Told you so!

Looks like I was right about the problem with the TEGA ovens... To quote the NASA website (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080625.html)

"When doors for a second TEGA oven were commanded open last week, the doors opened only partway. Later, the team determined that mechanical interference may prevent doors on that oven and three others from opening fully. The remaining three ovens are expected to have one door that opens fully and one that opens partially, as was the case with the first oven used."

Oops... Now they are in extreme difficulty - sure they still have got the "Wet Lab" and the microscope, but Phoenix's ability to chemically analyse the soil and detect water - the prime reasons for the mission has now halved!

What caused this? Well they say that the oven doors were damaged through the use of the "vibrator" used to get the clumpy soil into the first oven that caused the problem

"engineers believe the use of a motor to create the vibration may also have caused a short circuit in wiring near that oven".

This is of course an electrical problem - hence the use of the word "also" - there is a "mechanical interference" problem according to the first statement - I think that is, at least partially, the fact that the soil is sticking to the doors!

So now there are only three ovens left out of the original 8 - and only one has been used. I still think they should try using the robotic arm to rip the doors open - what have they got to loose?

Or perhaps they have already tried that - have a look at the photo at the start of this blog...

Does it look to you like they are trying to open the oven door with the scoop? I does to me!

Despite the NASA website saying they are showing the "raw images" I think they are being selective about the ones they put up there. The picture above wasn't in the general archive (or at least I couldn't find it).

Potatoes - a Fable

In the early days of last century a strange blight fell upon the remote town of Ballyspudulike.

Things were quiet there, and had been for a long time. The town was surrounded by bogs, but somehow there was a few hundred acres of good land ideal for the production of potatoes, and as a result the entire population of 800 ordinary souls had become very dependent upon the potato as a staple part of their diet. There were four farms around the town which was famous for the left-handed widgets it made and sold across the whole of the country. Mind you there wasn't a huge demand for left-handed widgets so the town wasn't that wealthy but it kept the men as busy as they wanted to be with money in their pockets and potatoes on the table.

The farmers however were less than content. It was hard work digging up the potatoes and taking the to market everyday so they were very interested in the proposition put to them by a stranger, Mr Oliphant by name, who had bowled into town one day.

"I'll buy your spuds from you at a guaranteed price, and I'll guarantee to buy all your spuds, and take them to market for you" he told them and the four of them signed up instantly. Soon Oliphant's Potato Emporium Company was up and running. Everyone was happy for a couple of years - Mr Oliphant set up a warehouse where he stored the excess spuds when the crop exceeded demand and kept the potatoes in good condition all year round - so there was never a time when the people of Ballyspudulike had to go without potatoes, and as a result they ate more and more of them.

The men of the town became healthier and produced more left-handed widgets and more children. The farmers responded by ploughing more land and planting more fields of potatoes. Ballyspudulike had never been so wealthy.

Then things started to go wrong. There was talk of building a factory to make more left-handed widgets and it was going to bring people in from the neighbouring towns to work there, and worse than that there were times when the Oliphant's Potato Emporium Co's warehouse almost ran out of potatoes because of the town's expanding population and waistlines.

Mr Oliphant could see that if the population of Ballyspudulike kept on growing there would be a crisis. But Mr Oliphant was a shrewd business man. He knew that a crisis meant an opportunity and saw the time was right to make some real money.

Over night he doubled the price of the potatoes he had in his almost full warehouse. At first the farmers complained, but when he pointed out that he would pay them the new price for their potatoes and would be passing on the agreed percentage of all future profits to them they soon settled down.

The people of Ballyspudulike on the other hand were furious, but they still had to buy the potatoes as they still needed to eat.

The town council met and discussed the problem.

They talked about not buying potatoes from Oliphant's Potato Emporium Co., but the farmers weren't interested in selling to them direct and going back to the hard graft of shipping the potatoes to town every day.

They talked about ploughing up some more land and growing extra potatoes for themselves, but no one could see the point as they had a problem today, not next year when the potatoes would be ready, and anyway the unploughed land was pretty...

"I know what," said the town mayor, "lets show Oliphant's Potato Emporium Company that we can live without potatoes, lets start making more bread!". It was unanimously agreed and the bakers were told to double the amount of bread made every day.

Sure enough people stopped buying so many potatoes, and started eating a lot of bread.

A month later the chickens died... of hunger, the baker had bought the corn they ate to make the bread. Because the chickens were dead there were no eggs so there were many rumbling tummies and people bought more bread and potatoes to compensate. The response from Oliphant was to put up the price of potatoes even more as demand was increasing.

The council then decided that people were eating so many potatoes because they were working too hard and set limits on the number of left-handed widgets that could be made. The town's economy started to collapse and it wasn't long before the population of the town had halved.

Oliphant's Potato Emporium Co was only selling half as many potatoes as before, but at twice the price, so Mr Oliphant wasn't worried. He was hated in the town, but he didn't care, he was now a very rich man in deed.

The population of Ballyspudulike continued to plummet.

Then one day the few remaining inhabitants went down to the Oliphant's Potato Emporium Company building to find a notice pinned to the door "Closed - permanently". Mr Oliphant had left town - taking almost all of the people's money with him.

The farmers didn't care, they retired to the South of France.

The few remaining folk had no choice but to leave Ballyspudulike and emigrated to America leaving the town and its fertile fields for ever.

The rest of the country wondered why they couldn't buy a left-handed widget anymore, but otherwise not much more was thought about Ballyspudulike.

As for Mr Oliphant - well what do you think he did next?

Phoenix Oven Doors - Sol 25

The saga with the Oven (TEGA) doors continues.

As can be seen from the image above Phoenix is trying to open the next oven door - and it looks like it is having a problem doing so. The door to Oven 3 is only partially opened - probably as a result of all the soil that remains on the partially open door to Oven 4 - see earlier posts on this one.

What is also interesting is how far the soil has slipped on Oven 4. The image below is the one taken when the problem with the soil on Oven 4 became apparent

I think this soil is like dried mud - stiff and brittle. The water that was present in it when it was dumped on the oven door has all 'evaporated' away now leaving it hard, "dry", and brittle. I think they should get the robotic arm to tap the TESA structure on its side to remove this crud...

The Phoenix team are also having another look at the rock with the hole in it under the lander, this time from a slightly different angle. I still can't see any sublimation on it, but the change in angle doesn't help.

However there is an interesting object on the right of the picture...

Is that something else that has fallen off Phoenix?

Or perhaps it is a seashell

Indian Jones and the Crystal Skull

I went with some Hash buddies to see the movie last night - and loved every minute of it - during the movie - but was left strangely flat afterwards.

Was it because of the incredibly long fight scene in the jungle? Was it because of the annoyingly stupid Mutt character who unlike Indiana revelled in his stupidity? Was it because of the strangeness of seeing a loved character so aged? Is it because I too am older and more cynical?

No - I think that this Indiana Jones film broke the unwritten rule of success that the other 3 movies established – In each of the other three it was the mysteries of the past and the wonder of past civilizations ability to have mastered such power and to achieved so much that was the hidden star of the film that left me, at least, so uplifted…

It is sad that George Lucas broke that rule with the latest/last Indiana Jones film…

Phoenix finds water!

Unsurprisingly...

The soil is as I suspected packed full of ice and a lot of salt. The white stuff is a mixture of mainly salt with a little ice while the red stuff is dust with ice - the ratio varies because first of all the stuff on the surface will be drier because of the sun and low pressure, and secondly, because Phoenix has contaminated the site, turning over the topsoil and adding ice during its landing.

While the little lumps in the "Dodo" trench are definitely ice - because they disappeared, the stuff under the lander probably isn't.

Here is a picture taken by the lander on Sol 6 of a weird rock under the lander.

Is it ice? It looks as if it could be, particularly with those holes... but it isn't. Here is the rock on Sol 19

Spot the difference? No neither can I. Despite being in the sun occasionally (as is shown by the patch of sunlight at the top of the Sol 19 picture) the rock is unchanged. Had it been ice or even icy I would have expected it to have changed as it slowly evaporated away.

So now what?

Well baking some of the icy soil would be a good idea, but I don't think anyone has worked out how to get the stuff into the oven as the soil is “strangely clumpy” and “sticky”.

I am sticking by my ice-cream scoop analogy. The soil is like ice-cream straight from the freezer. Deep frozen ice-cream doesn't look particularly wet, but stick an ice-cream scoop into it and then try to get the ice-cream off the scoop - you can't - why?

Because the scoop being warmer melts a thin layer of ice-cream it is in contact with, and then because the ice-cream is so cold it freezes the melted ice-cream and the metal in the scoop's temperature falls to the same level as the ice-cream and the ice acts as glue. The only way to get the ice-cream of the scoop (on Earth) is to wait for the ambient temperature to beat the ice-cream’s and to warm the scoop to melt the ice glue.

I believe that the surface of the TEGA ovens is warmer that the air and soil temperature - because of the sunshine and possibly because of thermal leakage from the internal workings of the Phoenix.

When the icy soil hits the oven doors and grill it melts and instantly freezes sticking to the metal in the same way as deep frozen ice-cream does to the ice-cream scoop... On Mars it is very very cold, so there is no way the ice-metal glue is going to re-melt as it would on earth, but as the pictures at the start of this blog show, on Mars ice evaporates straight from ice to water vapour without going through the liquid phase – because of the low pressure.

Pi in the Sky

All the loony crop circle fans are pointing to a new crop circle that appeared in Wiltshire as evidence that Aliens are trying to communicate with us.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2144652/Most-complex-...

To read the message in the crop circle you start in the middle and follow the path out. Then walking clockwise you count the length of the first segment which is turns out to be 3 times longer than the shortest segment (the next one). Then you note a decimal point (the dot in the corn) then you find you have to turn again and then walk along a short curved segment representing the next number, 1. Turn again and the next segment is 4 times longer than the previous one so represents the digit 4... and so on. When you get to the outside of the crop circle you find the number is 3.141592654 which surprise surprise is Pi to 10 decimal places

If that is the case we now know 3 things about the creatures that made the circle...

They speak English as they use a "full stop" for the decimal point - something done in English speaking countries on Earth, but for example if they spoke French or German, then they would have used a "comma".

They come from a planet that rotates anticlockwise around its axis (otherwise the circle would have been anticlockwise - just trust me on this one)....

They have 10 fingers - as Pi is represented as a decimal number (it has a nine in it). If they used base 8 then although the value of Pi would be the same there would be no segment longer than 7 units - similarly if they used base 16 for example then the longest segment would by 15 units...

Pi
Base 10 3.141592654
Base 2 11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101
Base 8 3.110375524
Base 16 3.243F6A888

(where F represents a number we represent as 15 and A a number we represent as 10).

So the crop circle makers speak English, come from a planet like Earth (in rotation) and have 10 fingers - I wonder if they also live in a county called Wiltshire!

Friday 13th

Spare Rib and I were joint hares for a Friday 13th run with the GONADs (GOing Nowhere Always Drunk) Hash House Harriers last week. We led a group of enthusiastic hashers around the Cinquintinaire Park area of Brussels for a Hash Run full of blood and horror.

We had a great time with

• a flogging
• a disembowelment
• a murder and
• a stoning.

The run started off normally, but as well as checks we had 4 Murder Scenes along the way.

The first Murder Scene was a flogging to represent all the murdered slaves

Flaming Cocktrix's flogging was at the rather non-pc memorial to Belgium's exploits in the Congo in the Cinquintinaire Park - don't worry it was fake blood.


Then Cl'oysters' disembowelment was performed by a statue of a large dog also in the Park. While I narrated "The Lion and Albert" Spare Rib decorated Cl'oysters with raw mince and fake blood. Why the statue of a dog? Well we couldn't find a statue of a lion!


Yark Sucker's murder was a re-enactment of a real murder committed in London in 1938.


But we added the worms (baby eels which turned out to be very tasty) to add to the whole effect.


Inspector Spare Rib quickly apprehended the guilty party (Blue Willy) and handed out summary justice.


The stoning was by the bells of a demolished church just a few hundred metres from the Park. I told the story of the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches) the Church inspired persecution and murder of (mainly) women throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.


I acted as the "Witch Finder General" and quickly found the witches (Dominicetrix and Pink Panther) in the pack


and after torturing them to gain their confession

we stoned them to death (with wet newspaper).


Everyone had a good time on the run and the party afterwards, hosted by Pink Panther, was fun too (what I remember of it).


Apparently the Friday 13th run is a regular feature with the London H3 where they go around and re-enact murders in the locations they happened.

Sadly that was the only Friday 13th in 2008, but there will be 3 next year.

Mud on face - all round...

A correction to my last blog...

The Oven "Tega" is in fact a house like structure on the flat top of the Phoenix (circled in the picture below).

The schematic diagram which forms the intro picture, copied from the NASA webs shows the position of Oven 4 (the first oven used) so the picture below

is taken from above the oven looking down over the oven doors to the top of the Phoenix. To quote NASA

"The TEGA oven doors are on a surface sloping at about 45 degrees, with the top of the doors near the lower edge of these images. The downhill direction on this part of the instrument appears upwards in the image. The screen-covered opening for the oven intended to analyze this soil sample is between the vertically positioned door at the right end of the series of doors and the partially opened door to the left of that one."

So I retract my comments about the design of the TEGA.

But that soil was incredibly sticky!!!

Referring back to the picture with the soil on the oven doors, it should have fallen away from the viewer into the picture and towards the lens in the middle of the picture - not to the left as I had originally interpreted.

This picture may help to understand what was going on. It shows the digger poised over the oven before "dumping its load".

The TEGA is the dark triangle on the bottom right of the picture and open oven doors are visible and the lens in the centre of the other picture is just visible in the bottom centre of this picture.

As you may know the oven has now received some soil and analysis is now underway as described on Yahoo News

To quote that article "Scientists have been surprised by the clumpiness of the soil at the landing site, which they described as crusty on the surface and looser below." - you mean like it had been baked? I wonder how that happened?

The Nasa site itself says "that the oven might have filled because of the cumulative effects of all the vibrating, or because of changes in the soil's cohesiveness as it sat for days on the top of the screen".

The Daily Telegraph says "The sample, a tiny fraction of a teaspoon, will now undergo its first test, known as a "low temperature bake", in which it will be heated to determine it if contains any ice. Scientists think this is unlikely given that it has been exposed to the Martian sunshine so long."

So one explanation is that the sample was wet and muddy when dropped... and then it dried out.

An alternative explanation which could explain why the sample didn't look like mud would be that the lander is slightly warmer than the surrounding environment. If that is the case then it might explain why the soil is so sticky. The very cold icy mud could melt for a moment on contact with the oven doors and protective mesh and then immediately freeze again as all the available heat was sucked out of the metal just in the same way as ice cream straight from the freezer sticks to a dry ice cream scoop.

After a few days in the dry low pressure Martian atmosphere the ice in the soil sublimated (going straight from solid to vapour like dry ice does on Earth) and having dried out the soil loosens its grip on the mesh and oven doors and falls into the oven. If this is the case, then again this is a bit of a design flaw.

This theory could also explain why the digger arm is now able to sprinkle samples of soil.

If, as I suspect, the whole area was blasted by steam and water as Phoenix landed, the water would freeze on contact with the surface of the surrounding soil but then would slowly sublimate away leaving the dried mud effect of a hard crust with "clumpy bits" underneath.

The stuff the digger scrapes up now is a lot 'drier' (contains less ice) than the stuff it dug up a few days after landing.

This theory will be proved (or otherwise) if the soil scooped from deeper under the surface contains water ice while the surface stuff (and the soil in the oven at the moment) doesn't...

By the way all pictures NASA's not mine (I haven't been to Mars to take them ).

Phoenix

As predicted the Mars lander "Phoenix" should have been named "Turkey".

Lets look at the list of technical cock-ups to date (10th June 2008).

1. The lander has messed up the very site it was sent to examine.

The rockets have blasted their way through the surface soil (and scattering it in all directions) down to a strange layer of white stuff (ice?). The consequences of that are:

1. all the soil in the area is now polluted with exhaust gases and
2. the stuff the lander can scoop up will not necessarily be 'top soil' - so no strata analysis can be usefully performed

2. Since the lander has arrived the two orbiting relay satellites (the "NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter" and "Mars Odyssey") have both spontaneously switched themselves off. These are really important to both the Phoenix mission and the two incredible Mars Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity). On each occasion there was no apparent reason for this shutdown and there was considerable worry back on Earth as to whether each could be switched back on (fortunately both could be). Is this a coincidence or perhaps Phoenix is "shouting" or giving them incorrect commands?

3. The door to the first of the 8 ovens (Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA)) on Phoenix has failed to open completely.

You can see the closed doors of the second and third ovens to the left of the first door. Each oven is about 4 inches long and I guess about 2 inches wide.

Notice also the fine mesh over the oven door opening which was designed to stop large rocks falling into the oven.

By the way these ovens, each of which I believe can only be used once, are vital to the expedition as they are the primary way of analysing the soil - the very reason that Phoenix went to Mars - but the design stinks, as we will see...

4. The commanders can't drive Phoenix's digger directly. They send an instruction to dig via the Martian satellites and then have to wait up to 8 hours until the next satellite pass to see what happened. As a result the first attempt to dig was a fiasco - the people on the ground couldn't find the pile of soil the digger was meant to have dug! You would have thought they would have practised this important manoeuvre on Earth before sending Phoenix all that way!

5. Despite the oven door problem the lander has dumped a shed load of Martian soil on the semi
closed oven door.

And surprise surprise nothing got into the oven!

Now everyone is wishing they hadn't put the ovens on an only slightly inclined surface as there is no way to clean off the resulting pile of dirt.

So that is oven 1 out of commission with nothing learnt. But I wonder if they will be able to open oven 2?

Personally, if I was the mission commander I would use the digger to rip the doors off the defective oven and try to force the soil through the grill, and if that didn't work I wonder if the digger is dexterous enough to knock a hole in the grill? There is no point in pussy footing around with this thing. It is scheduled to be a lump of scrap metal soon anyway.

6. "Martian soil is too clumpy" according to mission control.

Future attempts to scoop up the soil will be preceded by the Phoenix's digger trying to crush the soil - I wonder if 'clumpiness' was caused by either

• being baked by the rockets as it landed or
• as a result in being sprayed in steam and water burnt off by the rockets from those white patches which promptly then froze on contact with the surrounding soil

Either would make it 'clumpy'.

Anyway the design of the oven with its grill and slightly sloping surface shows that the designers were, I guess, expecting a mixture of rock and sand... but what do you get when you have soil and frozen water... frozen mud, which isn't very rocky or sandy, it would be... 'clumpy', and given that Phoenix went to the North Pole with the explicit intention of finding water, perhaps this could have been predicted?

7. Bits are dropping off Phoenix - I wonder if this is part of the mechanism meant to open the oven door?

What is going to go wrong next?

Don't get me wrong. I am very excited about the Mars missions, but this particular mission has had disaster written all over it from the beginning.

Phoenix is what is known in the second hand motor trade as a 'bitsa'. It is made from bits and pieces of other cancelled missions. It wasn't designed, it was just bolted together. It is only expected to last 90 days - I don't think it will see out half that (but do really I hope that I am wrong).

I'm back...having fun!

Hello everyone, I'm back.

Things got pretty difficult for a while and honestly I didn't really want to write about anything.

On top of my mother's death and all the trauma that caused, and the Jag's problems and all the hassle that caused I also managed to hurt my knee gardening the day after my mother's funeral and was in quite a lot of pain for a long time - but finally it is healed and I am running and Hashing again. I went on an excellent Hash Weekend for the Belgium Nash Hash in Mons and had a blast and I went out running with the Blue Moon Hash last night. I was one of the last to finish, but it wasn't a race and it was just good to be back!

I have also moved - my last apartment in Brussels was really getting me down. Being on the ground floor facing the street is no fun in Brussels. I was awoken at all hours by people just walking past my bedroom window chatting. My new apartment is much nicer. It is in a nice area and I am at the back overlooking gardens on the 5th floor. On top of that I've got at least 4 different friends in easy walking distance.

So I will be posting a little more frequently from now on...