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Lunar Lava Tubes via Clementine
It was once proposed to do an automated search of images from the
Clementine probe for evidence of lunar lava tubes. The argument (by Taylor and Gibbs) was that the usually-cited candidates for lava tubes are the huge, apparently partly collapsed rilles visible from Earth or in Apollo photos and that any tubes at these sites may be too deep to use easily. The thought was that smaller tubes could be just as useful (for radiation and meteoroid protection), more numerous, possibly located near more interesting sites, and easier to access. These smaller tubes might be discernable in some of the 1.9 million Clementine images. Did anything ever come of this? If not, did anyone ever begin a _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light Clementine images? This sounds about right for a small NASA grant or for a volunteer, distributed project among interested space cadets. |
#2
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Lunar Lava Tubes via Clementine
On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, Bill Bogen wrote:
It was once proposed to do an automated search of images from the Clementine probe for evidence of lunar lava tubes. Did anything ever come of this? If not, did anyone ever begin a _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light Clementine images? This sounds about right for a small NASA grant or for a volunteer, distributed project among interested space cadets. Manual search isn't needed. The L5 society Portland Chapter http://www.oregonl5.org got data and image software years ago but couldn't get it running. Legal or technical problems or both. |
#4
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Lunar Lava Tubes via Clementine
William Elliot wrote in message ...
On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, Bill Bogen wrote: It was once proposed to do an automated search of images from the Clementine probe for evidence of lunar lava tubes. Did anything ever come of this? If not, did anyone ever begin a _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light Clementine images? This sounds about right for a small NASA grant or for a volunteer, distributed project among interested space cadets. Manual search isn't needed. The L5 society Portland Chapter http://www.oregonl5.org got data and image software years ago but couldn't get it running. Legal or technical problems or both. Um, then it sounds like a manual search _is_ needed (or some other software method). |
#5
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Lunar Lava Tubes via Clementine
Thomas Billings wrote in message ...
In article , (Bill Bogen) wrote: It was once proposed to do an automated search of images from the Clementine probe for evidence of lunar lava tubes. The argument (by Taylor and Gibbs) was that the usually-cited candidates for lava tubes are the huge, apparently partly collapsed rilles visible from Earth or in Apollo photos and that any tubes at these sites may be too deep to use easily. The thought was that smaller tubes could be just as useful (for radiation and meteoroid protection), more numerous, possibly located near more interesting sites, and easier to access. These smaller tubes might be discernable in some of the 1.9 million Clementine images. Did anything ever come of this? Our research team at Oregon L-5 attempted to start preparing for such a search, back in 1993-4 using some software from a Caltech/JPL project in pattern recognition. The originating software team had used it to search out small volcanic features in the Magellan Radar data, and we thought of using it on Clementine data. We knew it might be marginal, because of the resolution of the Clementine sensors on the lunar surface, but figured it was worth a try. Unfortunately, the software (unnamed, to protect the guilty) turned out to be such an unusable lash-up of previous academic projects that we never found anyone outside of that particular Caltech/JPL team who had gotten it to work, either. We once met someone at a conference who also tried it, and he was awed that we'd once gotten as far as getting a user interface screen! We banged away for about 5 years, on and off, as volunteer teams must. Any idea how many person-hours were consumed? The head of that software project quit Caltech and joined Microsoft in the middle of our efforts. 'Nuff said! If not, did anyone ever begin a _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light Clementine images? We looked at this, and looked at our local support group, and quailed! Why? Isn't the human eye&brain a wonderful pattern recognition device? Maybe I'm being naive here but I'd set up the project this way: 10 people each sitting in front of a PC for about 2 hours a day. Display an image. The person decides whether it is a possible lavatube and flags it with a keystroke. Since the vast bulk of pictures will be rejects, I'd expect an average rate of about 1 sec/image. We'd be done in 9 days. Let's triple that and let each image be seen by 3 people; we'd rank each image by consensus. Let's pay each person $10/hr: labor cost = $5,167. Even adding costs for software to present the images and record flags, project management, etc, this still seems pretty cheap. Oregon L-5 has some experience in NASA grants, doesn't it? Would this be an unreasonable grant proposal? |
#6
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Lunar Lava Tubes via Clementine
(Bill Bogen) writes:
Thomas Billings wrote in message ... In article , (Bill Bogen) wrote: If not, did anyone ever begin a _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light Clementine images? We looked at this, and looked at our local support group, and quailed! Why? Isn't the human eye&brain a wonderful pattern recognition device? Maybe I'm being naive here but I'd set up the project this way: 10 people each sitting in front of a PC for about 2 hours a day. Display an image. The person decides whether it is a possible lavatube and flags it with a keystroke. Since the vast bulk of pictures will be rejects, I'd expect an average rate of about 1 sec/image. We'd be done in 9 days. Let's triple that and let each image be seen by 3 people; we'd rank each image by consensus. Let's pay each person $10/hr: labor cost = $5,167. Even adding costs for software to present the images and record flags, project management, etc, this still seems pretty cheap. Oregon L-5 has some experience in NASA grants, doesn't it? Would this be an unreasonable grant proposal? Yes --- It's =FAR= too cheap a proposal to ever be accepted by NASA! :-/ You'll need to first raise the project cost by several orders of magnitude, and find some way to distribute the project over several NASA Centers, before it has even a small _chance_ of being approved !!! :-I -- Gordon D. Pusch perl -e '$_ = \n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;' |
#7
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Lunar Lava Tubes via Clementine
In article ,
(Bill Bogen) wrote: Thomas Billings wrote in message ... In article , (Bill Bogen) wrote: It was once proposed to do an automated search of images from the Clementine probe for evidence of lunar lava tubes. The argument (by Taylor and Gibbs) was that the usually-cited candidates for lava tubes are the huge, apparently partly collapsed rilles visible from Earth or in Apollo photos and that any tubes at these sites may be too deep to use easily. The thought was that smaller tubes could be just as useful (for radiation and meteoroid protection), more numerous, possibly located near more interesting sites, and easier to access. These smaller tubes might be discernable in some of the 1.9 million Clementine images. Did anything ever come of this? Our research team at Oregon L-5 attempted to start preparing for such a search, back in 1993-4 using some software from a Caltech/JPL project in pattern recognition. The originating software team had used it to search out small volcanic features in the Magellan Radar data, and we thought of using it on Clementine data. We knew it might be marginal, because of the resolution of the Clementine sensors on the lunar surface, but figured it was worth a try. Unfortunately, the software (unnamed, to protect the guilty) turned out to be such an unusable lash-up of previous academic projects that we never found anyone outside of that particular Caltech/JPL team who had gotten it to work, either. We once met someone at a conference who also tried it, and he was awed that we'd once gotten as far as getting a user interface screen! We banged away for about 5 years, on and off, as volunteer teams must. Any idea how many person-hours were consumed? Between our team, the very nice Sun Software Engineers who volunteered their time from their Portland area office, the company that donated the Suns, the Caltech Grad students who tried to help us after their team leader left for Redmond, and a few others, probably about 150-200+ manhours. Sigh! The head of that software project quit Caltech and joined Microsoft in the middle of our efforts. 'Nuff said! If not, did anyone ever begin a _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light Clementine images? We looked at this, and looked at our local support group, and quailed! Why? Isn't the human eye&brain a wonderful pattern recognition device? Maybe I'm being naive here but I'd set up the project this way: 10 people each sitting in front of a PC for about 2 hours a day. We didn't have 10 people. Display an image. The person decides whether it is a possible lavatube and flags it with a keystroke. Since the vast bulk of pictures will be rejects, I'd expect an average rate of about 1 sec/image. We'd be done in 9 days. Let's triple that and let each image be seen by 3 people; we'd rank each image by consensus. Let's pay each person $10/hr: labor cost = $5,167. Even adding costs for software to present the images and record flags, project management, etc, this still seems pretty cheap. This is true with sufficiently fast download times. Back then we didn't have that for our team. For some on our team, we don't today. Oregon L-5 has some experience in NASA grants, doesn't it? Would this be an unreasonable grant proposal? Today? I don't know. Maybe so. In the years after SEI was toasted by NASA's 400 billion dollar estimate, nothing involving the Moon was being accepted willingly by NASA, IIRC. Lunar Orbiter was only done to pre-empt Clementine II, while placating certain space advocates, or so I've been told. Regards, Tom Billings -- Oregon L-5 Society http://www.oregonl5.org/ |
#8
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Lunar Lava Tubes via Clementine
Thomas Billings wrote in message ...
In article , (Bill Bogen) wrote: It was once proposed to do an automated search of images from the Clementine probe for evidence of lunar lava tubes. The argument (by Taylor and Gibbs) was that the usually-cited candidates for lava tubes are the huge, apparently partly collapsed rilles visible from Earth or in Apollo photos and that any tubes at these sites may be too deep to use easily. The thought was that smaller tubes could be just as useful (for radiation and meteoroid protection), more numerous, possibly located near more interesting sites, and easier to access. These smaller tubes might be discernable in some of the 1.9 million Clementine images. Did anything ever come of this? Our research team at Oregon L-5 attempted to start preparing for such a search, back in 1993-4 using some software from a Caltech/JPL project in pattern recognition. The originating software team had used it to search out small volcanic features in the Magellan Radar data, and we thought of using it on Clementine data. We knew it might be marginal, because of the resolution of the Clementine sensors on the lunar surface, but figured it was worth a try. Unfortunately, the software (unnamed, to protect the guilty) turned out to be such an unusable lash-up of previous academic projects that we never found anyone outside of that particular Caltech/JPL team who had gotten it to work, either. We once met someone at a conference who also tried it, and he was awed that we'd once gotten as far as getting a user interface screen! We banged away for about 5 years, on and off, as volunteer teams must. The head of that software project quit Caltech and joined Microsoft in the middle of our efforts. 'Nuff said! If not, did anyone ever begin a _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light Clementine images? We looked at this, and looked at our local support group, and quailed! We haven't found that purely iternet organized projects, where people never meet physically, have enough credence with team members for any single person to take "ownership" of this sort of project. This sounds about right for a small NASA grant or for a volunteer, distributed project among interested space cadets. It still tweaks my interest quite strongly, but more through the possibility of using better pattern recognition software ( JPL has touted their "Diamondeye" since then, but only on their machines, IIRC) and the higher resolution data from Transorbital, if and when it becomes available. Regards, Tom Billings Info on the great work the Oregon L-5 Society has done on lava tubes can be found at: http://www.oregonl5.org/lbrt/l5ombrr1.html Access to the Clementine data is also available from that website. |
#9
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Lunar Lava Tubes via Clementine
Thomas Billings wrote in message ...
In article , (Bill Bogen) wrote: Thomas Billings wrote in message ... In article , (Bill Bogen) wrote: snip Any idea how many person-hours were consumed? Between our team, the very nice Sun Software Engineers who volunteered their time from their Portland area office, the company that donated the Suns, the Caltech Grad students who tried to help us after their team leader left for Redmond, and a few others, probably about 150-200+ manhours. Sigh! The head of that software project quit Caltech and joined Microsoft in the middle of our efforts. 'Nuff said! If not, did anyone ever begin a _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light Clementine images? We looked at this, and looked at our local support group, and quailed! Why? Isn't the human eye&brain a wonderful pattern recognition device? Maybe I'm being naive here but I'd set up the project this way: 10 people each sitting in front of a PC for about 2 hours a day. We didn't have 10 people. Maybe, if done as an Internet project, enough people could be recruited to make this happen. Display an image. The person decides whether it is a possible lavatube and flags it with a keystroke. Since the vast bulk of pictures will be rejects, I'd expect an average rate of about 1 sec/image. We'd be done in 9 days. Let's triple that and let each image be seen by 3 people; we'd rank each image by consensus. Let's pay each person $10/hr: labor cost = $5,167. Even adding costs for software to present the images and record flags, project management, etc, this still seems pretty cheap. This is true with sufficiently fast download times. Back then we didn't have that for our team. For some on our team, we don't today. Nowadays, with DSL and multi-gig hard drives, I'm not so concerned about whether people and hardware can be gathered. A bigger question may be: is this neurologically feasible? IOW, do you think that the photos are of sufficient resolution, contrast, etc that properly-trained people might actually detect signs of lava tubes? If so, how might the people be trained, assuming this were done via Internet? Perhaps work up a quiz/tutorial of images (some suspected by experts of showing signs of lava tubes and some not) and only select the highest scoring individuals? Or better yet, let anyone play but, when later forming a consensus/score for a given Clementine image, weight that person's choices by their score on the quiz? |
#10
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Lunar Lava Tubes via Clementine
In article ,
(Bill Bogen) wrote: Thomas Billings wrote in message ... In article , (Bill Bogen) wrote: Thomas Billings wrote in message ... In article , (Bill Bogen) wrote: snip Any idea how many person-hours were consumed? Between our team, the very nice Sun Software Engineers who volunteered their time from their Portland area office, the company that donated the Suns, the Caltech Grad students who tried to help us after their team leader left for Redmond, and a few others, probably about 150-200+ manhours. Sigh! The head of that software project quit Caltech and joined Microsoft in the middle of our efforts. 'Nuff said! If not, did anyone ever begin a _manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light Clementine images? We looked at this, and looked at our local support group, and quailed! Why? Isn't the human eye&brain a wonderful pattern recognition device? Maybe I'm being naive here but I'd set up the project this way: 10 people each sitting in front of a PC for about 2 hours a day. We didn't have 10 people. Maybe, if done as an Internet project, enough people could be recruited to make this happen. Display an image. The person decides whether it is a possible lavatube and flags it with a keystroke. Since the vast bulk of pictures will be rejects, I'd expect an average rate of about 1 sec/image. We'd be done in 9 days. Let's triple that and let each image be seen by 3 people; we'd rank each image by consensus. Let's pay each person $10/hr: labor cost = $5,167. Even adding costs for software to present the images and record flags, project management, etc, this still seems pretty cheap. This is true with sufficiently fast download times. Back then we didn't have that for our team. For some on our team, we don't today. Nowadays, with DSL and multi-gig hard drives, I'm not so concerned about whether people and hardware can be gathered. A bigger question may be: is this neurologically feasible? IOW, do you think that the photos are of sufficient resolution, contrast, etc that properly-trained people might actually detect signs of lava tubes? Indeed, there's the rub! Even though Dr. Shoemaker was very encouraging when he visited us in late 1994, he did warn us that the photos were optimized for geochemical sensing, not for detecting terrain differentials. They tried for direct overhead shots at local noon, for maximum reflection for their suite of multi-spectral sensors. This makes for few, if any, shadows, the keys to terrain. We have too little experience with the larger suite of Clementine photos to know for sure how easy others will find it. I found it hard, by eyeball. If so, how might the people be trained, assuming this were done via Internet? Perhaps work up a quiz/tutorial of images (some suspected by experts of showing signs of lava tubes and some not) and only select the highest scoring individuals? Or better yet, let anyone play but, when later forming a consensus/score for a given Clementine image, weight that person's choices by their score on the quiz? Unless someone out there has done more than the minimal amount of eyeball work we did with the pictures in finding terrain features, this last idea seems a bit more hopefull to me. I would recommend starting at : http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/clementine.html There is a browser for the images, as well as much Clementine information in links and pages. Regards, Tom Billings -- Oregon L-5 Society http://www.oregonl5.org/ |
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