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Meandering
Nov. 9th, 2001 10:20 pmWondering if pavlova is really anything like angel-food cake... sitting in my office on a Friday night, partly to edit a paper and partly because there's nothing better to do.
The Mars Society component of our Haughton-Mars Project got a lot of attention in the newly-released documentary on the Discovery Channel -- lots of Bob Zubrin, lots of simulated EVAs in fake spacesuits -- but the NASA component got short shrift. A few passing glances and mentions of the "NASA base camp", that was about it (except for the Carnegie-Mellon guys and John Blitch with their rovers, which are inherently telegenic. Much more so than instrument packages or odd-looking jumbles of boxes and wires.) Very much humans-on-Mars focussed rather than science-on-Mars. Oh, well... NASA HQS can't second-guess us this time, and at least there won't be the crank letters and e-mails (e.g., about aliens among us, or literal perpetual-motion machines) that arrived in March after the RDF program on Channel 4 in the UK. The beauty of X.500... anyone can lookup your work e-mail address.
Mars drilling automation moves along... one company (Honeybee, in NYC) wants to wait until January to put their drill back together, so that trip (to NYC and Boston) will slip again, after it already got postponed once in September. Another drill prototype near Washington, DC (UTD Robotics) will be ready to talk to us in late November. And we discovered that a colleague here has already developed (unbeknownst to us) a drilling work-flow model in support of the 2003 rovers. This will be *very* useful, I think, especially if we can use it to show a 5-day drill duration with automation (vs. 15-days per 2m hole with current 2003-rover-level technology).
On the home front... I should have been in Minneapolis this weekend. That makes me quite grumpy towards Pat... it will be hard not spending the weekend glowering. Or hiding out in my office? (wry grin) I can always go visit the new Coldwater Creek store at Stanford Shopping Mall this weekend and hang out with my friends (at least two of which are suffering from pulled muscles and sore backs now).
But on Wednesday I got a surprise call from a friend I hadn't spoken with in months... that lifted my day, after things had been tense at home and with Nancy. My friend is surfing several breaking waves of change in zir life, which have begun cresting higher (and closer together) since 9/11. I just want to reach out and hug zir... I guess that many folks have re-examined their lives over the past two months.
The Mars Society component of our Haughton-Mars Project got a lot of attention in the newly-released documentary on the Discovery Channel -- lots of Bob Zubrin, lots of simulated EVAs in fake spacesuits -- but the NASA component got short shrift. A few passing glances and mentions of the "NASA base camp", that was about it (except for the Carnegie-Mellon guys and John Blitch with their rovers, which are inherently telegenic. Much more so than instrument packages or odd-looking jumbles of boxes and wires.) Very much humans-on-Mars focussed rather than science-on-Mars. Oh, well... NASA HQS can't second-guess us this time, and at least there won't be the crank letters and e-mails (e.g., about aliens among us, or literal perpetual-motion machines) that arrived in March after the RDF program on Channel 4 in the UK. The beauty of X.500... anyone can lookup your work e-mail address.
Mars drilling automation moves along... one company (Honeybee, in NYC) wants to wait until January to put their drill back together, so that trip (to NYC and Boston) will slip again, after it already got postponed once in September. Another drill prototype near Washington, DC (UTD Robotics) will be ready to talk to us in late November. And we discovered that a colleague here has already developed (unbeknownst to us) a drilling work-flow model in support of the 2003 rovers. This will be *very* useful, I think, especially if we can use it to show a 5-day drill duration with automation (vs. 15-days per 2m hole with current 2003-rover-level technology).
On the home front... I should have been in Minneapolis this weekend. That makes me quite grumpy towards Pat... it will be hard not spending the weekend glowering. Or hiding out in my office? (wry grin) I can always go visit the new Coldwater Creek store at Stanford Shopping Mall this weekend and hang out with my friends (at least two of which are suffering from pulled muscles and sore backs now).
But on Wednesday I got a surprise call from a friend I hadn't spoken with in months... that lifted my day, after things had been tense at home and with Nancy. My friend is surfing several breaking waves of change in zir life, which have begun cresting higher (and closer together) since 9/11. I just want to reach out and hug zir... I guess that many folks have re-examined their lives over the past two months.
