for that at the moment... so, amazingly, I find myself agreeing that perhaps it is time to turn our minds towards other bodies and destinations.

I've actually been feeling this way for a while, if I'm honest. Everyone here knows how passinate I am about Mars (just noticed, I joined this Forum <before it even WAS 'this forum'!> four years ago yesterday, so thanks for 4 fantastic years Doug!) but recently I've been feeling a kind of... well, no, not boredom, I wouldn't go that far, but I have definitely been feeling a kind of restlesness, a wanderlust almost. I think, in fact I know, a lot of that is to do with the work of people here - the fantastic images of Io produced by Jason, Ted's stunning portraits of the oft-neglected moons of the outer planets, Juramike's intense studies of Titan's surface, pictures produced by so many other people here during the recent Mercury and Iapetus and Enceladus encounters, and more besides. They've made me feel fascinated by these places all over again, helped wash the martian dust out of my eyes and allowed me to see that there are other wonders Out There worthy of exploration.

So, while part of me, again if I'm honest, feels a pang of guilt for even thinking this, I have to agree that the time is right to not turn our back on Mars, but definitely to sweep our eyes across the bigger picture and embrace the Farworlds. The fractured ice plains of Europa calls to us (not you Jason, I know!) as does the sulphurous landscape of Io and the bizarre, alien-yet-familiar surface of Titan. The moons of Uranus and Neptune deserve further study, and Pluto is now just years away from being seen as a real world for the first time.

Bring it on, I say!

Michael Griffin made clear that this was not an elimination of the Mars program, burt simply a return to baseline. He made clear that MSL is a flagship-class mission, and given NASA's limited budget, keeping Mars funding at this level means that no other targets will get flagships. In other words' while we might prefer a "both and" approach, it simply isn't possible. He also made clear that Mars exploration would continue, just not at its present, mission every two years plus a flagship level.

Ted

Ted - I look forward to your Monday bulletin at TPS.

Stu - Thanks for sharing your reflections on the matter of where to explore next. Once again I and I'm sure many others will recognise the cross-tides of mental dialogue you put into words so well. For me at least you strike exactly the right note, and one point you make particularly resonates: there are places out there that will grip our fascination more and more the closer we look at them. This has already started - it's too late to turn back!

I hope they would consider a contingency plan to clone MSL if - perish the thought - anything goes wrong with the mission. That robotic arm would be of enormous help at a site like Victoria.

I concur Stu, but I've to say that the statement is even easier when one know that we're a little bit over 2 months away from a mars landing

Stu, I guess, Steve S does NOT concur :http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=27330

I'd be amazed if he did! It's his livelyhood, after all, and the guy deserves a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted medal for all he's achieved. Along with all the MER team he's done nothing less than give us a New Mars. I was just saying that I could see the other side of the argument, that's all.

Mars calls out to me like no other place in the solar system, always has, always will. And the thought of exploring it less, of having the budget that allows us to send rovers and landers there cut is not something that makes me want to moonwalk, believe me. But I'm starting to believe, reluctantly, that after MSL and MRO we won't be able to do an awful lot more with rovers and orbiters. We need people there, geologists who will be able to walk around, pick up rocks in their gauntlet-covered hands, and know whether or not to bring them back to the hab for a closer look or toss them to the ground again. We need Dave Scotts, Jack Schmidts and Steve Squyres' on Mars, following their gut instincts, hopping towards rocks that, for some reason, stood out from the rest and caught their eye. We need people there who will get up each morning, pull on a red-stained spacesuit and head out into another chilly martian dawn determined to solve at least one mystery before walking wearily home again. But that's not on the horizon, and I fear I may not live to see it after all these years of waiting. Of course, if Phoenix finds something... interesting... then it'll be time to scrunch up existing plans and budgets and yee-ha, Mars will be the new frontier. We'll see.

So, here we are. I feel like we've climbed to the top of a very steep hill, all of us here, and now, having spent a wonderfully enjoyable afternoon sitting on the top, drinking in the view, following the curves of the valleys and hills below and around us, filling our cameras' memory cards with 1000s of images, we are feeling satisfied that we know this place pretty well and are ready to go climb some of the other hills in the distance. Doesn't make this hill any less interesting, doesn't mean we're bored with it, but the light is fading, we've only so much food and water to go around, and we feel we have to move on.

Of course, we could always go home, and clomp up this same hill again, with an even better camera with an even bigger memory card and a bagful of fancy lenses...

...but those hills over there would have great views too, wouldn't they..?

...and somebody like you that stretch the inspiration even further...
You know, at 54 I still believe I'll see men on Mars. I watched Apollo 13 on TV last night and I remember so well how it was "live" at this time. I had a little radio I listened hours after hours and now, I watch this that, even if it doesn't fully match the reality, still remind me how it really was. I can't believe I'll not see men on Mars.
Nevertheless you point out something very important there : and if Phoenix finds...???
I don't only think of Phoenix. Ground trust has been so different to what we first thought it will be (except may be Meridianii?) so, I still believe that UMSF to Mars has to pave the way to humans. As you point out, If we find something, $€£ will follow to set up a manned Mars mission. So let's continue explore, yes, but I also agree that Solar System exploration would have to go first as a priority but I'd rather prefer we find "something" first on Mars than on Europa since it'll be much easier to get to the red planet.

..." But I'm starting to believe, reluctantly, that after MSL and MRO we won't be able to do an awful lot more with rovers and orbiters. "...

Actually, we can. But a lot of the best science will be from repeating things we've already done, but much better. It took elegant cheap image design to get ANY imaging system on Mars Observer, which reflew as MGS's Mars Orbiter Camera 2. The prevailing feeling in the late 80's was "We've imaged Mars. Enough Already".

Boggle at HiRise images and repeat "We've already imaged Mars".... and giggle.

MGS gave us a first look at global magnetic field residuals. We're accumulating global gravity maps from standard spacecraft tracking. Not good enough. We need a "Grace" type mission with dual spacecraft in low polar orbit, as low as possible, possibly with drag compensating systems and a generous 1-year supply of fuel. We NEED to get really high resolution and high signal-to-noise gravity (and magnetometry .... should be flown on the same mission) data for the entire planet.

Oddyssey's gotten global elemental abundance maps with it's gamma spectrometer. We probably need to fly an array of gamma spectrometers to Mars on a dedicated mission to remap global elemental abundances. Large, collimated detectors in a 10 x 10 gamma detector array and getting data from low orbit could provide a follow-on map with perhaps 20 times the resolution of Mars Odyssey's data, permitting real geology with it. Current resolution of most elemental abundance maps is sub-useful. It'd be like going from the COBE maps of the microwave glow to the WMap images... soon (we hope) to be followed by Planck images.

We need to fly dedicated multi-wavelength-multi-polarization side-looking radar...

The list goes on...

But the things we can learn from missions like these cover one type of research modality per mission, with a 10x 100x or 1000x improvement in what you can learn from that sort of data.

Returned samples, 0.1 cc samples of different "soils", similiar sized chips from a diverse collection of sedimentary rocks of various ages, samples of heavily weathered friable igneous rocks...

We'll learn 1,000,000 times more than we know now about the history of the martian environment, rock weathering, soil formation, salt transport and depositions.... all the things we can't learn from the hard, tenaceouis IMPACT-SURVIVING meteorites from Mars we now have.

We're almost certainly in a "barely have a clue" stage with a lot of this understandling. We "didn't have a clue" about the real nature of the lunar regolith from the Surveyors and Luna landers. We just didn't understand that impact gardening of regolith led to formation of "agglutinates"... glass spatters gluing together rock and mineral grains, with mature regoliths ending up with a "steady state" particle size distribution, agglutinates building up as fast as they were destroyed, forming the bulk of the soil. They tried to estimate soil particle size distribution from Surveyor images. They were way off.

I think we're at the same point with martian soils, particularly regarding chemistry. Phoenix's wet lab tests will help greatly, but we just plain NEED sample return.

I'll stop this rambling rant here.. but I think I've made my points. 1.) We can do a lot more from orbit and with rovers. 2.) One GOOD sample return mission will give us 1000+ times the science (and it will be essentially NEW science) for the money.

All excellent points, too The point I was trying to make was that we could do a lot more from orbit and with rovers IF the budget continued to grow and we were able to throw money at Mars wothout constraint. But it clearly won't, and we clearly can't. No missions to meet your rerquirements are being talked about realistically, especially not a sample return mission. At this point they're too expensive. I'd hate to see us just sending budget missions to Mars every launch window just for the sake of it; I'd rather see us "save up" and send something significant that would answer some Big Questions. A sample mission is what we all want, yup, it's surely the Holy Grail of Mars missions at the moment...but it seems so far in the future that we'll need to jump in Marty McFly's Delorean to see it...

And Climber: I'm just, I think, being realistic, sadly, if only because of the politics. Not a subject to discuss in depth here, I know, but politically no-one is interested, are they? And there will, inevitably, be delays and disappointments, trials and tragedies once Ares and Orion start flying, which will push back the date of the first manned Mars expedition further. So, unless something happens to trigger another "Space Race", this time to Mars, I think we're looking at 2040 for a footprint on Mars. I'll be 75. Now, I don't know about you, but I want to watch that historic event when I'm still able to appreciate it, in the company of others who do too; not fighting for the remote in a care home while others want to watch re-runs of TERMINATOR 9 or ROCKY 15 on the Classic Movies channel...

Oh 75 isn't that bad these days -- speaking as someone looking at turning 50 in a few months -- but I think it's the LAST age you can say that for. Things seem to fall apart fast after 75. But as far as being able to appreciate a Mars landing, 75 ought to be fine. I'll be 82 in 2040, and -- given another few decades of improvement in health case -- maybe even 82 won't be TOO bad.

By the way, I retired from Microsoft this month. That ought to make me feel old already, but somehow it doesn't. :-)

--Greg

Ted Stryk's Titan session notes have now been posted on The Planetary Society blog as promised. Good stuff, but unfortunately not including the presentation on the latest side-swapping SAR swath. Until that appears I think I'll just lock myself in my bedroom and start counting up to a million . . .

I did catch a bit of that actually and had several related conversations early in the week, but there wasn't anything very firm. The data is in and looks very promising, but the analysis is too preliminary to draw any conclusions. The good thing that can be said so far is that nothing seems to be ruled out, and the idea of a recently active Hotei Arcus looks more promising than ever (not sure exactly what that means - my ability to interpret radar is quite crude).

Is there a better forum or topic to have the whole manned vs. unmanned debate? I'd love to find out what the rebuttals are to the things that seem obvious to me (and I'm sure many here have those rebuttals) but it's not really related to LPSC. "Policy and strategy" looks like the best match; then again, this is UNmannedspaceflight.com ...?

Humph? Adjudication, please!

I think the conversation has shifted away. I thought about a moderator warning here, but it there relevance in that a major subject of debate at the conference is whether we should be primarily focused on Mars, with sample returns and an eventual manned landing, or whether it should be one element of the program which also seeks to explore the solar system as a whole. However, the "I will be 274 years old when we land!" type stuff needs to stop. Consider this a warning.

Aah, thanks very much for that. Hotei is exciting for sure, but my main focus is still the Huygens landing site. Anyhow, sulk over. I'll wait for the release which will surely come as soon as they are completely happy with the product.

Regarding the timing of manned mars missions, it is not all about politics; rather, orbital mechanics matter too. Not all launch opportunities all the same (from a delta-v point of view, which translates exponentially into cost). For example, 2003 was a very good year, at least if we limit ourselves to direct Earth-to-Mars orbits (e.g. MERs could not have used a Delta II in 2005). Next good launch window in 2018-2020 time period, which is the current target for MSR. The one afterward is 2033-2035, which I guess is when NASA is aiming for a manned mission. IIRC, If we miss this period, then we have to wait until 2048-2050.

Now, THAT's a fascinating little tidbit. I can't imagine how they'd infer that either unless there is some sort of change evident between obs...

With respect, I hardly think there's been a "debate" here about manned vs unmanned spaceflight on this thread; I know the rules, and only referred to the potential for manned missions in comparison to what can be achieved with rovers and landers in a very limited context, i.e. the long term consequences of these budget proposals discussed at LPSC, and so consider raising that subject to be wholly appropriate.

As for the "age when we land on Mars" - a flippant and slightly off-topic comment, true, but I'm sure everyone here has made that mental calculation everytime something happens to unmanned Mars exploration budgets and timelines. Please don't forget some of us don't have a technical background, and feel like dogs trying to read "War and Peace" in Greek when the tech discussions start, and need to find a more emotional and human angle to a story, which can make us stray slightly OT. But ok, warning heeded, and I apologise for the break in transmission. We now return to our scheduled programmes.

" I'd hate to see us just sending budget missions to Mars every launch window just for the sake of it; I'd rather see us "save up" and send something significant that would answer some Big Questions."

Perhaps the mission<s> that could most answer some "big questions" without being flagship scale is network science. Always a bridesmaid, but never a bride, it's always everybody's <maybe not quite> second choice for the next Mars Mission. It's what Pathfinder was the pathfinder FOR till it was forgotten before Pathfinder even flew!.

My brain hurts...

It's true - Pathfinder was the prototype for MESUR (Mars Environmental Survey, I think) which would be a network of a dozen or so cheap landers. The network got cancelled, the prototype made it out

A Netlander type project is where I think ESA should be going instead of ExoMars imho.

Doug

I agree on this Doug. We lack of "samples". We've already forget that in 1999 we've lost not only MPL, but also the 2 DPS2 probes : 3 landers at once.
I agree that, because of budget, we've got to make choices and go to outer planets but, instead of flying Flagship and "normal" missions to Mars less often, I'd rather go for a regular survey using relatively cheap probes on a regular basis and wide spreaded on the planet.

Yes, but how do you make a network mission sexy? That's the real question.

What about a lander network paired with an impactor? That could make it attractive enough that media interest could be drummed up. Hmmm... Maybe something like this: Send a seismic lander network to Mars, followed by a rover. The cruise stage for the rover is designed to be "smart" enough to target the center of the lander network after dropping the rover. The MER cruise stage weighed 1,000 kg. The MSL cruise stage will probably be slightly larger. It might not make a significant crater, but I bet it'll make a nice THUMP for a seismic network to use. The negative would be that the landers would have to be fairly close together, limiting the amount of detailed seismic information you could get. But I bet that given the data set, scientists could do some amazing stuff. Look at helioseismology...We can tell what's happening on the other side of the sun based on the waves we see on this side.

Well, according to a poster at the Tuesday session, they've crammed the NetLander science package into the lander for ExoMars... I still wonder about their mass margins...

Simon

I think that a tremendous amount of science could be done by pairing the netlander payload with Pathfinder-sized rovers for site exploration. With technological advances over the 15 years since the Pathfinder mission, the rover could be respectable. Not MER-class by any means. We have so little ground truth about Mars that even exploring the 100 m around the lander would be useful. And this would be in addition to the primary mission, would would be the long-lived network science station.