Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V13_6/V13_696.TXT

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Subject: SPACE Digest V13 #696

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 13 : Issue 696

Today's Topics:
             Re: Crary's Quick Debunkings
           The Space Station Nobody Wanted
              Re: Microgravity?
         Re: Moonbase movie *Plymouth* to air Sunday?
              Re: Microgravity?
       Re: INFO: More on Hoagland's Mars - ParaNet File
               Re: More on Freedom Vote
             Olympus services interrupted

Administrivia:

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----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 4 Jun 91 20:12:53 GMT
From: agate!headcrash.Berkeley.EDU![e-mail]  (George William Herbert)
Subject: Re: Crary's Quick Debunkings


    When it comes to science interacting with socety as a whole, and
some of the fringes in particular, very seldomly will things go in a rational
or sensible manner.  The continuing vigor of Hoagland's theories is one
example of this.  What follows is a somewhat personal explanation of why,
in my opinion, it's happening.  It is a long story, mostly because it was
a long incident that started all of this.  But, if you're really curious
about why Hoagland's theories persist, read on.  You'll find it both
enlightening and scary.

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Daniel Fischer) writes:
>Do you have a reference for these OTHER photos? Have they been published
>somewhere? To my knowledge (based mainly on an infamous paper in APPLIED
>OPTICS in 1988) there are only the two well-publicised VIKING photographs
>that have high enough resolution, and there's nothing with a resolution
>anywhere near that from other dates. And there is the photoclinometric
>analysis by Carlotto (in the aforementioned paper) that demonstrated
>convincingly that the actual topographic relief of the feature does indeed
>resemble a face, and that the visual impression given in the original
>VIKING frames reproduces the actual surface shape pretty well - the usual
>debunking of the thing that it is 'a play of light & shade' is incorrect!!!
>
>So the thing is there, and one should do some actual physical studies with it:
>how likely is it that martian erosion forces create a thing that looks like a
>face? (I presume, it *is* likely, but why doesn't someone with a background
>in such stuff do some actual science here?) ONLY THIS WAY can we stop Mr.
>Hoaxland (pun intended) from spreading his stories and his fans from flooding
>the networks with his latest crap! Outdated debunking ('light & shade') can do
>only harm, now that the scientific investigation of the feature has come so
>far as it has come - the same thinking has discredited scientific UFOlogy in
>the past when too little attention was paid to the actual physical stimuli
>that were causing many of the UFO reports, stimuli from THIS world, of course.

    Mr. Fischer has several totally valid points: The other photos have not
been publicized, the NASA photo-interpretation studies that show Carlotto's
topographic data to be erronious were never publicized beyond a NASA report
 and that the only way we can stop Hoagland is to put the real studies out
 in the public eye.

    In late 1987, the UC Berkeley SPACE society invited Mr. Hoagland and
several NASA and Berkeley astronomers/planetary scientists to hold a debate
on the subject of his claims.  The resulting (very interesting to watch)
discussion shed quite a bit of light on why Hoagland (a fairly intelligent and
reasonable person) and his ideas about these formations keep going.

    To summarize Hoagland, he said what he'd published before in his book
and various other articles... sci.space readers are probably overly familliar
by now with his claims.  He went into some detail about the process that he'd
used to determine some of the relationships, which later was a point of debate
that he conceded to some degree.
    The planetary scientists that followed muffed their presentation in
a particularly painful way; being somewhat of a skeptic, I was hoping for some
real conclusive data showing Hoagland's claims to be innacurate.  What we
saw, instead, was a long diatribe against pseudo-science.  From the face of
it (pun intended), Hoagland won the debate on scoring actual 'this is data'
points.

    The dinner/drinks at a Pizza Restaraunt afterwards were very, very
telling.  Hoagland had to leave, but a significant portion of the audience
and the scientists joined in the following discussion.

    Very quickly, the point was brought up (I forget who was responsible;
I seem to recall it's having been Frank Crary, but memory is fallible) that
the scientists hadn't presented any negative data.  There was quick agreement
among the scientists that it indeed existed; the second-angle photos were
discussed, someone from NASA Ames who had worked with the Viking data
commented that there were full Image-Enhancement studies of all the involved
photos, and that there had been a topographic projection made from all the
combined data.  It seemed common knowledge among them that this data
showing Hoagland to be incorrect was complete and well-documented.
    I was horrified; I'd never heard of these other studies at all, and
I'd been following space science fairly actively for a long time.  When I
brought this lack of publicity of the negative studies up, the scientists
agreed.  They further protested that it's incredibly difficult to get a
negative-results scientific study published, which was why nobody else had
seen them.

    What seemed incredible to me was that they did not connect the lack
of serious, scientific published debunkings and the continuing popularity of
Hoagland's work.  What seemed obvious to me was simply passing over their
heads; that they were going to keep losing people until someone published the
disproving studies.
    There was an attitude problem in the scientists there, and as far as
I can tell among the planetary science program as a whole.  They knew that
Hoagland was wrong; they'd done the studies.  But since they knew he was wrong,
they were unwilling to treat him seriously enough to write an article
showing that he was wrong, and they were tired enough of answering questions
about his work that they were resorting to hiding in a shell and accusing him
of 'Pseudoscience'.  They completely missed the fact that the public didn't
have access to or knowledge of their studies.
    Nor did Hoagland.  During the debate, some of the studies were brought
up at times to poke holes in some of Hoagland's arguements.  He had never heard
about them either.  Nor did he seem inclined to take it on faith that they
existed; he after all had done real image-processing work on 'his' photo,
and an un-backed-up claim that it was wrong didn't have a whole lot of
convincing power.

    In the years since, I've seen a good deal of the 'other' photos,
some of the topographic work that NASA did, etc.  I do believe that it's
suffecient evidence to say with some authority that Hoagland is wrong
about the shape of 'the Face'.  But these didn't come easily, and I never
was able (though some of it was due to lack of time) to get complete copies
of all the reports, or even report numbers from some that I borrowed from
people and read (for which I am now kicking myself).  Nor, I suspect, has
Mr. Hoagland been shown any of this.

    There isn't a whole lot more to say.  Planetary Science has shot itself
in the foot by never publishing one good debunking.  There have been some
half-hearted ones, but they didn't come off better than Hoagland's work does.
If the face on Mars is to be exorcised forever, some planetary scientists
are going to have to wake up and see that they helped create it.


-george william herbert
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 4 Jun 91 12:15:03 PDT
From: [e-mail]
X-Vmsmail-To: UTADNX::UTSPAN::AMES::"[e-mail]"
Subject: The Space Station Nobody Wanted


People who say that any space station is better than nothing ignore the
fact that everything NASA does also has a fair amount of PR value.  The
PR value of Fred would be even more negative than that of the Shuttle or
of the HST.  But at least the Shuttle and the HST do have a purpose,
whereas Fred does not.

One person even complained, "While everyone was busy yelling about how
the space station would not meet their particular needs,  it lost the
support it needed to come into being."  What a colossal waste to spend
so much money on something nobody will use!  Why did it need to come
into being anyway, just to be "mankind's first step toward the stars"
or some other such quasi-religious reason?  If you ask me, even if
this were a worthy goal, Fred would be a step in the wrong direction.

_____________
Dale M. Greer, whose opinions are not to be confused with those of the
Center for Space Sciences, U.T. at Dallas, UTSPAN::UTADNX::UTDSSA::GREER
"What good fortune for those in power that people do not think." - A. Hitler

------------------------------

Date: 4 Jun 91 20:40:48 GMT
From: orca!bambam![e-mail]  (Bob Pendleton)
Subject: Re: Microgravity?

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Herman Rubin) writes:
> In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Bob Pendleton) writes:

> > Not a problem. You put the experiment in a high density streamlined
> > container and you DROP it 710 meters. During the fall you get
> > microgravity. At the end you get macrogravity. :-)

> N people also sent me this by email.

Yeah, that's happend to me to. The fun part is comparing the answers,
how many of them wre wrong?

> However, is this better than taking to
> a substantial height (we do have ways to get drops of well over 7000 meters)
> and it is not necessary to get quite as much macrogravity at the end?

The trouble is to provide microgravity in all directions. Drop from an
airplane and the package will decelerate along the line of flight,
not to mention the effect of winds. But, yeah people do "drop" things
from rockets and such. A sounding rocket that is in a free trajectory
above the atmosphere is a great way to get microgravity.

A shaft has no side winds, it might even be evacuated. And an elevator
is a much cheaper way of getting altitude than is an airplane or a
rocket. For short duration work a deep shaft is cheaper.

--
              Bob Pendleton, speaking only for myself.
   [e-mail] or decwrl!esunix!bpendlet or hellgate!esunix!bpendlet

                         Tools, not rules.

------------------------------

Date: 5 Jun 91 01:33:47 GMT
From: agate!lightning.Berkeley.EDU![e-mail]  (Frank Crary)
Subject: Re: Moonbase movie *Plymouth* to air Sunday?

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Gary Coffman) writes:
>...What I was thinking
>about was the fact that, inside a base, you would still have Earth normal
>inertia while facing only 1/6 G resistance. Your normal gait under those
>conditions should resemble that of an ice skater to some degree. You
>would tend to take long gliding steps and be very conscious of quick
>stops. That's very difficult to simulate on film for an entire cast.

I would think it would be almost impossible. There is no actual data
on how people would walk under these conditions. The Apollo LM was too
small to do any real walking in. The problem you refer to might not ever
exist for slower motions (e.g. a reasonably slow pace.) Also, the necessary
changes in gait might not be very visable (unless you know what to look for.)
It is quite possible that this would be something one had to adjust to, or
concentrate on, but which did not really involve many changes in actual motions

                       Frank Crary

------------------------------

Date: 5 Jun 91 05:14:42 GMT
From: cis.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu![e-mail]  (Bryan J Abshier)
Subject: Re: Microgravity?


     A good way to reduce the redundancy we see all the time in threads
such as this is to use the "m" command in rn.  This marks the message as
unread so you can reread and reply to it after you have read all of the
other messages in the newsgroup.  (Sorry to waste bandwidth on this.)


--

| Bryan J. Abshier                   | "Violence never settles anything."   |
| [e-mail] |      --  Genghis Khan                |

------------------------------

Date: 5 Jun 91 01:35:03 GMT
From: cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rphroy!cfctech!ttardis![e-mail]  (Mike O'Connor)
Subject: Re: INFO: More on Hoagland's Mars - ParaNet File

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Louis A. Mamakos) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Don Allen) writes:
>>
>>The following text comes from the ParaNet UFO echo.

What is ParaNet?  How does one go about accessing it?



                    ...Mike

Phone:            TTARDIS Public Access Unix -- [phone]
Internet:        [e-mail]
UUCP ("domain"):    [e-mail]
UUCP (bang):        ...!uunet!sharkey!cfctech!ttardis!mjo

------------------------------

Date: 5 Jun 91 05:16:17 GMT
From: prism![e-mail]  (Matthew DeLuca)
Subject: Re: More on Freedom Vote

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Matthew DeLuca) writes...
>>As for the production line bit, the production line was closed when
>>Challenger blew up, and yet we have Endeavour.  I'll believe you when
>>they destroy the tooling used in making shuttles.

[I meant to say before Challenger blew up, not when.]

>Yup.  Of course, now that they've assembled Endeavor, they no longer have the
>stock of spare parts they did before Challenger blew up.

Actually, I understand that the spare part situation is better now than it
was before; they were cannibalizing parts from one shuttle (usually Columbia)
to keep the others flying; this has been rectified.
--
Matthew DeLuca
Georgia Institute of Technology      "I'd hire the Dorsai, if I knew their
Office of Information Technology      P.O. box."  - Zebadiah Carter,
Internet: [e-mail]    _The Number of the Beast_

------------------------------

Date: 5 Jun 91 03:28:20 GMT
From: cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!unix.cis.pitt.edu!pitt!nss![e-mail]  (Bev Freed)
Subject: Olympus services interrupted

31 May 1991

ESA RELEASE #16

                     OLYMPUS SERVICES INTERRUPTED

After nearly 2 years of successful operations Olympus, an advanced
telecommunications satellite of the European Space Agency, had to
interrupt its experimental services on 29 May 1991 at 03.21 GMT due
to difficulties encountered with the attitude control of the
satellite.  The attempts to return the satellite back to normal mode
have not been successful for the time being and it is possible that
a significant delay will occur before operations can be resumed.

An independent Enquiry Boar4d will be set up to investigate the
incident, assess the technical difficulty and recommend the best
course of action.

Olympus is a multi-purpose telecommunications satellite featuring
direct TV broadcasting, distance learning, various business networks
and several other experimental payloads.  It was launched on 12 July
1989 and is operated from the control center in Fucino, Italy.



--- Opus-CBCS 1.20.16
 * Origin: NSS BBS - Ad Astra! [phone] *HST* (1:129/104.0)
--
Bev Freed - via FidoNet node 1:129/104
UUCP: ...!pitt!nss!freed
INTERNET: [e-mail]

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V13 #696
*******************