From: itsd1@teleport.com
In article ,
wbogen@visteon.com (Bill Bogen) wrote:
> Thomas Billings wrote in message
> news:...
> > In article ,
> > wbogen@visteon.com (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/
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