https://youtube/watch?v=cbASq3FMf70 The Lesson of the Rosetta Comet Mission Was Not Learned, Which Suggests that It Will Likely Be Repeated for Europa Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman is the author of a very popular and educational recent text by the title of Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman details in this text, among other things, how the public can know when to trust expert judgment. None of his criteria bode well for the space sciences (see attached quotes), but the one Id like to focus on here is in regards to the nature of lessons learned (or not) ... Whether professionals have a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends essentially on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as on sufficient opportunity to practice. Its within this context that I find curious the non-results of a Google search on the question: Q: why didnt rosetta philae connect? The search appears to suggest that few, if any, are asking the question. It seems that the drama of the mission has apparently distracted everybody from the fact that Philae was only designed to connect to a material with the compressive strength of solid ice. In other words, even if the harpoon and thruster had worked as designed -- circumstances which the mission managers presumably had no control over -- Philae would likely have failed to connect regardless since it was assumed, at the time of planning, that the textbook theory about comets was correct. This lesson was not learned. We need only look to the ongoing discussion of the Europa mission to observe it. Although we cannot rule out that things will indeed be learned from any mission at all to Europa, the fact is that we can already observe that mission planners are designing that mission on the basis of an assumption that the textbook theory for Europa is correct. Alternative ideas about the causes for what we see there are being ignored. The images attached to this article detail this unfolding new drama, which will in certain regards resemble the last drama. We will go to Europa with the assumption that the surface grooves we observe there are ice fractures, and that Europas emissions are the result of ice geysers. Thats despite the fact that these grooves more-often-than-not do not interact with one another; despite their linear, parallel forms in other spots; and despite the fact that these fractures in yet other places extend hundreds of miles in perfect cycloids -- none of which are characteristics typically associated with fracturing ice. Consider what happened when Rosettas Philae was designed with only the textbook theory in mind: That mission was designed before the first close-up images of a cometary nucleus were returned by a probe (Giotto). The Rosetta mission planners therefore were operating under the assumption that the surface had an ice-based surface. Had the mission planners seen those Giotto Halley images prior to designing the Rosetta mission, one has to imagine they would have equipped the Philae with a means of digging into material with a compressive strength far greater than simply solid ice. In the case of Europa, we have plenty of close-up shots of Europa right now, so what is the excuse for refusing to consider the alternatives? These features clearly look, as the Thunderbolts Group [thunderbolts.info] has suggested, like they have been imposed upon the surface from above. And as Ive detailed in my electric discharge machining graphic, there are by now a dozen planetary sciences anomalies which can be resolved with a from-above electrical interpretation -- Europa being one of them ... https://plus.google/108466508041843226480/posts/5Bpk1oRbEec Chances are that theres little that can be done to alter the trajectory of the Europa mission at this point. The mistakes of this mission are probably already baked into the plans. But, what we can do is make sure that these mission planners know we are watching, and at a time when important decisions are being made. Please take a few moments to attach this post to any Europa press release you might run into. What we expect with a mission to Europa is that mission planners will simply ask the question: Q: Are the features of Europa the result of electric discharge machining? #rosettamission #europa #electricuniverse #cometlanding #byebyebigbang https://plus.google/app/basic/stream/z13gtdoz4xmjsf1vq22ce5iges2bgts04
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 01:12:29 +0000