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Compton Observatory crash tomorrow

Nasa has announced that it will crash the nine-year-old Compton Observatory into the Pacific Ocean tomorrow (Sunday) The 16-ton spacecraft, which was hugely successful for nearly twice its planned lifetime of five years, studied gamma rays.
The decision, much criticised, to crash the craft back to Earth, was taken because one of the gyroscopes had failed and the craft would become dangerously uncontrollable if a second went.

Successful Shuttle flight

Atlantis has returned safely to Earth at Kennedy Space centre after effecting repairs to the ISS. The space station was boosted into a 30 mile higher orbit (now 230 miles up), had four new batteries installed (now at full electrical power output), had a new antenna installed, plus construction crane, fire extinguishers, smoke detectors and fans.
The mission took one Russian and six American astronauts several days to complete after a delayed take-off.

Warp drive

The 11th annual Advanced Space Propulsion Research Workshop begins today at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and will run through June 2, 2000. The workshop is sponsored by JPL and the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Topics include advanced chemical propulsion, nuclear fission propulsion, solar sails, tethers, micropropulsion, advanced electrical propulsion, and fusion propulsion.

Job searching

If you are looking for a new job in aerospace forget the newspapers or networking - a new website - http://www.spacelinks.com/JobsStore.html -offers one-stop jobsearching throughout the industry. At least 400 jobs per week for $2.50 per week if you want full details.

European Space Expo

The International Aerospace Exhibition ILA2000 opens its doors in Berlin from June 6 to 12. The European Space Agency and Germany's Space Agency and space industry present their activities in a joint pavilion.
The ILA2000 aerospace fair will take place in Berlin, at the Schönefeld airport. Trade days, reserved to professional visitors, are 6 to 8 June. Members of the general public will be welcomed from noon on Friday, 9 June to 12 June.
Experts from ESA, the DLR and German industry will be joined by ESA astronauts to answer questions on the different programmes.

The Big Black Hole that hums

An exotic black hole binary star system known by astronomers as XTE J1550-564 has suddenly become nearly as bright an x-ray source as the Crab Nebula, which is the brightest hard x-ray source in the entire sky," said Dr. Mike McCollough of the NASA/Marshall Space Flight Centre. "Since last month's peak it's faded to about one-tenth the x-ray luminosity of the Crab, but that's still very bright Normally, J1550-564 is almost invisible at x-ray wavelengths, but its intensity varies in a seemingly random pattern of powerful flares. In 1998, for example, it was 1.5 times brighter than the Crab Nebula for several days.
"That was the brightest eruption we know of," says McCollough, "It flared again in early 1999, but since then has been quiescent -- until lately. BATSE [the Burst and Transient Source Experiment on the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory] detected an outburst in the hard x-ray band [20-300 kilo electron-volts (keV)] on April 6, 2000, then the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer confirmed it at lower energies."
McCollough and colleagues believe that XTE J1550 is a black hole with an orbiting companion star. Gaseous material from the star spilling toward the black hole forms a swirling disk of material that heats up as it falls through the black hole's event horizon. The disk, called an "accretion disk", becomes so hot and glows so brightly at x-ray wavelengths that it's visible to Earth-orbiting x-ray telescopes from 10,000 or more light years away.
"It's probably blobs of material from the companion star cascading down onto the accretion disk," explains McCollough.
When J1550 is "on," as it is now, its unpredictable x-ray flux oscillates by about 50% every 3 seconds or so. To astrophysicists, these oscillations are one of the most intriguing aspects of J1550's enigmatic behavior.
"If you converted the x-ray oscillations from J1550 into sound waves it would feel like a low, rumbling hum," says Dr. Stefan Dieters, an astronomer at the NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center. "It's the sort of sound you feel in your chest from a very large bass speaker at a rock-and-roll concert. The dominant frequency component is around 0.3 Hz -- that's too low for the human ear to hear -- but its spectrum contains frequencies all the way up to 20 or 30 Hz, which is near the lower limit of human hearing."
Dieters first coined the term "humming black holes" when he was explaining another black hole binary system to his mother, who is not an astrophysicist. The "sound" from one of these black hole systems wouldn't be a pure tone, recounted Dieters, because the spectrum of oscillations contains a whole range of frequencies. Scientists call these Quasi Periodic Oscillations, or QPOs.
"It could be that the accretion disk [that gives rise to the x-ray emission] is simply vibrating," says McCollough. "Or the QPOs could be a beat frequency between the spin period of the central object and the orbital period of the disk's inner edge. We just don't know."
"It's all very speculative," agrees Dieters. "At the beginning of a flare the dominant QPO frequency is often low. During the 1998 outburst from J1550, for example, QPOs started out vibrating at 0.06 Hz (16-17 sec period), then the frequency increased by a factor of 20 over a 10 day period "There are lots of theoretical models to explain this, but the basic idea is that some kind of boundary in the accretion disk is moving in toward the black hole. It might be the inner boundary of the disk, or perhaps a transition region between two different parts of the disk. Whatever it is, it starts outside, where the disk's orbit is bigger and the orbital period is longer. Then it moves into a tighter, faster orbit that gives rise to higher-frequency oscillations.
"During the most recent eruption in April, the QPO frequency started low and stayed low. Why did it work differently this time?" asked Dieters. "It's a mystery...."
"The list of black hole binaries with QPOs is getting longer all the time," he continued. "Right now we know of at least 10 of them. As we look more closely at these objects it seems like just about every one has oscillations at some level."
Not all of the QPO sources studied by McCollough and Dieters vibrate at low frequencies. Black hole systems can oscillate as fast as 250 Hz, while QPOs from neutron star binaries have frequency components extending as high as 1.25 kilohertz.
"When we examine these fast oscillations in black hole systems, we're really sensing what's going on in the inner accretion disk, near the point of no return where material flows across the event horizon," says McCollough. "It strains the imagination. We're getting close to a region where space and time as we know it doesn't exist any more."

New Honour for Patrick Moore

The Council of the Royal Astronomical Society has announced that it is to make a special Millennial Award to Patrick Moore in recognition of his unique contribution to astronomy. The award will take the form of an inscribed commemorative gift, which will be presented at a future meeting of the Society.
Professor David Williams, outgoing President of the RAS said, "Patrick Moore has been the foremost populariser of astronomy in the UK for more than 40 years, and has served as an exemplary ambassador for our science to the British public and around the world. He was responsible for first sparking the interest in many of us who went on to become astronomers and he has always encouraged young people, giving generously of his time and expertise.
The Society was keen to show its admiration of Patrick's exceptional achievements in a personal and special way." Patrick Moore has presented 'The Sky at Night' on BBC television every month since 1957, and is the author of around 70 books. He was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society's Jackson-Gwilt medal in 1977, and was made a CBE in 1988.

Spiral Fire puzzles science.

Flames are familiar to all - we all know what a burning match, candle, lit hearth or blowtorch look like -- or a burning building, jet engine or rocket ignition blast for that matter. The presence of gravity and the effects of air or gas movement, plus the type of fuel and oxidant, determine everything from a flame's shape and temperature to burn rate, burn pattern, soot production and deposition and how fast it will or won't be extinguished. But in the microgravity of space, the tall spear-shaped flame on a candle, the roaring hearth look of bonfire-type flames, or the forced-air look of a rocket or furnace flame are very different. This difference is being investigated by Dr. Vedha Nayagam of NASA who said "Soot production, burning rates, completeness of combustion, exhaust products and other characteristics all change radically in space. "The absence of gravity's effects on convection in space makes flames behave in ways that can be either beneficial -- as a test bed for research -- or very dangerous in the case of a fire.. It is vital to know what makes flames start and stop in low gravity, and how flames behave while burning. The safety of space crews and vehicles can depend on our knowledge of combustion in space." Recently, Dr. Nayagam and Dr. Forman Williams of the University of California at San Diego ignited a plastic disk a little bigger than a CD with a blowtorch and then spun it slowly (2 to 20 revolutions per second) in still air. They expected to see flames burning as a horizontal disk. Instead, the flame burned in a flat spiral pattern, with the spiral moving in the direction opposite to the disk's spin. As the flames lessened their tips exhibited a strange meandering motion from side to side. Starting a fire at the center of a still disk is like dropping a stone in a quiet pond, says Nayagam. It produces a flame front that moves outward in a circle, fading as the fuel (the disk) is consumed. If you spin the disk, then the circular disk flames become spiral flames under some conditions. "Under slow spin conditions ... just before circular flames extinguish, [the flames] break symmetry -- and spirals appear in the center hole of the flames and propagate outwards in a spiral instead of in a circular wave front," he explained. "Spiral burning could be common in the slow, swirling flows that we can establish in a microgravity environment -- but these results were very unexpected in normal Earth gravity," added Dr. Williams. "We plan to explore further what causes the spiral flame pattern, and what causes the tips to follow a [chaotic] meandering path." Nayagam says it's an advantage to be able to generate these flames in the lab under normal gravity, where it is easier and less expensive to study them than on the Space Shuttle. The investigators plan to conduct further tests with spiral flames on board the Johnson Space Flight Centre's KC-135, which can create brief microgravity conditions in parabolic flight.		On Earth, gravity-driven buoyant convection causes a candle flame to be teardrop-shaped (A):and carries soot to the flame's tip, making it yellow. In microgravity, where convective flows are absent, the flame is spherical, soot-free, and blue.
		Flames on top of a disk slowly spinning in a clockwise direction burn in a spiral turning anticlockwise. Vedha Nayagam and Forman Williams are studying this phenomenon, which occurs both on Earth and in microgravity, in the hopes of fully explaining the pattern by basic principles of physics.
		At NASA's Johnson Space Centre, there is a microgravity research aircraft nicknamed the Vomit Comet used to fly parabolas to investigate the effects of zero gravity.

Nice, but hard to send flowers…

As a tribute, Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry's ashes were taken into space by NASA, but now space and SF fans can go one further, with an undertaking opening up on the Moon.
Well, not quite opening on the Moon for business, but for $12,000 (about £8,250) Los Angeles undertaker Ernest Glasscock will send your compacted ashes to the moon. They will, with lots of others, be compacted into a small capsule and fired at the moon (no guarantee of arrival).

Where have all the spots gone?

A month ago the solar disk was covered in sunspots. Now, a little more than a month later, the Sun's visible disk is almost featureless, sporting just a few diminutive spots.
This seems odd when a sunspot maximum is due.
"These are just normal up and downs in the sunspot cycle," explains Dr. David Hathaway, a solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center who specialises in tracking and predicting sunspot activity. "On a daily or weekly basis the sunspot number can fluctuate wildly, but when we average the counts over a month they agree fairly well with our predictions that Solar Max is very near."
Some of the apparent disparity comes from the method of collecting data: Solar astronomers keep track of sunspots in two ways: by counting them and by monitoring their total area. Although the two quantities are related, they are not perfectly correlated. It's possible, for instance, to have a large number of sunspots that simply don't cover a very large fraction of the solar disk. That's what happened this week.
"The Boulder sunspot number on May 7 was 130," says Hathaway. "That's not extraordinarily low. What makes the Sun look so blank right now is the small total area that's covered by spots
On any given day near the sunspot maximum, the areas of all the sunspots added together cover about 1200 millionths of the Sun's disk. On May 7, 2000, that number dropped all the way to 130 millionths
"That's about ten times less than the average for the past two months," says Hathaway. "Meanwhile, the sunspot number is only about 25% less than the recent average. What we've got is a whole bunch of very small, hard-to-see sunspots." . On May 7, the sunspot area and the Boulder sunspot number were coincidentally the same - 130.

Brown dwarf missing link identified

Astronomers have identified three brown dwarfs of a type never before observed, so filling in what has until now been an elusive 'missing link' in the range of properties of known brown dwarfs. The discovery resulted from a collaboration between astronomers using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii and scientists associated with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
Brown dwarfs are 'failed stars', more massive than Jupiter, but falling short of the minimum mass a true star needs - 8% of the Sun's mass. Stars shine constantly for billions of years because they generate nuclear energy from the fusion of hydrogen into helium. But brown dwarfs cannot sustain nuclear power production. After a modest initial flush, they cool off and become progressively fainter.
Young brown dwarfs are now known to exist in the hundreds in the Sun's neighbourhood. They have surface temperatures that range down from about 3,500 K (3,200 degrees C) to 1,500 K (1,200 degrees C). Over most of this range their appearances are similar to cool stars of the same temperature. However, as the surface of a brown dwarf cools below 1,500 K, a dramatic chemical change takes place: large amounts of methane form, considerably altering the appearance of the brown dwarf.
The first methane-dominated brown dwarf to be discovered was found orbiting a nearby star by astronomers at Caltech in 1995. More have been found by astronomers at Caltech and Johns Hopkins University since early 1999, largely through two ongoing surveys of the night sky - the Sloan Digital Sky Survey operating a single dedicated telescope in New Mexico, and the 2 Micron All-sky Survey (2MASS), which operates one telescope in Arizona and one in Chile. The methane brown dwarfs have turned out to be almost identical to each other. Their spectra are very similar to those of the giant Jupiter-like planets, even though they are considerably warmer.
The three newly discovered brown dwarfs bridge the gap between the young, warmer group and the cooler methane group. They are not identical, but form a sequence linking the warmer more star-like and the cooler more planet-like types.Teams of astronomers have been searching intensively for such transition objects over the last year. In February 2000, following the discovery of several new brown dwarf candidates by the Sloan Survey, infrared measurements by Dr Sandy Leggett at UKIRT indicated that three of them might be this sought-after type. Infrared spectra were taken at UKIRT by the observing team of Leggett, Dr Thomas Geballe of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, Professor Gillian Knapp of Princeton University and Alexander McDaniel, a Princeton University undergraduate student, working with Xiaohui Fan (Princeton graduate student) and Dr David Golimowski and Dr Todd Henry at the Johns Hopkins University.
The spectra clearly revealed that the properties of these three brown dwarfs fall between the warmer and cooler groups previously known. Both methane and carbon monoxide show up weakly. Methane is absent in the warmer group and strong in the cooler group, while carbon monoxide is the other way around - strong in the warmer group and not seen in the cooler group. A paper reporting these findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. Reports are also being presented at a meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming (28 May - 1 June) and at the 196th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Rochester, New York, 4 - 8 June. Detailed analysis of the spectra is under way to deduce more about the nature of these objects, which may resemble Jupiter and Saturn shortly after they formed about 5 billion years ago.
Website: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0004408

	They'll have to change the name now… NASA astronomers have collected the first-ever radar images of a "main belt" asteroid, a metallic, dog bone-shaped rock the size of New Jersey, an apparent leftover from an ancient, violent cosmic collision The asteroid, named 216 Kleopatra, is a large object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter; it measures about 217 kilometers (135 miles) long and about 94 kilometers (58 miles) wide. Kleopatra was discovered in 1880, but until now, its shape was unknown. "With its dog bone shape, Kleopatra is one of the most unusual asteroids we've seen in the Solar System," said Dr. Steven Ostro of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, who led a team of astronomers observing Kleopatra with the 1,000-foot (305- meter) telescope of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. "Kleopatra could be the remnant of an incredibly violent collision between two asteroids that did not completely shatter and disperse all the fragments."
The Arecibo radio telescope is currently the largest single-dish telescope in the world. First opening in 1963, this 305 meter (1000 foot) radio telescope (and radar) resides in a natural valley of Puerto Rico.
These images show several views from a radar-based computer model of asteroid 216 Kleopatra

Planets Aligned today. The five naked-eye planets -- Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -- will cluster together on the far side of the Sun. Although the planets will not be in a perfectly straight line, their approximate alignment in a 25 degree-wide region of the sky has triggered speculation in some quarters that interplanetary tidal forces might be magnified, leading to extraordinary effects here on Earth. After all, "Spring Tides" (peak ocean tides that arise bi-monthly) occur when the Sun, the Moon and the Earth are nearly in a straight line around the times of the New Moon and Full Moon. Ocean and crustal tides on Earth will be indistinguishable from normal, and tidal forces from Jupiter and the other planets will be at a low ebb this week.

We really are star children?

The latest results from the Stardust craft, out in space beyond Mars, have given weight to the theory that Earth was seeded with life forms from space.
The craft detected five complex carbon molecules between May and December last year.
The molecules struck an impact plate in the probe's cometary and interstellar dust analyser, and the resultant splatt produced a tar-like material. The molecules as analysed were up to 2,000 atomic mass units, more than 100 times the size of a water molecule.

Eta Aquarid shower due

"This week will provide one of the few good views of a meteor shower this year," said Robert Lunsford, the North American Co-ordinator for the International Meteor Organisation. "Moonlight will spoil most of the major meteor showers in 2000, but the eta Aquarids will occur with the moon near new and out of the way."
The nominal peak of the eta Aquarids occurs near 1700 UT on May 5, but "the display will not have a sharp peak of activity. Instead good rates will occur for a week centered on May 5."
This year the shower should produce 15 to 20 shooting stars per hour for lower-latitude observers in the northern hemisphere and up to 60 per hour in the southern hemisphere. The best times to look will be in the hours before dawn on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, May 4-6.

Star naming court tussle

The International Star Registry is suing its main rival Name a Star in a USA federal court in Illinois over its use of the trademark international star registry. More than a million star names have now been sold. The firms record the desired name of the star and send a certificate and some details of the celestial object to the buyer. The names have no proper astronomical foundation, and cost from £30.
The only recognised body for naming astronomical objects is the International Astronomical Union
Website : http://www.iau.org

Fast as light (anyway)

Nasa scientists are working on a new generation of super-fast computers which will use light rather than electricity.
"Entirely optical computers are still some time in the future," said Dr.Donald Frazier, "but electro-optical hybrids have been possible since 1978, when it was learned that photons can respond to electrons through media such as lithium niobate. Newer advances have produced a variety of thin films and optical fibers that make optical interconnections and devices practical. We are focusing on thin films made of organic molecules, which are more light sensitive than inorganics. Organics can perform functions such as switching, signal processing and frequency doubling using less power than inorganics. Inorganics such as silicon used with organic materials let us use both photons and electrons in current hybrid systems, which will eventually lead to all-optical computer systems."
"What we are accomplishing in the lab today will result in development of super-fast, super-miniaturized, super-lightweight and lower cost optical computing and optical communication devices and systems," Frazier explained.
The speed of computers has now become a pressing problem as electronic circuits reach their miniaturization limit. The rapid growth of the Internet, expanding at almost 15% per month, demands faster speeds and larger bandwidths than electronic circuits can provide. Electronic switching limits network speeds to about 50 Gigabits per second (1 Gigabit (Gb) is 109, or 1 billion bits).

New SF writing award

A literary competition in honour of science fiction writer James White, who died last year, has been launched. The award will be given for the best sf short story, as selected by judges which including Morgan Llwellyn, Michael Scott, Michael Carroll, David Pringle and David Langford. The author of the winning story will receive a trophy and the winning story will be published in Interzone. Closing date for entries is August 23 and the winner will be announced before the end of the year.
The competition is open to any non-professional writer, who can submit a maximum of three unpublished stories, which must be in English and between 2,000 and 4,000 words long (There will be an administration fee of £3/$4 per story). Full rules and writers' guidelines are available from the administrator, James Bacon at 211 Blackhorse Avenue, Dublin 7, Ireland or from the website at http://www.jameswhiteaward.com
James White was Ireland's best known science fiction writer. His first published story, Assisted Passage, appeared in New Worlds in 1953. His novels include All Judgement Fled, The Watch Below and The Silent Stars Go By. However he is best remembered for his series of stories and novels set on the giant space hospital Sector General. He died from a stroke in August.

Who said 'space is big…really big?' An international team of scientists has measured the distance to an X-ray source by observing the delay and smearing out of X-ray signals traversing 30,000 light years of interstellar gas and dust, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Chandra has "opened a new world," said Peter Predehl of the Max-Planck Institute, Garching, Germany, the lead author on a report to be published in the European journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Geometrical distance measurements are of particular importance for astronomy. Now we have a new method that works for distant sources," Predehl said. This information is difficult to obtain because, with rare exceptions, astronomers cannot measure distance directly and must use a variety of ingenious but uncertain techniques. This new method relies on the scattering of X-rays by between a source and the Earth. The dust produces a halo, much like the halo around a traffic light on a foggy night. When the light switches from red to green (or vice versa), the halo around the light is also slightly delayed," Predehl explained. "No one would use this delay for determining the distance to the traffic light, of course (that delay is only a few billionths of a second). But if the 'traffic light' is 30,000 light years away, the delay is on the order of 15 minutes. Using the excellent and unprecedented resolution of the Chandra observatory, we can distinguish between light that was 30,000 years on its way and other light that needed only a few minutes more." Other members of the team included Vadim Burwitz and Joachim Trumper, also of the Max-Planck Institute, and Frits Paerels of Columbia University, New York, NY. Trumper and a colleague proposed this method 27 years ago, but it could not be applied until an X-ray observatory with Chandra's unique capability was available.

The halo (beyond the yellow ring in the center) is due to scattering of the x-rays by interstellar dust grains along the line of sight to the source. The sharp horizontal line is an instrumental effect.

Happy Birthday Hubble

The Hubble space telescope, now performing superbly after its astigmatic start, celebrates its tenth birthday, and gets its own website to celebrate.
The new site features many spectacular new images, including one of an exploding star in Aquilia.
Website: http://hubble.stsci.edu/

April Shower The Lyrid meteor shower will peak on the morning of April 22 when 10 to 15 meteors per hour shoot out of the constellation Lyra. "Unfortunately there's going to be a nearly full moon this year on April 22," said Dr. Frank Six, an astronomer at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Centre. "That'll make it hard to see faint meteors. Still, it might be worth staying up for (max between 3am and dawn) if you're an enthusiastic star gazer." While intense Lyrid displays are not unheard of, they are rare. In fact, the Lyrids are better known for their longevity than for their dazzle. Lyrids have been observed for at least 2600 years, according to Chinese records from 687 BC describing "stars that fell [like] rain." This makes it the oldest recorded meteor shower. The Lyrid meteor stream is associated with periodic comet Thatcher, which follows an orbit tilted nearly 80 degrees with respect to the plane of the solar system. Because the comet spends most of its time well away from the planets, it is nearly immune from significant gravitational perturbations. This is probably the reason why the debris stream has remained stable and the Lyrid shower has been observed for so many centuries.

Artist Duane Hilton created this rendition of a Lyrid meteor streaking past the Moon over the Sawtooth Ridge near Mammoth, CA.

Ubiquitous Klingons

They get everywhere, those Klingons. What started as a bit of a joke at Trek conventions, and something for Mark Lenard to talk about, has developed into a whole language and culture with published books and a website all of its own - the Klingon language.
Lenard used to talk at conventions about how he had made up the guttural noises of the language when playing a klingon way-back-when in the original Trek series. This was the first time a klingon had had to speak and he just produced a series of noises which resembled someone with a bad post-nasal drip.
Since then much of the klingonese has been created by linguist Marc Okrand, the whole thing has its own website and The Bible is being translated (what would Kahless think?)
Website: www.kli.org

Cassini success

NASA's Cassini spacecraft, currently en route to Saturn, has successfully completed its passage through our solar system's asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
This makes Cassini the seventh spacecraft ever to fly through the asteroid belt. Before NASA's Pioneer 10 spacecraft successfully passed through the region in 1972, it was not known whether a spacecraft could survive the trip. The spacecraft entered the belt in mid-December and while it was in the area, Cassini's camera imaged the asteroid 2685 Masursky.(pictured). Data gathered provided scientists with the first size estimates on the asteroid and preliminary evidence that it may have different material properties to those previously believed.

New lease of life for Mir

Russian space station Mir has been re-powered-up by cosmonauts who are to spend two months aboard checking for leaks and preparing the station for a new role as a commercial space base.
Two cosmonauts arrived earlier this week to start working on the station, which had been mothballed when state funding ran out.
Now the Mircorp has put up £13m ($21m) to refurbish Mir, which was launched in 1986 and has been in operation for well over twice its designed life.
Even the airleak was not as bad as was feared, so that Sergei Zaletin and Aleksandr Kaleri could leave off the oxygen masks they thought would be needed in the living quarters.

The Voice of the Book goes silent

Actor Peter Jones, best known to SF fans as The voice of the Book in the radio and TV versions of Douglas Adams's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, died earlier this week, aged 79.

SF becomes fact… the truth really is out there?

The cameo appearance in the TV sci-fi series the X-files of the `gravity shielding' experiments of the Finland-based Russian scientist Yevgeny Podkletnov summed up the reaction of the physics world to his work: it belonged in the realm of fantasy.
But not everyone sneered. The military wing of the hi-tech conglomerate BAe Systems took the Podkletnov experiment so seriously that it has launched an anti-gravity research programme, Project Greenglow. If the technology could be made to work it would make existing forms of transport obsolete. BAe last week confirmed that the project, led by the mathematician Ron Evans, existed but would give no further details. Like many of the few scientists around the world exploring gravity shields and gravity beams, Dr Evans is believed to be fearful of ridicule.
The cold fusion debacle, when scientists' claims to have created a solution to the world's energy problems in a lab flask were discredited, casts a long shadow. Dr Evans, at BAe's stealth and electronic warfare department at Warton, Lancashire, is understood to be working with scientists at Lancaster University.
There is a sparse website which describes the project as `a speculative research programme… the beginning of an adventure which other enthusiastic scientists from academia, government and industry might like to join, particularly those who believe that the gravitational field is not restricted to passivity.' In 1996 Dr Podkletnov claimed to have discovered a way to shield objects from gravity by placing them over a superconducting disc which, in turn, rotated above powerful electromagnets. His findings were to be published in a British physics journal, but news leaked out and, after press stories that scientists had made an anti-gravity device, he was booed by peers who accused him of breaking the laws of physics. He withdrew his paper and went into a huff. The university that had sponsored him, in Tampere, Finland, withdrew its support, and he has returned to Russia. But the notion of a machine that could gently lift objects - people, freighters, spacecraft - with a hum of electricity gripped some people.
A few serious scientists andengineers have been trying to reproduce Dr Podkletnov's results. This month he slipped into Britain to give a lecture at Sheffield University, where he claimed that the latest Russian gravity shielding experiments had made objects 5% lighter, compared with 2% in the Finnish study.
Website: http://www.greenglow.co.uk

Planet search finds smaller bodies

Planet-hunting astronomers have found of two planets that may be smaller in mass than Saturn.
Of the 30 extra-solar planets around Sun-like stars detected previously, all have been the size of Jupiter or larger.
The existence of these Saturn-sized candidates suggests that many stars have smaller planets as well as Jupiter-sized ones The discovery was made by planet-sleuths Marcy, Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Steve Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, using the mighty Keck telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. They discovered a planet at least 80 percent the mass of Saturn orbiting 3.8 million miles from the star HD46375, 109 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros, and a planet 70 percent the mass of Saturn orbiting 32.5 million miles around the star 79 Ceti (also known as HD16141), located 117 light-years away in the constellation Cetus.
These planets are very close to their stars and so have short orbits. They whirl around their parent stars with periods of 3.02 days and 75 days respectively. This allowed for their relatively rapid discovery.

Solar flares may or may not cause problems…? By triggering power blackouts and communications disruptions, solar activity could cause some of the same problems that raised fears of electronic meltdown at the beginning of the year. Solar activity is indeed on the rise, says Dr. David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, but there may be nothing to worry about. Judging from recent sunspot counts, the 2000 solar maximum will be slightly less spectacular than sunspot peaks in 1978 and 1989. Those maxima caused occasional problems with satellites and power blackouts, but nothing that threatened civil order or world finance. In the course of a solar maximum, Hathaway says the "frequency of solar eruptions is dramatically increased." During a solar minimum, a week or more will pass without any solar eruptions. Now, nearing the apex of the cycle, there are multiple eruptions every day. This week is a good example. Since March 17 there have been more than four "M-class" solar flares. According to the NOAA Space Environment Centre, M-class eruptions cause high-frequency radio blackouts on the sunlit side of the Earth and degrade low-frequency navigation signals for tens of minutes affecting maritime and general aviation positioning. On February 6 the brightest solar flare of the current cycle erupted. The "X-class" event (10 times bigger than an M-class flare) caused radio blackouts for hours.

Click image to view an animation. (144KB)

New discoveries in gamma-ray astronomy

The exotic world of gamma-ray astronomy has taken yet another surprising turn with the revelation that half the previously unidentified high-energy gamma ray sources in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, actually comprise a new class of mysterious objects.
"These are objects we've never seen before," said Dr. Neil Gehrels, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, Greenbelt, MD. "We can't make out what they are yet, but we know they're strange and, boy, there's a lot of them. These are very different from the famous gamma-ray burst sources, because the gamma rays shine continuously instead of coming in a flash, like the gamma-ray bursts."
Gehrels said that of the 170 unidentified sources in our galaxy, about half lie in a narrow band along the Milky Way plane. These may be well-known classes of objects that simply shine too faintly in other types of light to be identified. The other types of light may also be obscured by intervening "fog." Gamma rays easily pass through such material. The other half of the unidentified galactic sources are closer to Earth and make up the new class. These lie just off the Milky Way plane and seemingly follow the Gould Belt, a ribbon of nearby massive stars and gas clouds that winds through the Milky Way plane.
What objects could be emitting gamma rays in the Gould Belt? Possibilities are black holes acting as particle accelerators, the massive stars themselves, and clusters of oddball pulsars, among other theories.

What was wrong with Polar Lander?

Some journalistic sources in the USA are claiming that NASA knew beforehand that the Mars Polar Lander would fail. Major news agency UPI's expert James Oberg says that engine tests were not done in conditions which mirrored those in which they would really have to work, so that they could be passed fit to fly - the thrusters designed to slow the craft would not operate at low temperatures and an automatic switch which was supposed to turn them off after landing would have been triggered while the craft was still in the air, making a crash inevitable.
The report says that test results were massaged by middle management, rather than show up serious flaws which would lead to a complete redesign (the same problem as ignoring a fault with the O-rings lead to the Challenger crash in 1986)

Buckyball time capsules

Scientists from the University of Hawaii and NASA have unearthed time capsules bearing extraterrestrial cargo from when an asteroid collided with Earth, by managing to identify gasses trapped inside buckyballs -- tiny molecular cages made of 60 or more carbon atoms. "We discovered the gases trapped inside buckyballs in a one-inch thick sedimentary layer of clay that[formed from the fallout of an asteroid impact 65 million years ago," said Ted Bunch, of NASA's Ames Research Centre. The clay layer, known as the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary, marks a period of extreme biological change including mass extinctions and the end of the dinosaurs
Bunch and his colleagues, led by Luann Becker, a geochemist at the University of Hawaii, believe that the gas must have come from space because it contains helium rich in the isotope 3He. "Helium from different sources on Earth, like our atmosphere or the exhaust from volcanoes, has a different isotopic signature from the helium in a meteorite," said Becker. The nuclei of most helium atoms have two protons and two neutrons. This dominant isotope is called helium-4 (4He). A smaller fraction of helium atoms comes in the 3He variety with just one neutron. The ratio of 3He to 4He discriminates between terrestrial and extraterrestrial samples because cosmic helium has a relatively higher concentration of 3He. This isn't the first time Becker and Bunch have uncovered extraterrestrial fullerenes. They found similar molecules in samples from the 4.6-billion-year-old Allende meteorite that landed in Mexico three decades ago and inside Australia's Murchison meteorite. The Murchison samples contained helium gas rich in the isotope 3He just like the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary clays. That's a sure sign that the buckyballs and their contents have a cosmic origin, said the researchers.
In their most recent work, Becker, Bunch, and Robert Poreda (University of Rochester) examined the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary layer because it is a well-studied sediment that contains extraterrestrial iridium. Minerals in the layer show signs that they once experienced temperatures greater than 2,000 C and pressures of about 400,000 atmospheres, presumably resulting from an asteroid impact. The scientists examined clay deposits in Denmark, New Zealand and North America. All of them contained fullerenes which encapsulated inert gases with unmistakable extraterrestrial and possibly extra-solar isotopic signatures. Eventually research might show that fullerenes from comets and asteroids delivered the gases and carbon necessary to establish life on Earth.
Details: http://www.pnas.org
Diagram caption Fullerenes -- better known as "buckyballs" -- are hollow, cage-like molecules made of carbon atoms. They are named in honor of Buckminster Fuller, designer of the geodesic dome that resembles the molecule. This image shows how extraterrestrial gases such as helium can be trapped inside the fullerene cage. One view shows a broken bond, or open "window," with an atom moving out through window.

Dan Dare honoured in hometown

Marking his 50th birthday, the town of Southport, in the northwest UK has marked the creation of Dan Dare.
Dan Dare, pilot of the future, was the creation of the Rev Marcus Morris, vicar of nearby Birkdale ( home of the golfcourse) who wanted to create a comic for boys which did not feature the violence of the American comics.
He brought together a team of local artists in a small studio - 'The Bakery' - in the village of Churchtown, and together they created and published The Eagle which first appeared on April 14, 1950 with 900,000 copies sold and which closed down in 1970, but which may be revived, as its editor from 1959 to 1961 is working with a group of artists and publisher on a magazine to be called Eureka - an updated and modernised version.
The original achievement of Rev Morris, who died aged 73, in 1989, was marked yesterday (Tuesday March 21) by the unveiling of plaques in Churchtown and in the new library of Southport College, where three of the comic's artists were students and where there is now a permanent Eagle exhibition.

Orion Nebula's floating planets found

The most sensitive survey ever undertaken of the region in the Orion Nebula where new stars are forming has revealed 13 "free-floating planets" as well as more than one hundred very young brown dwarfs. The discovery was made by Dr Philip Lucas of the University of Hertfordshire and Dr Patrick Roche of the University of Oxford using a new camera on the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii. Their results will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Brown dwarfs are objects that might have become stars, but never accumulated sufficient material. With less than 8% of the Sun's mass, they did not heat up enough inside to trigger the nuclear reactions involving hydrogen that keep stars shining over long periods. Nevertheless, they do produce some nuclear energy for a short time (from deuterium, a rare isotope of hydrogen) if their mass exceeds 1.3% the Sun's mass - about 13 times the mass of Jupiter
The new infrared survey of the Trapezium Cluster in the Orion Nebula, turned up 13 objects below the 13 Jupiter-mass threshold. The mass of the smallest is equivalent to no more than about 8 Jupiters. These objects have been dubbed "free-floating planets". They give off only residual heat left over from when they were born. By nature they are more like the giant planets of our solar system than stars. However, they do not orbit any star and drift through space by themselves. Only two similar objects have previously been discovered. (Japanese astronomers found them in the southern Chamaeleon Nebula.) The discovery of thirteen more in one cluster suggests that they might be very common.
Because brown dwarfs and free floating planets quickly cool down, they are easiest to find when they are young and still retain some heat from the formation process. The objects in the Trapezium cluster are mostly about one million years old - very young compared to the five-billion-year age of the Sun.

New Lunar Rover

Apollo astronauts were banned from going very far from their lander, plus scientists wanted moon rocks returned from the widest possible area, so eventually a Lunar Rover Vehicle (which would be housed in the descent stage of the Moon lander, was the best way to extend the range of the astronauts.
Technical requirements for the rover were that the moon buggy had to operate in a low-gravity, airless environment featuring unknown dusty terrain and 400 degree daily temperature extremes. It had to fold up to fit within the tight, pie-shaped confines of the lunar module, then, after landing, it had to unfold from its stowed configuration and deploy itself to the lunar surface with minimum assistance from the astronauts.
Weighing approximately 460 pounds on Earth (209 kg), the Lunar Rover could carry a payload t of about 1,080 Earth pounds (490 kg) when it was deployed on the Moon. Each wheel was individually powered by a quarter-horsepower electric motor (providing a total of one horsepower) and the vehicle's top speed was about 13 km/hr (8 mph) on a relatively smooth surface. The moon buggy allowed Apollo 15, 16 and 17 astronauts to venture further from the Lunar Module - just over 100 kilometers during Apollo 17.
Now NASA runs annual Great Moonbuggy Races. This year's is on April 7, 2000 i n on Huntsville, Alabama. The event, sponsored by the Marshall Space Flight Center Center and others, challenges students to design and build a human-powered vehicle that addresses engineering problems similar to those faced by the designers of the original lunar rover. Competitors will race their vehicles in the shadow of a giant Saturn V, like the rocket that boosted NASA's lunar rover to the Moon, and a full-size Space Shuttle mock-up. The one-half mile race course is speckled with "lava ridges," "craters" and sandpits -- simulating the lunar surface -- as it winds through the grounds of the US Space Rocket Center.
Entries are solicited for next year's races. Contact Frank Brannon, the Marshall Center's university relations coordinator,
e-mail Frank.Brannon@msfc.nasa.gov

Meteor fragments recovered

Fragments of the meteor which fell to Earth on January 18, 2000, one of the most dramatic meteors in 10 years streaked across the skies of the Yukon Territory in Canada.
Now scientists have recovered fragments thanks to a a local resident who collected the fragments from snow-covered ground. He placed them in clean plastic bags and kept them continuously frozen. These are the only freshly fallen meteorite fragments ever recovered and transferred to a laboratory without thawing. Keeping the fragments continuously frozen minimized the potential loss of organic materials and other volatile compounds in the fragments.
The fragments -- lumps of crumbly rock with scorched, pitted surfaces -- resemble partly used charcoal briquettes: black, porous, fairly light and still smelling of sulphur. Scientists say the meteorite was a carbonaceous chondrite, a rare type of space rock that contains many forms of carbon and organics, basic building blocks of life. Carbonaceous chondrites, which comprise only about 2 percent of meteorites known to have fallen to Earth, are typically difficult to recover because they easily break down during entry into Earth's atmosphere and during weathering on the ground.

Black Holes are greedy

Astronomers at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham (UK) have uncovered the first direct evidence that the extremely massive black holes lurking at the centres of galaxies have gradually put on weight by consuming a steady diet of gas and stars. This discovery is to be presented at the OXCAM2 conference in Oxford on 27 March 2000, where astronomers will be discussing recent developments in the study of supermassive black holes. A paper on the subject will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on 1st April.
It has been known for some years that the centres of almost all galaxies contain small, very massive, dark objects. Such an object can weigh in excess of a billion times the mass of the Sun, yet may occupy a region not much larger than the solar system. The only explanation that astronomers have been able to come up with for such extreme properties is that these objects are supermassive black holes, but very little is known about how these exotic objects came to be at the centres of so many galaxies. Were the black holes there before the galaxies formed around them, or have they grown over time by sucking in some of the stars and gas that make up their host galaxies? What makes this a difficult question to answer is that the galaxies we see today have typically been in existence for many billions of years, so the rate at which a black hole would have to acquire mass to build up to its current size is far too low to be detectable.
In order to get around this problem, Professor Michael Merrifield of the University of Nottingham and Drs Duncan Forbes and Alejandro Terlevich of the University of Birmingham have adopted a different approach. As Prof Merrifield explains, "If you didn't know how people grow as they get older, you wouldn't have to watch one individual over a complete lifetime to find out; just by looking at a snapshot of a large family that spans a range of ages from toddler to great-grandparent, you could infer that children grow quite rapidly for the first decade or so of their lives, but that older people don't continue to develop at anywhere near the same rate. We have used the same reasoning to discover how black holes grow with age." To determine the ages of galaxies, the astronomers have compared the detailed properties of the starlight they emit to what would be expected for galaxies of differing ages. Using this technique, they have been able to determine the ages of 23 nearby galaxies, including such familiar objects as the Andromeda Galaxy, which are known to contain black holes at their centres. The analysis revealed a wide range in the ages of these galaxies, from a youthful four billion years to a venerable twelve billion years. Comparing the ages to the masses of the central black holes, the researchers discovered that the masses of black holes in young galaxies tend to be relatively modest, while older galaxies contain progressively more massive black holes.
It thus appears that these black holes have built up to their current stature by acquiring mass over the entire lifetime of the galaxies that they live in, with no signs that this growth has come to an end. "One of the basic properties of a black hole is that material can fall into it, but can't get out again," said Merrifield. "What we seem to be seeing is the consequence of this one-way traffic, with gas and stars from the surrounding galaxy dragged in by gravity, making each black hole more and more obese as it gets older."

Death and SF

A new campaign seeks to resurrect James T. Kirk back from the dead. The Enterprise's first captain was killed off in Star Trek Generations, but not heroically enough for William Shatner fans. Website: http://www.bringbackkirk.com/

New Trek planning

While on the subject of Star Trek - Voyager executive producer Brannon Braga and Rick Berman are still said to be working on the new Trek series, needed to fill the vacuum which will be left when Voyager comes to its scheduled close fairly soon. Any new show would not be started before autumn 2001.
However, it does seem likely that the long-travelling Voyager crew will make it back to Earth in time for the finale.
As for the recurring question about when Voyager will return to Earth, Braga told the magazine, "I don't know what's going to happen. I kind of wish I did know so I could start planning. I think we'll know more next year [Voyager's last season

This Year's Nebula shortlist

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have announced the final ballot for the 2000 Nebula Awards, for SFF books, stories and scripts of 1999 as published in the previous year, as voted on by members association.
Novels
George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
Maureen McHugh, Mission Child
Sean Stewart, Mockingbird
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
Ken Macleod, The Cassini Division
Novellas
L. Timmel Duchamp, "Living Trust"
Michael A. Burstein, "Reality Check"
Adam-Troy Castro Jerry Oltion, "The Astronaut From Wyoming"
Andy Duncan, "The Executioners' Guild"
Ted Chiang, "The Story of Your Life"
David Marusek, "The Wedding Album"
Novelettes
Brian A. Hopkins, "Five Days in April"
Jack McDevitt Stanley Schmidt, "Good Intentions"
Esther M. Friesner, "How to Make Unicorn Pie"
Mary Turzillo, "Mars is No Place for Children"
Bruce Sterling, "Taklamakan"
Phyllis Eisenstein, "The Island in the Lake"
Short Stories
Michael Swanwick, "Ancient Engines"
Frances Sherwood, "Basil the Dog"
Constance Ash, "Flower Kiss"
Michael Swanwick, "Radiant Doors"
Leslie What, "The Cost of Doing Business"
Bruce Holland Rogers, "The Dead Boy at Your Window"
Scripts
Brad Bird Tim McCanlies, Iron Gian
t Larry Andy Wachowski, The Matrix
M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense
Robert J. Avrech, The Devil's Arithmetic
John Millerman, The Uranus Experiment: Part 2

Galileo and Cassini to team up

After more than 10 years in space and several severe doses of radiation from Jupiter, the durable Galileo probe keeps sending data back, and this week NASA has announced plans to extend Galileo's mission through to the end of 2000, when the craft will embark on a joint expedition with another solar system explorer, the Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft. Cassini will visit Jupiter in December 2000 for a gravity assist maneuver that will slingshot the probe toward Saturn.
"For the first time ever, two spacecraft will simultaneously explore an outer planet," Cassini Project Scientist Dr. Dennis Matson said about the planned Jupiter. "One spacecraft will be inside Jupiter's magnetic envelope, with the other outside where it can observe the powerful solar wind pressing on the envelope. From the two vantage points, we'll watch cause and effect as the wind changes the magnetic properties around Jupiter."

The Greatest American Hero

Disney has announced plans to remake the early 1980s SF comedy The Greatest American Hero, which originally starred William Katt and Robert Culp as the unwitting and unwilling schoolteacher/hero and his partner, the FBI agent with a habit of eating dog biscuits.
The series was originally from the Steven J Cannell stable.(A-Team etc)

Nasa says Swiss cheese New high-resolution images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft comparing the ice caps at the North and South poles show surprising differences between the two regions. The North polar cap has a relatively flat, pitted surface, while the South polar cap has larger pits, troughs and flat mesas that look like pieces of sliced and broken Swiss cheese. The upper layer of the Martian South polar residual cap has been eroded, leaving flat-topped mesas into which are set circular depressions," said Dr. Peter Thomas of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA, and lead author of the paper. "Nothing like this has ever been seen anywhere on Mars except within the South polar cap, leading to some speculation that these landforms may have something to do with the carbon dioxide thought to be frozen there."

Possible new ESA projects

Six proposals, ranging from a visit to the Asteroid Belt to amazingly sensitive gyroscopes, will undergo close examination during the next six months, as the European Space Agency's science advisors move towards the selection of flexi-missions for launch between 2005 and 2009. Science working groups and the Space Science Advisory Committee have chosen them from
The front-runner for one of these slots is European participation with NASA in the Next Generation Space Telescope, successor to the NASA-ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Although a formal decision will not be taken until later this year, much European effort has already gone into preparing for this NGST project, due for launch in 2008

Always important to know where your moons are

Fourteen years ago, scientists working with data from NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft announced the discovery of two small moons orbiting the planet Uranus. Initially dubbed 1986 U7 and 1986 U8, the moons later officially received the Shakespearean names Cordelia and Ophelia. Voyager monitored the satellites for two weeks and then left the Uranus system.
Since then Cordelia and Ophelia have been lost -- until now.
Late last week, scientists from the University of Arizona, Cornell University and Wellesley College announced that they had re-discovered the lost moons of Uranus by examining images from the Hubble Space Telescope. The astronomers knew where to look thanks in part to telltale ripples at the edge of one of Uranus's rings.
A few weeks ago, Erich Karkoschka, a researcher with the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab, began to examine some Hubble photographs recorded in 1997. He electronically stacked dozens of images on top of each other, matching them pixel for pixel and allowing for the orbital motions of the moons estimated from the old Voyager data. Lo and behold, Ophelia popped clearly into view!
But Cordelia still was missing.
While Karkoschka was examining Hubble images for signs of the lost moons, Richard French, an astronomer from Wellesley College, and Phil Nicholson were analyzing stellar occultation data collected since 1977. Instead of looking for the moons directly, they hoped to find wavelike distortions in the shape of the rings that might be caused by the gravity of shepherd satellites. They found a telltale pattern of ripples at the edge of the epsilon ring. Reasoning that the ripples would move around the ring at rates matching the orbital motions of Cordelia and Ophelia, French and Nicholson precisely calculated the orbital periods of the two moons far better than the old Voyager data.
Their orbits predicted a position for Ophelia that was very close to the location Karkoschka measured in the Hubble images. French then provided Karkoschka with a prediction for Cordelia. When Karkoschka inspected the Hubble Space Telescope images, he found Cordelia exactly where French had suggested. The mystery of the missing moons was solved. "These discoveries illustrate well the fundamental workings of science," says Karkoschka, who discovered another of Uranus's faint moons in 1999 by examining archival Hubble images. Apparently, even old Hubble data can be valuable.
Uranus has 20 moons -more than any other planet in the Solar System.

New Images of Io and Europa

New images and work on telemetry shows that Io, the innermost of Jupiter's large moons, is the hottest of all. Tidal bulges in Io's crust are as high as a 30-story building. As the moon revolves around Jupiter the bulge moves, flexes the crust, and heats Io's interior like a paper clip bent rapidly back and forth. This is the source of energy for volcanoes that spew lava almost constantly. The plumes which rise 300 km into space are so large they can be seen from Earth by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Io is the closest of the Galilean satellites to Jupiter so it feels the strongest tides. Next in line is Jupiter's second big moon, Europa.
On the surface the two worlds couldn't be more different. Io is peppered with bubbling geysers and streams of steaming lava. Europa, on the other hand, is coated with a thick layer of ice 300 F below the freezing point of water.
Underground, the satellites have more in common. Although Europa is twice as far from Jupiter as Io, and thus experiences weaker tides, the icy moon is also heated by tidal flexing. If the ice beneath Europa's crust is melted as many researchers suspect, then Europa could harbor the largest ocean in the solar system.
The signatures of tidal stress are manifest in pictures of Europa released on March 6 by NASA/JPL and the University of Arizona. Numerous linear features in the center of the mosaic (above) and toward the poles were probably formed by tides strong enough to fracture Europa's icy surface. Some of these features extend for over 1,500 kilometers (900 miles).
Europa has volcanoes, too, but they're not hot. Cracks in Europa's crust sometimes allow mineral-laden water or slush to percolate to the surface. Water freezes instantly when it reaches the top leaving only telltale ridges that display a brown color caused by the mineral impurities.

Always know where you are

While Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax always knows just where she is - here - it isn't quite so simple on Roundworld. However, it is getting a bit more simple with the development of ESA's Global Positioning and Navigation Satellite System, dubbed GNSS.
The GNSS programme is being carried out in two stages: GNSS-1, the first generation system, based on signals received by the existing American GPS and Russian Glonass constellations, and GNSS-2 , the second generation, that will provide improved navigation and positioning services to civil users. Galileo will be Europe's contribution to GNSS-2.
Within GNSS-1, Europe is contributing EGNOS, the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System, aimed at augmenting the performance of GPS and Glonass in terms of precision and data integrity..
The system is based on use of ground infrastructure and three geostationary satellites equipped with dedicated navigation transponders to augment the positioning services currently offered by the GPS and Glonass systems
EGNOS's ground infrastructure will be deployed over more than 40 sites, mostly in Europe. The ground infrastructure for the pre-operational version has already been deployed at many sites around Europe: France, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom and at two sites outside Europe: Kourou (French Guiana) and Hartebeeshoek (South Africa).
The EGNOS system will be qualified at the end of 2003, although an EGNOS-like signal has since mid-February been transmitted from space, providing users with a GPS augmentation signal and enabling them to compute their positions to an accuracy of a few metres.

Stormy weather ahead

The NOAA Space Environment Center is forecasting a 70% chance of significant M-class solar flares from at least one of the two large sunspots currently visible on the solar disk., likely to produce solar flares and coronal mass ejections aimed toward Earth.
Intense M-class and X-class flares can overload electrical power grids and cause blackouts and satellites can be damaged or even destroyed when their electronics are saturated by charged particles from large flares.
A large and famous space storm in 1989 induced electrical currents on the ground that caused a failure in the Hydro-Quebec electric power system. This prevented 6 million people in Canada and the US from having electricity for more than 9 hoursas well as causing Earth's atmosphere to inflate - which dragged the NASA's Long Duration Exposure Facility satellite to a lower orbit earlier than expected

Weightless opportunity for students

ESA has launched a competition for 120 students to have the chance to experience weightlessness aboard a specially adapted Airbus aircraft
To gain a place on the campaign, students (over 18 years of age) are invited to submit, by 31 March, preliminary designs for experiments to be carried out in microgravity conditions. Shortlisted designs, to be announced in mid-April, will then be put through the final selection process and the winning entries will be announced on 1 June
The primary aim of this campaign is to provide an exceptional educational opportunity for European undergraduates to design their own microgravity experiments and fly them aboard the specially adapted Airbus A-300. A secondary goal is to generate a significant level of outreach and publicity to raise the profile of science and technology subjects in the eyes of young Europeans and stimulate local support for the student teams.
Details; http://www.estec.esa.nl/outreach/pfc

Huge Black Hole Found

The core of the Milky Way galaxy is filled with giant molecular clouds, the remnants of exploding stars, and mysterious filaments hundreds of light years long. At the center of this menagerie lies an object radio astronomers call Sagittarius A - a radio source that looks like a faint quasar. Scientists have long suspected that it is powered by a supermassive black hole with 2.6 million times the mass of our Sun.
A group of researchers led by Frederick K. Baganoff and colleagues from Pennsylvania State University has announced that a faint X-ray source, newly detected by Chandra, may be the long-sought X-ray emission from a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
"The luminosity of the X-ray source we have discovered already is a factor of five fainter than previously thought, based on observations from an earlier X-ray satellite," Baganoff said. "This poses a problem for theorists. The galactic center is a crowded place. If we were to find that most or all of the X-ray emission is not from Sagittarius A*, then we will have shown conclusively that all current models from Sagittarius A* need to be rethought from the ground up."

European Physics on Stage

A big push to publicise science and technology throughout Europe is being launched -"Physics on Stage" is launched by the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), with support from the European Union (EU). Other partners include the European Physical Society (EPS) and the European Association for Astronomy Education (EAAE). The problem is that as our need for such knowledge is increasing, so our take up of the subjects in schools, colleges and universities is declining rapidly.
The programme is part of the European Week for Science and Technology and will culminate in a Science Festival during November 6-11, 2000, at CERN, Geneva.
Physics on Stage" has been initiated in 22 European countries [2]. In each country, a dedicated National Steering Committee (NSC) is being formed which will be responsible for their own national programme
Website: http://www.estec.esa.nl/outreach/pos
In the UK: Dr Steven Chapman,
Secretary, Physics on Stage United Kingdom National Steering Committee
Institute of Physics
76 Portland Place
London,
W1N 3DH
Tel: +44 20 7 470 4924
Fax: +44 20 7 470 4848
e-mail: Steven.Chapman@iop.org

Even NEARer

A 15-second engine burn at 1 p.m. EST on March 3 brought NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft into a 200-kilometer (124-mile) orbit around Eros, giving the probe its best scientific look at the asteroid so far.
Moving at three miles an hour relative to Eros, NEAR is circling the rotating space rock three full times during the upcoming 200 km (124 mile) orbit which it will continue until April 1, when another short engine burn will gradually move it into a 100-kilometer (60-mile) orbit.

The New Fundamental

A new fundamental particle may have been discovered by Italian scientists. The new particle, weighing at least 50 times as much as a proton, could explain the long-running problem of all the missing matter which should be in our universe to properly explain the way it works.
The new particles, dubbed WIMPs (weakly interactive massive particles) are believed to interact only occasionally with all other matter, partly explaining why they have eluded detection before now. Their existence would also explain why the Universe behaves as if it contains about ten times more matter than can so far be accounted for - leading to some scientists populating it with myriad black holes.
The results from the Italian team, which has worked for three years underground at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, is doubted but will be properly revealed on Friday in California.
The team is led by Dr Rita Bernabei, of Rome University.

Firey Finale

Nasa is contemplating a dramatic end to the Galileo mission to Jupiter - a plunge into their the planet itself or one of its many moons. Launched from the shuttle in 1989, after a half billion mile journey and at a cost of £1.6b the satellite has proved one of the most successful in Nasa's history.
Most recently it has been concentrating on Io. In October last year the craft passed only 380 miles from the body, revealing dramatic volcanos, more than 100, some throwing lava miles into space. Last November the approach was to 186 miles, and that pass showed no cratering, leading to the theory that the volcanic activity was so profound that it constantly altered and re-formed the moon's surface.
Yesterday (Tuesday's) pass was the lowest yet, at 124 miles. . The volcanoes themselves are the hottest spots in the solar system (not counting the sun) with temperatures exceeding 1800 K. The plumes, which rise 300 km into space, are so large that the Hubble Space Telescope can see them from its low Earth orbit
Now fuel is running low, navigation equipment is failing and radiation encountered is twice spec.One problem is that Galileo sends back data very slowly - If all goes according to plan, the data from this latest pass will be transmitted to Earth over the next several months for processing and analysis. Already planned are two passes to Ganymede towards the end of next year, before a final decision on its last mission.

Eros first pictures.

After less than a week in orbit, NEAR has already returned dazzling pictures that have surprised and delighted researchers
"At first I was stunned speechless by the beauty of this asteroidal landscape," said Mark Robinson, a member of the NEAR imaging team from Northwestern University. "Once I got over that, the geology took over."
The first images from NEAR show that Eros has an ancient surface covered with craters, grooves, layers, house-sized boulders and other complex features.
"This is not just another rock floating out in space," continued Robinson. "There's a lot of neat geology going on."
There are tantalising hints that the asteroid has a layered structure, like a sheet of plywood." said Andrew Cheng, of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, who serves as the NEAR mission's lead scientist. "These layers appear to be very flat and appear to run end-to-end. This could come about if Eros was once part of a larger body, perhaps a fragment of a planet."
This idea fits the general picture that scientists have of asteroids. Most are concentrated in a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids are likely to be leftover pieces of a planet that tried to form 4.6 billion years ago when the solar system was young, but couldn't because of nearby Jupiter's disruptive gravitational field. Eros might be a fragment from a planetoid that coalesced long ago and later broke apart as a result of collisions with other asteroids.
Eros is heavily cratered," continued Robinson, "That means its surface is not young." Craters have probably accumulated on the surface of Eros for billions of years. Without weather on the dry, airless asteroid, there is nothing to erase or erode the ancient scars of impacts. As a result, Eros's surface is saturated with craters -- most of it, anyway.
Robinson noted that a strange feature on Eros, called the "saddle" by NEAR team members, is curiously devoid of cratering.
"Boulders ... I can see 1, 2, 3 ... at least 6 or 7 in this view right here," he said, pointing to one of the recent NEAR images (pictured below). "If you look in each image, it's the same thing -- there are dozens of them across the surface of the asteroid. These things are important because boulders are strewn out onto the surface during an impact. That makes them a natural drill hole. By analyzing the boulders we'll be able to learn more about what's inside of Eros."

Good Morning, Starshine…

Starshine is coming home, in a dramatic way. In June last year 87-lb beach-ball sized satellite designed to study the effect of solar activity on Earth's atmosphere was put into orbit via Shuttle.. The satellite, named Starshine is a hollow aluminium sphere covered with 1 inch-square mirrors. Observers have been tracking the ball for over 9 months by means of reflected sunlight.
Starshine was often visible to the naked eye in the evening sky from distances greater than 1000 miles, but its orbit is failing and eventually, the atmospheric drag will become too much and it re-enter the atmosphere, burning up like a slow bright meteor or fireball. Best estimate is that re-entry will be tomorrow (February 18) at about 07:07UT, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 14 hours.
The satellite was put up to study the way its orbit decayed, from which scientists will be able to deduce the extent and density structure of the upper atmosphere as we approach the peak of the sunspot cycle, in the middle of this year.

RAeS Lecture

There will be a lecture by Dr Henry McDonald, director of Nasa's Ames Research Centre at the Royal Aeronautical Society's HQ in Hamilton Place, London,W1, on Tuesday February 29, at 6pm. Admission free and all welcome (email to RAes helpful - conference@Raes.Org.UK

Starring Role

It seems unlikely but plans are being made for Mir to take a starring role in a film, as a new plan to extend the life of the space station emerges.
The plan is for a Russian novel, The Mark of Cassandra, to be filmed aboard the station at a cost of about $20m under the title, The Last Journey.
This is part of a plan put forward to rescue 3 the 14-year-old station by leasing it and turning it into a destination for billionaire tourists as well as a film location.

Here comes the sun, (or at least a bit of it)

-On Thursday (February 17) a medium-sized solar flare erupted from a sunspot group near the middle of the sun. It was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME) that appears to be headed directly for Earth. The CME could trigger beautiful aurorae and other geomagnetic activity when it passes by our planet, tomorrow (February 20).
Two M-class solar flares erupted in quick succession. Both events were unexpected as the sunspot groups they came from showed very little activity prior to flaring. The second flare, in particular, occurred near a small and apparently innocuous sunspot identified by the NOAA Space Environment Centre as active region # 8872. The eruption from 8872 was accompanied by a coronal "halo event." Halo events are coronal mass ejections aimed toward the Earth. As they loom larger and larger they appear to envelope the Sun, forming a halo around our star.
Coronal mass ejections excite geomagnetic storms, which have been linked to satellite communication failures. In extreme cases, such storms can induce electric currents in the Earth and oceans that interfere with or even damage electric power transmission equipment.. The leading edge of the February 17 CME could reach the Earth by February 19 or 20.

Eros date

With remarkably fitting timing the NEAR (Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) satellite went into orbit around the asteroid Eros, yesterday, February 14.
The craft's rockets fired for 57 seconds, slowing it to about a walking pace, so that it was travelling slowly enough to allow it to be captured by Eros's gravitational pull. The asteroid is 21 miles long and the meeting was about 160 million miles away from Earth. NEAR is the first craft ever to go into orbit around an asteroid, and it will stay for about a year, gathering information. Continuing the romance theme, one of the first images to arrive back on earth showed a heart shaped crater…

Clarke Award Shortlist

This year's shortlist for the Arthur C Clarke award have just been announced : Time by Stephen Baxter; The Bones of Time, by Kathleen Ann Goonan; Silver Screen by Justina Robson; Distraction by Bruce Sterling; A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge and Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Lost Japanese Rocket

Japan lost a $105m astronomical satellite yesterday when the M5 rocket launching it went spiralling out of control on launch from Kagoshima Space Centre. First thought was that some graphite was lost from the rocket's nozzle, exposing the fabric to heat damage.

Polar Lander?

Still no final decision on whether Mars Polar Lander is out there and trying to contact NASA or not. A total of fourteen different radio telescopes are now trying to track down any vestigial signals from the errant probe, while NASA continues to analyse all received radio signals to try to sift out anything which may come from the Lander, which had been thought lost. New commands were due to be sent to the lander from NASA's Deep Space Network around the clock on Tuesday and Wednesday, telling the spacecraft, if it is functioning, to reset its clock and send a signal to Earth. On Friday windows will open for the antennas in The Netherlands, England and Italy to begin listening. The antenna at Stanford may also listen during these windows.
The one-way light time from Earth to Mars is currently about 16 minutes. Mars is presently about 300 million kilometers (181 million miles) from Earth.

A Real Millenium Exhibition

From someone who knows when the Millenium really is, news of plans for a major exhibition to open on January 1. 2001 come in from Arthur C Clarke. Sir Arthur is planning a futuristic exhibition in collaboration with the UK Science Museum in London, DERA (The Defence Evaluation and Research Agency and the film industry. The show is planned for Sir Arthur's home town of Taunton in Somerset and is provisionally called "Arthur C Clarke's World of the Future.
The initial idea came from younger brother Fred, and the young SF author himself carried out physics experiments in the basement of the County Social Services department building when it was an educational establishment way back in the 1930s.
Planned for the show will be a floor dedicated to SF, including a section on 2001 A Space Odyssey, as well as extrapolations for our future in fact from the Science Museum and DERA scientists.
Even though he is now 82 and in a wheelchair hopes are high that Sir Arthur will be able to make the trip back from his home in Sri Lanka for the opening of the exhibition which will cost about £5m, mostly financed from sponsorship.

New Heatshield Test

Space probes are usually protected by rigid heat shields when making high-speed-approach landings on distant planets having an atmosphere, their descent slowed down by parachutes to reduce the impact. The Russian spacecraft Mars'96 for instance (launched in November 1996 but failed to reach its nominal orbit) carried two modules designed to land on Mars. They featured a new aerobraking system and a thermally protective shell, a densely packed inflating material and a pressurisation system.
A demonstration mission next week will evaluate the performance of this new technology. A Russian Soyuz/Fregat launcher, lifting off from the Kazakh steppe near Baikonur, will provide a low-cost flight opportunity for the test vehicle, which is equipped with the inflatable heat shield and a sensor package developed by DaimlerChrysler Aerospace (DASA). After four orbits around the Earth, the test vehicle will be powered by the launcher's upper stage to re-enter the atmosphere for a landing the next day about 1800 km north-west of the launch site.

Where there's beep there may be Mars

Stanford University's 150ft dish has picked up a radio beep which may be a gasp for recognition by the thought-lost Mars Polar Lander.
Engineers have gone back into the mission room to try again to contact the Lander, after analysis of signals received at the turn of the year from the direction of Mars, which were clearly artificial.
A fresh set of radio commands were sent Mars-ward on Tuesday. If there is a response it will take some time for the positive data to be processed.
"We need to conduct this test to rule out the possibility that the signal could be coming from the Polar Lander" said Richard Cook, project manager, emphasising that the possible contact could have been from several other sources.

Hubble Bubble, no more trouble

The Hubble space telescope is working perfectly again after the repair and upgrade mission by shuttle over Christmas.
All the equipment installed (new computer, solid-state recorder and fine guidance sensors as well as replacement gyroscopes) are at optimum, with the new systems allowing enhanced targeting and imaging.
As part of the recommissioning testing process an image of NGC2392 - now dubbed the Eskimo nebula because it looks like a face inside a fur lined hood, is spectacularly pin-sharp. The nebula was first observed by British astronomer William Herschel in 1787, but the new images have revealed for the first time that the 'hood' fur is made up of enormous comet-like bodies with their tails pointing away from the central star. The bright central feature of the 'face' is thought to be a bubble of material blown into space by the central star's wind of high-speed material.

A for Andromeda (Fiction)

Majel Roddenberry is acting as executive producer for a second SF series founded on ideas from the late Gene Roddenberry, still best known for Star Trek. The new series, which has been commissioned for at least two series is to be called Andromeda.
The 44 episodes will star Kevin Sorbo as Dylan Hunt. Production will be starting soon in Vancouver, Canada. Still to be cast is another main character, Beka, the female captain of the derelict space freighter Eureka Maru.
Gossip so far is that the pace of Andromeda will be much more ER than Star Trek. The series is about a sentient starship named Andromeda Ascendant which is part of the Earth-based galactic System Commonwealth of worlds. Andromeda Ascendant, with Hunt on board, gets caught in a black hole and is rescued 300 hundred years later by Beka and her ship. The series follows Hunt's efforts to reassemble the Commonwealth and unravel his past.

A for Andromeda (Fact)

Chandra's first X-ray picture of Andromeda has revealed more than 100 individual X-ray sources in the image. Most of them are thought to be binary star systems, but one was located precisely at the galactic center just where the black hole ought to be.
The black hole candidate in Andromeda is big -- 30 million times more massive than our Sun -- but it's not a record setter. Some active galaxies appear to harbor black holes in their nucleus that register between 100 million and a billion solar masses.
Andromeda's black hole appears to be remarkable for a different reason. Data from Chandra's advanced spectrometer showed that the temperature of its accretion disk was just one million degrees., Cool to X-ray astronomers.
Matter doesn't even register on an X-ray telescope until its temperature reaches about one million degrees. For comparison, the other sources in the Chandra image register about 10 million degrees. They are probably binary star systems in which a normal star orbits a neutron star or a small black hole. The normal star feeds matter to an accretion disk around its dense companion, resulting in X-ray emission from the hot disk. These systems weigh in at just a few to a few tens of solar masses. Theorists expected the accretion disk around the central massive black hole to be at least as hot and energetic as these lightweight systems.
One possibility is that the gas undergoes a large scale boiling motion which slows down the rate at which gas falls into the black hole.

Great Ball of Fire

Last week, one of the most dramatic meteors in 10 years streaked across the skies of the Yukon Territory in Canada. Witnesses reported two sonic booms, a foul odor, and sizzling sounds heard all the way from Alaska through northwestern Canada. Based on readings from defense satellites and seismic monitoring stations, scientists estimate that the meteor detonated with the energy of two to three kilotons of TNT
There was no major meteor shower on January 18. The Yukon fireball was probably what astronomers call a sporadic meteor. The inner solar system is filled with tiny dust particles that have bubbled off innumerable comets as they pass close to the Sun. These particles, called meteoroids, hit the Earth from random directions producing two or three sporadic meteors per hour every night.

Geoffrey Perry

FTL notes the death of Geoffrey Perry on January 18. Geoffrey Perry was a remarkable science teacher at Kettering Grammar School in the UK, and took the school to world prominence with his compelling interest in space which spilled over to the students, with whom he monitored most of the Soviet Rocket launches and orbits from 1957 and Sputnik to the manned missions of Soyuz and the entry of China into Space in 1978.
With the students Perry was the first, via the UK TV news station ITN, to break the news that the cosmonauts aboard Soyuz ll had died - monitoring their telemetry he saw their heartbeats stop.
He correctly predicted that the first historic handshake between astronauts and cosmonauts would in fact take place over Bognor Regis ( South coast UK) rather than Moscow as was claimed in the propaganda (It was delayed and happened in reality over the French coast), and also discovered the new Soviet launch site at Plesetsk (astonishing the US Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences and the US intelligence who knew nothing about it).
All this was achieved with a small receiver and aerial, hooked up to felt-tip pens to trace signals, watched over by relays of students.
He was made an MBE in 1973 and awarded the Jackson-Gwilt Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society - the £50 award went on a new antenna and pre-amplifier for the tracking station. Kettering honoured him last year by naming the Perry Science Centre of its Tresham Institute after him.
If any former Perry students read this, would they contact the editor, please.

Solar show

The European Space Agency and NASA spotted a huge solar flare on January 18, using the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). SOHO monitors solar activity from a permanent vantage point 1.5 million kilometers ahead of the Earth in a halo orbit around the L1 Lagrangian point. Unlike an Earthbound observer, it can see the Sun 24 hours a day. t maximum, the prominence was about 100 times wider than the Earth.
Solar activity will peak around the middle of the year 2000.

Trek Goss

Firstly Voyager seems likely to close at the end of the next season, with the long-distance starship getting home - that in itself will engender many stories - what, for example, of Seven of Nine?
Second, Paramount at present has no idea what, if anything, will replace Voyager on the small screen (no announcements about another TNG film either)
What is happening with 'The Franchise'?
Finally, another death, that Of Stephen Edward Poe. The co-author of The Making of Star Trek, died Thursday, Jan. 6, of leukemia. He was 63. Poe co-wrote the classsic 'how-to-create-and-produce-a-hit-TV-series' 1968 book under the pseudonym "Stephen E. Whitfield" with Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.
. Poe's last book was Vision of the Future: The Making of Star Trek: Voyager.

The Wrong sort of Comet

Spanish scientists now think that the ten melon sized iceballs which have fallen from the skies over Spain in the last few weeks are not the ejected contents of lavatories aboard passenger aircraft, as first thought, but are in fact debris from a comet of the space variety .

Volcano on Io

Last November . NASA's Galileo spacecraft flew by Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, and some of Mauna Kea Observatory's most powerful telescopes were poised to observe Io during the encounter. Volcanic activity on Io is so intense that hot spots can sometimes be seen from Earth by the infrared radiation they emit.
John Spencer (Lowell Observatory) and Glenn Orton (JPL) were using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility on Thanksgiving when they captured an image of a towering lava fountain arching 1.5 km above Io's surface. The eruption was so large that it was visible nearly 400 million miles away.
Catching these fountains was a one-in-500-chance observation," said Galileo scientist Dr. Alfred McEwen from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Astronomers making Earth-based telescopic observations see a bright spot like this one somewhere on Io only about 20 percent of the time, so the Galileo team was fortunate to catch one in its narrow field of view.
The biggest mystery about Io's volcanoes is why they're so hot," said Bill Smythe, a co-investigator on JPL's NIMS team in a 1999 interview. "At 1800 K, the vents are about 1/3 the temperature of the surface of the sun! Billions of years ago basaltic lava on Earth was about that hot, but now -- thanks to mixing in subduction zones -- terrestrial basalts have a lower melting point. Lavas we see now on Earth are about 300 K cooler than they used to be. It's very surprising to see lava flows on Io as hot as these ancient flows on Earth. Why? Simply because Io's soil has been reworked many, many times, so the melting temperature should be lower for the same reason that Earth's basalts melt at a lower temperature. It's a real puzzle.
"We thought all the lava flows were sulphurous, but sulphur vaporises at ~700K. The 1800 K regions have to be basaltic. Now the questions is 'are any of the lava flows sulphurous?' Galileo has detected areas on Io with temperatures between 300 and 600 K. That's about right for molten sulphur. But those could also be places where tiny volcanic vents at ~1800 K are surrounded by cold ground. From a distance the average temperature would appear to be 300 - 600 K.

Lunar spectacular

There is a lunar eclipse due tonight (January 20), visible in North America and Europe
A lunar eclipse takes place when the Moon passes through Earth's shadow. This can only happen when the Moon is full. The eclipse will begin when the moon is high in the sky over the Americas. The face of the Moon will begin to dim at about 10 p.m. in New York and 7 p.m. in Los Angeles. As seen from Western Europe and Africa, the eclipse won't begin until a few hours before dawn on January 21. (UK 4.05 and 5.22am) At totality the face of the Moon will likely have a deep coppery colour.
The Moon orbits the Earth every 29.5 days but it doesn't pass through the Earth's shadow each time it goes around. That's because the Moon's orbit is tilted with respect to the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. There are anywhere from 0 to 3 lunar eclipses (including partial and total) each year. The last total lunar eclipse visible from the United States occurred on Sept. 26, 1996. North Americans won't have another opportunity to see a total lunar eclipse until May 16, 2003. However, on July 16, 2000, Hawaii, Australia and Asia will see the longest total lunar eclipse in 140 years (since 1859). It will last 1 hour and 47 minutes.

Watch out there's a black hole about

Two international teams of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes in Australia and Chile have discovered the first examples of isolated stellar-mass black holes adrift among the stars in our galaxy.
All previously known stellar black holes have been found in orbit around normal stars, with their presence determined by their effect on the companion star. The two isolated black holes were detected indirectly by the way their extreme gravity bends the light from a more distant star behind them.
"These results suggest that black holes are common, and that many massive but normal stars may end their lives as black holes instead of as neutron stars," said David Bennett of the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN. Bennett presented his team's results yesterday in Atlanta at the 195th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The findings also suggest that stellar mass black holes do not require some sort of interaction in a double star system to form, but may also be produced in the collapse of isolated massive stars, as has long been proposed by stellar theorists.

Sunpot activity

The sunspot number is soaring, and the visible disk of the sun is peppered with spots. The largest sunspot group #8824 has a complex "beta-gamma-delta" magnetic field. This makes it a possible site for M-class and X-class solar flares. near the eastern limb of the solar disk, continues to produce solar flares. During the past 24 hours it has unleashed two C-class flares and two M-class flares.

After the clouded over disappointments for celestial spectacles for 1999, there is a chance that 2000 might turn over an unclouded sky then Quadrantid meteor shower might be what we have been hoping for. The shower started on December 28 to January 7, with a sharp maximum on January 4 at 0530 UT when as many as 200 shooting stars per hour might be seen. The peak occurs just a few days after the phase of the Moon is new. That means the sky will be dark, and viewing conditions should be excellent. No matter where you live, the best time to watch will be between midnight and 6 am local time on the morning of January 4.
The Quadrantids are the least well-known shower because the weather for viewing them is nearly always terrible, and their peak only lasts a few hours. Because of this very little is known, not even their source. Because of this, amateur observations of the Quadrantids could prove especially valuable to professional astronomers who would like to know when to look for the source of the meteors. If you're interested in observing the Quadrantids and reporting your data to NASA, please visit Quadrantids.com for details.

Spacewalk triumph

Michael Foale and Claude Nicollier successfully spacewalked for nearly a record-breaking time to replace the aged computer aboard Hubble, in spite of the handicap of the awkward gloves.

Roll Over Beethoven

Astronomy is ending the year with a bang as scientists across the world take advantage of a unique bit of teamwork that quickly located a gamma-ray burst, one of the most violent events in the universe. As a result, several major observatories, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, were able to swing into position within hours or days of the blast and discover its X-ray, optical and radio counterparts for the burst. One astronomer has nicknamed the blast Beethoven because it fell on the anniversary of the composer's birth (December 16, 1770). Its official name is the more prosaic GRB 991216.
One of the leading theories for the cause of gamma ray bursts is the collapsar or failed supernova theory. A super-massive star, after burning all of its nuclear fuel, starts to explode as a supernova, but the overlying atmosphere is too massive to blow off, and the explosion collapses, forming jets of matter that burrow out through the poles and then rip the star apart.

Chandra and Cassiopeia

A team of astronomers led by Dr. John Hughes of Rutgers University , New Jersey,USA has used Chandra to explain how silicon, iron, and other elements were produced in supernova explosions. An X-ray image of Cassiopeia A (Cas A), the remnant of an exploded star, reveals gaseous clumps of silicon, sulfur, and iron expelled from deep in the interior of the star
"During their lives, stars are factories that take the simplest element, hydrogen, and convert it into heavier ones," he said. "After consuming all the hydrogen in their cores, stars begin to evolve rapidly, until they finally run out of fuel and begin to collapse. In stars 10 times or so more massive than our sun, the central parts of the collapsing star may form a neutron star or a black hole, while the rest of the star is blown apart in a tremendous supernova explosion." Supernovae are rare, occurring only once every 50 years or so in a galaxy like our own.
Chandra data made it possible to identifyi the make-up of the various knots and filaments of stellar material visible in Cas A, and infer where in the exploding star the knots had come from.
The most compact and brightest knots were mostly silicon and sulfur, with little or no iron. This pointed to an origin deep in the star's interior where the temperatures had reached three billion degrees during the collapse and resulting supernova. Elsewhere, they found fainter features that contained significant amounts of iron as well as some silicon and sulfur - produced even deeper in the star, where the temperatures during the explosion had reached four to five billion degrees.
When Hughes and his collaborators compared where the compact silicon-rich knots and fainter iron-rich features were located in Cas A, they discovered that the iron-rich features from deepest in the star were near the outer edge of the remnant. This meant that they had been flung the furthest by the explosion that created Cas A. Even now this material appears to be streaming away from the site of the explosion with greater speed than the rest of the remnant.
Websites: http://chandra.harvard.edu
http://chandra.nasa.gov

The Real Hitchhiker's Guide?

In a spooky life-imitating-art scenario, Douglas Adams, (author of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books, radio, TV series etc etc and signer of books) is launching a real guide to life the universe and everything on the web, backed by chip manufacturer Intel.
When fully up and running the site will allow registration and then uploading of comments about any subject - so far entries range from the taste of Marmite to diving in China.
Website: http://www.h2g2.com

Astro/exo-biology

The British National Space Centre has called for more work on what it calls astro-biology (what most of us already call exo-biology). A recent report calls for more co-ordination amongst specialists.

At Last!

Discovery finally launched yesterday (December 20), on its mission to replace the fine guidance sensor and the computer on the Hubble Space Telescope. The launch from Cape Canaveral was successful after nine postponements, and the Discovery crew is scheduled to make three spacewalks for a total of about six hours.

XMM Success

The European Space Agency's new X-ray space telescope has reached its operational orbit less than a week after being launched from Kourou on December 10. The XMM spacecraft, which is being controlled by teams at the ESA's Space Operations Centre, ESOC in Darmstadt Germany, is functioning very well.
The early orbit phase came to an end on December 16 after XMM had been manoeuvred to its final orbit. This required four firings of its thrusters, on successive passages at apogee, in order to increase XMM's velocity, thus elongating its orbit and raising the perigee from 826 km to 7,365 km. One burn was then made to fine tune the apogee to around 114,000km. The spacecraft, being tracked by ground stations in Perth, Kourou and Villafranca, is now circling the Earth in this highly elliptical orbit once every 48 hours.
Progress on calibration should allow the telescope to target and take "firstlight pictures" of its first X-ray sources next March.

Ariane Launch success

Arianespace successfully performed the first commercial launch of Ariane 5 today, placing the European Space Agency's XMM scientific satellite into a highly accurate orbit, fromthe Guiana Space Centre, Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The XMM satellite was placed into an elliptical orbit: with a perigee of 827km an apogee of 113,946 km and an inclination of 40 degrees. The European Space Agency's XMM (X-ray Multi-Mirror) satellite was built by Dornier Satellitensysteme, which is part of the DaimlerChrysler Aerospace (DASA) group. Equipped with three telescopes, it will perform X-ray astronomy missions during its operational design lifetime of more than ten year s. XMM is the largest scientific satellite ever built in Europe, weighing almost 4,000 kg (8,800 lb) and stretching 10 meters high (33 ft). websites: www.arianespace.com/news_livevideo.html news at www.arianespace.com

Discovery launch delayed

The servicing mission (SM3A) to replace the six gyroscopes on the Hubble Space Telescope has been delayed several times. Originally planned for December 6, it was subsequently rescheduled to the 9th and 11th. However, a dented main fuel line in Discovery's engine compartment was discovered, and Shuttle managers decided it needs to be replaced. The replacement work will take about three days, and launch is now scheduled for no earlier than December 16 (21.18 EST websites: http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/status/stsstat/current.htm UK HST web site in Cambridge: http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/HST/

Leicester takes off

The first space centre for schools to be opened by NASA outside the USA was opened yesterday (December 7) by the UK Education Secretary David Blunkett in Leicester, near Birmingham.
Dedicated to the Challenger mission and its seven astronauts who perished just after take-off, the centre will offer school groups of 36 at a time the chance to take part in simulated space missions to observe comets or travel to Mars. The children take the roles of astronauts, engineers, scientists or mission controllers to launch and run missions for about two hours at a time, led by special teachers.
Other exhibits at the centre, due to open just after the Millenium (Spring 2001) include a museum, planetarium and space research laboratory.
Mr Blunkett joined in a cometary mission as crew communications officer, using braille, as he is blind.

Lander Hopes fade

Nasa has all but abandoned hope of making contact with the Mars Polar Lander, after the last chance of making radio contact went by without success yesterday. Engineers will try for the next two weeks but have very little hope.
While the Climate Orbiter loss in September was quickly ascribed to the mix-up over metric and imperial measurements, this time there is no clear reason for the loss, which may be down to something as simple as a landing on a very uneven patch of land which caused the craft to topple right over.
However the loss of the $165 billion craft is a severe blow. And the reason for the failure may not be known until man finally reaches the planet.

RAeS Honours Geophysicist

The Royal Astronomical Society has awarded its annual Blackwell Prize for an outstanding PhD thesis on a topic in geophysics to Dr Mark Muller, who studied in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He will receive his £1,000 award and talk about his work at the Royal Astronomical Society's meeting in London on Friday ( December 10). Dr Muller's research throws new light on the details of the process that results in the Earth's crust being constantly renewed as molten rock wells up at mid-ocean ridges from the mantle below. He travelled to the Southwest Indian Ridge in the Indian Ocean on board the British research ship RRS Discovery to carry out seismic experiments on the sea floor in a place where the crust is spreading very slowly, and discovered that it is thinner than the crust formed anywhere else in the world's ocean basins. It is also broken up into segments that are typically shorter than those formed in other places where crust formation is going on.

XMM

The XMM satellite is due to be launched on Friday by ESA by Ariane 5 from Kourou in French Guiana. The satellite uses a new focussing system to offer faster and more powerful X-ray observation of the universe.
Previously X-ray satellites had to be focussed by reflecting the beam of a polished surface so that the rays struck the surface at a very oblique angle, while the new system creates a barrel open at both ends and lined with a polished surface. When the rays hit this at an acute angle them are reflected to a focus beyond the end of the barrel on one of 58 barrel shaped mirrors, located inside eachother like russian dolls.This system was invented by Hans Wolter, a german physicist.
XMM carries three such telescopes to make an all-up weight of nearly four tonnees and it is 30ft long. Its orbit will be eccentric, ranging from 4,000 miles to 63,000 miles.

Jodrell Bank upgrade

The University of Manchester has just been awarded a grant from the Joint Infrastructure Fund (JIF) to fund a £2m upgrade of its world famous Lovell Telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory. The improvements in both sensitivity and frequency range will extend the operational life of the telescope, taking it into a second half-century at the forefront of astronomical research with as much promise and potential as when it was first built.
The University of Manchester's giant 76-metre (250-ft) Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell Bank is probably the most famous working scientific instrument in the UK. For over 40 years, the telescope, still the second largest fully-steerable radio telescope in the world, has played a major role in astronomical research due to its large collecting area and great flexibility. Equipped with state-of-the-art receiver systems, the telescope is now 30 times more sensitive than when it was built. In recent years it has played a leading role in many fields of astronomy, including the detection and study of a new population of pulsars and the discovery of the first gravitational lens. Much of its research is funded by the Particle Physics and Research Council (PPARC). It is also currently attracting great public interest through its participation in the most sensitive search ever for signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Website: http://www.jb.man.ac.uk

Tipsy Hubble

The mission to replace the gyros on Hubble will lift off tomorrow (December 11) Four of the six gyros have failed on the space telescope, which has been in safe mode since the failure of the fourth on November 15, with consequencial loss of operations. The mission will replace all six gyros allowing the telescope to return to normal science operations and providing redundancy for the rest of the telescope's lifetime. In addition, other hardware maintenance will take place. This will include replacement of the telescope's central computer with a faster, larger memory machine, repair of the thermal insulation jacket surrounding the telescope structure, replacement of some data storage and transmission hardware, and new voltage-temperature control kits for Hubble's batteries. The mission will last 9 days, and 4 spacewalks (each lasting 6 hours) are planned.
The mission will replace all six gyros allowing the telescope to return to normal science operations and providing redundancy for the rest of the telescope's lifetime. In addition, other hardware maintenance will take place. This will include replacement of the telescope's central computer with a faster, larger memory machine, repair of the thermal insulation jacket surrounding the telescope structure, replacement of some data storage and transmission hardware, and new voltage-temperature control kits for Hubble's batteries. The mission will last 9 days, and 4 spacewalks (each lasting 6 hours) are planned.

Big Astronomy!

British radio astronomers have used a telescope the size of the earth to peer into the heart of a nearby galaxy where they have found the scattered remains of stars that have torn themselves apart in catastrophic explosions. These remnants contain the heavy elements which are the building blocks for life The highly detailed images, from one of the largest radio astronomy experiments ever performed, will be presented at the December 10 meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society. The astronomers are led by Dr. Alan Pedlar and Dr. Tom Muxlow of the Jodrell Bank Observatory (University of Manchester), and Dr. Karen Wills of Sheffield University. Using a collection of 20 radio telescopes spaced right around the earth, the team have produced an image of unprecedented detail of the galaxy known as M82. They found bright remnants of exploding stars and, comparing them with images taken many years ago, have found these shells of gas are expanding at up to 20,000 km every second. The youngest object they found to be only 35 years old.
The technique of combining the signals from radio telescopes spaced across continents results in very detailed pictures of the sky. The British astronomers have performed their observations with one of the largest ever collections of telescopes, making, in effect one telescope 12,000 km across. Their maps of the sky are so detailed that they can see objects only 0.2 light years wide at the distance of M82 (10 million light years). The pictures are 30 times more detailed than can be obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope, and as Dr. Mike Garrett (another member of the observing team) from the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe said. "This is equivalent to being able to read a newspaper in London from the Netherlands!"
The astronomer's target was the nearby starburst galaxy M82. Starburst galaxies, containing many billions of stars, are disturbed and are undergoing a rapid phase of star creation. Most new stars are quite small and live a long time like our local example, the Sun. But a small number of new stars are huge and evolve very rapidly - living for only a few million years or so. As Dr. Phil Diamond, director of the MERLIN/VLBI National Facility put it "These giant stars live fast and die young". So, paradoxically, the signature of such star-birth is the explosive death of massive stars.
Websites:http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/news/pr9903.html
http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/merlin.

New chance to view

The Leonid meteor storm was a rare treat for many skywatchers in Europe and the Middle East, but a bit disappointing in other parts of the world. If you missed the Leonid display because of poor weather, or perhaps because you live in the wrong place, there's still one more chance in 1999 to see a good meteor shower: the Geminids.
The shower officially began on December 7, but it doesn't peak until the morning of the 14th around 3 a.m. PST (1100 UT). Unlike the Leonids, the Geminid's broad maximum lasts nearly a full day, so observers around the globe have a good chance to see the show. At its peak the Geminids could produce as many as one shooting star every 30 seconds.

The first Geminid meteors suddenly appeared in the mid-1800's. Those early showers were unimpressive, boasting a mere 10-20 shooting stars per hour. Since then, however, the Geminids have grown in intensity until today it is one of the most spectacular annual showers. In 1998 observers counted as many as 140 per hour . Sky-watchers with clear skies should see at least that many this year if the Geminids continue to intensify
Website: http://www.Geminids.com

Polar Lander

Still no news at the time of writing from the Mars Polar Lander

RAeS Recognition

The Royal Aeronautical Society today announced that one of the three honorary fellowships awarded this year is to go to Dr Rene Collette, formerly the director of the Space Applications Programme for ESA, for his great contribution to the development of space communications in ESA. The award will be presented by the RAeS president, Tony Edwards, at its London HQ on Thursday December 9, just before the 88th annual Wilbur and Orville Wright lecture, this time to be delivered by Brian Jones, Breitling Orbiter 3 Project manager and pilot.

Cyberspace link with Mars

If Nasa's Polar lander lands successfully on Mars tonight (December 3) then almost immediately everyone reading this will be able to have a listen to the Red Planet.
Not only sound, but weather reports and scientific data will all be available on websites from Nasa, which is expecting a huge hit rate - over one billion are planned for over the three months of the mission (when Mars Pathfinder landed two years ago there were 33 million hits in one day).
Sound is being recorded on a pea-sized microphone used on Earth in hearing aids, linked to the same computer chip used in talking toys. The sounds will take 14 minutes and four seconds to reach Earth, and so far no one has any idea whether there will be any noises at all. The modest but exciting experiment has been sponsored by The Planetary Society.
When the probe arrives tonight it will fire two microprobes into the polar surface about ten minutes before landing itself. These probes will impact at 400mph and should bury themselves up to two or three feet deep. They are there to search for traces of water.
Links: http://www.marslander.jpl.nasa.gov
http://www.planetary.org

Britain to save the World

…well, maybe. The British National Space Centre has startled government science minister Lord Sainsbury into starting to plan for a centre to track and destroy any comets which may threaten the planet.
The centre, which may be sited in Northern Ireland, would be tasked with preventing a danger said to be statistically more likely than a major nuclear accident and which would be much more devastating globally.
The UK has spent billions reducing the risk of a serious nuclear accident to less than one in every million years. By contrast, said the BNSC, an observatory would cost about half a million to set up and about the same each year to run.
A similar project is already running in America and two telescopes for the same task are being constructed in Japan.
(So far no statements on what actually to do if one is spotted)

Ozone hole - cold spell in the European stratosphere?

On Tuesday 30 November 1999 the European Space Agency's ERS-2 remote sensing satellite detected abnormally low ozone levels over north western Europe. Above the UK, Belgium, Netherlands and Scandinavia ozone levels were nearly as low as those normally found in the Antarctic. Individual point measurements made from the ground in the Netherlands confirm that local values were almost 2/3 of the normal level at this time of year.
The ozone layer protects our planet from potentially harmful ultraviolet sunlight. A thinning in the ozone layer results in an increase of the amount of ultra-violet radiation. At this time of the year at our latitudes, however, the sun does not rise high enough above the horizon to deliver a significant amount of harmful ultraviolet light.

First Sighting of a New Planet of another Star

Two American astronomers have obtained the first-ever confirmation by light sensing of a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley using the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea on Hawaii detected a wobble in the star called HD 209458. This star, known only by number, is almost a million billion miles - 153 light years- 47 parsecs - from us in Pegasus. They could calculate the orbit and mass from this wobble and then Greg Henry, of Tennessee State University operated the Fairborn Observatory cluster of remote controlled telescopes on the Patagonian mountains of Arizona to observe the transit of the planet across its star, by sensing the dimming as the planet crossed between it and the telescope.
The planet is a gas giant, extremely hot and inhospitable to any life similar to us. It is about two thirds the mass of Jupiter but it is two thirds larger.
.Until now, none of the 18 other extrasolar planets Marcy and Butler have discovered has had its orbital plane oriented edge-on to Earth so that the planet could be seen to transit the star, nor have any of the other planets discovered by other researchers.

http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast14nov99_1.htm

Reminder Just a reminder to watchout for the Leonid shower at 2.08 a.m. on November 18, give or take 5 minutes, as the time for the peak of the display. This year up to 200 flashes an hour are predicted by meteor shower watchers, although no-one expects anything like the spectacular storm of 1966, when the rate reached 40 a second for a brief period. The Leonids, so named because they seem to originate from that zodiacal sign, are remnants of the tail of the Temple Tuttle comet. Ooops, the sequel It turns out that for nine months Nasa was talking to the Mars Climate Orbiter in feet and inches, while it replied in metric. No-one noticed this, which is why the spacecraft missed Mars The error has be dealt with says Nasa, for Mars Polar Orbiter, due to touch down on December 3. Japanese Rocket Fails Japan's second attempt at launching a satellite has failed. The H2 rocket, carrying a satellite which was to help air traffic control and weather observations had to be destroyed by ground control after it veered off course. The main engine cut out after blastoff, then the second lost thrust, so mission control at Tanegashiima SpaceCentre, SW Japan, aborted, and it fell into the sea about 700 miles south of Japan. This is the second H2 failure, the first being in February last year. Each launch costs about 19billion yen, about twice the cost of an ESA or USA launch Looking up A new meteor shower is a possibility tomorrow night (November 11). There is a prediction that an entirely new shower will be visible tomorrow, emerging out of the Plough, sourced by a comet discovered earlier this year, Linear. The exact time to look will be 19.43GMT, when it will be dark enough over Europe to make the phenomenon visible, although at that time the Plough is low in the sky. The more reliably appearing Leonids are due on November 17 and may make up for a non-appearance. Competition A while ago in databank we listed details of competitions for young people being run by ESA, to stimulate interest in the Agency and in space. The winners have just been announced and are: Draw me a Telescope This competition was open to schoolchildren aged 8 to 12, from schools in the 14 ESA member states. Classes got together to produce a drawing of a telescope. Out of over 350 entries received in the month the competition was running, one per member state was selected, and will be included in the official XMM logo. This logo will be displayed for the first time on the fairing of the Ariane-5 rocket on the day it launches the XMM spacecraft. ESA is inviting one child per country, representing the winning class, to French Guiana to see the launch. The winners belong to the following schools: AUSTRIA : Bundesgymnasium, Biondekgasse 6, A-2500-Baden bei Wien BELGIUM : Gesubsideerde Vrije Basisschool, Sint-Lodewijkscollege,Ezelstraat 86, B-8000- Brugge DENMARK : Nordstrandsskolen, Ålegårdsvænget 23, DK-2791-Dragor FINLAND: Mäntysalon Koulu, Havumäen Tie 7, FIN-01820-Klaukkala FRANCE : Ecole du Vieil Orme, 110, rue du Vieil Orme, F-78120-Rambouillet GERMANY: Gerhart Hauptmann Schule, Goethestrasse 99, D-54347-Griesheim ITALY: Class 4C, Scuola Elementare "5 giornate", Viale Mugello, 5 - I-20137-Milano IRELAND : North Dublin National School Project, Church Avenue, Classnevin, Dublin 9 NORWAY : School class 6A, Kringsjå skole, Sognsveien 218, N-0864-Oslo THE NETHERLANDS : International School of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 980, NL-1180-AX -Amstelveen SPAIN: 6A Primaria, Colexio Apóstol Santiago (Jesuitas-Vigo), Calle Sanjurjo Badia no. 79, E-Vigo SWEDEN: Hubertusgården, Class 3, Spårsnögatan 66, S-226 52-Lund SWITZERLAND: Ecole Primaire de La Roche, Classe 4 P, CH-1634-La Roche UNITED KINGDOM: Class 6G-23, The School of St. Helen and St. Katherine Faringdon Road, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 1BE What's new Mr Galileo ? Open to youngsters aged 13 to 15. Classes had to write in English, the international language of space, a one-page vision of astronomy and its benefits for humanity. In one month ESA received and assessed over 100 essays. The winning classes, one per member state, will be invited to Kourou to visit the Guiana Space Centre, Europe's spaceport, to witness first-hand the final preparations for the XMM launch. And the winning classes are : AUSTRIA: Bundesrealgymnasium, Keplerstrasse 1, A-8020-Graz BELGIUM: Lycée Emile Jacqmain, Rue Belliard 135A, 1040-Bruxelles FINLAND: Helsingin Suomalainen Yhteiskoulu, Issonnevantie 8, FIN-00320- Helsinki FRANCE : Collège Buffon, 16, boulevard Pasteur, F-75015- Paris GERMANY: Ignaz Kögler Gymnasium, Lechstrasse 6, D-86899-Landsberg A. Lech ITALY: Istituto Michelangelo Buonarroti, Via Seminario, 12, I-37122- Verona IRELAND: Malahide Community School, Dublin NORWAY: Enebakk Ungdomsskole N-1912- Enebakk SPAIN: Colegio El Ave Maria, Calle Campamento 55, E-46035-Benimamet (Valencia) SWEDEN: Hökarängsskolan, Fagersjövägen 18, S-123 58-Farsta SWITZERLAND: Cycle d'Orientation du Gibloux, Farvagny THE NETHERLANDS: Niftarlake College, Pauwenkamp 151, NL-3607-GK-Maarssen UNITED KINGDOM: Haggerston School for Girls, Weymouth Terrace, Shoreditch, London E2 8LS Over 450 university students in Amsterdam Between 4 and 8 October, at ESA's invitation, 463 university students from all over Europe attended the 50th IAF (International Astronautical Federation) congress, in Amsterdam, alongside over 2000 space experts, scientists, engineers and managers. For the first time, a significant number of students were given the opportunity to follow the various sessions and to exchange views and ideas with experts from all over the world. The interest and enthusiasm the students demonstrated throughout the congress were rewarded with a prize draw at a special student social event. Prizes were drawn by ESA's Director General, Antonio Rodotà, who also gave a keynote address to the students. Third prize was a special Internet account, second prize a trip to Kourou to witness an Ariane launch, and first prize a trip to Rio de Janeiro to attend the 51st IAF congress next year. The lucky winners were: Luigi Adamo, University of Palermo, Italy - 3rd prize Joost van Leeuwen, TU Delft, the Netherlands, 3rd prize Wouter Jonker, TU Delft, the Netherlands, 3rd prize Mario Roberto Carraro, University of Bologna, Italy, 3rd prize Raffaele de Amicis, University of Bologna, Italy, 3rd prize Charly Pache, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, 2nd prize Erik Wouters, TU Munich, Germany, 1st prize Stephan Ullmann, TU Munich, Germany, 1st prize A true success story The 50th IAF Congress also saw the presentation of prizes to the winners of another contest launched by ESA in November 1998). Dubbed SUCCESS (for Space Station Utilisation Contest Calling for European Students' IdeaS), the contest was designed to introduce students and their ideas to space and non-space industries to stimulate potential for future industrial research and technology development on the International Space Station. ESA received 103 experiment proposals from 126 students, in Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, spanning the fields of technology, life sciences, physics, materials science, and Earth observation. Under the aegis of ESA's Director for Manned Spaceflight and Microgravity programmes, Jörg Feustel-Büechl, prizes were awarded to: 1st prize : José Mariano López-Urdiales, Fernando Mancebo-Ordóñez, Daniel Meizoso-Latova and Pablo Valls-Moldenhauer, Instituto Universitario "Ignacio da Riva", Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain. 2nd prize - Paolo Ariaudo, Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II", Italy. 3rd prize - Alexander Roger and Anna Glennmar, University of Glasgow, UK. The Spanish students will each be granted a 3-month fellowship at ESA's research and technology centre ESTEC, to work on their experiments and get ready to test them on a parabolic flight campaign. The Italian student won a laptop computer, while the British students will be able to choose a trip to either KSC to attend a Shuttle launch or to Kourou to witness an Ariane launch.

More Chandra Successes NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has made an extraordinary image of Centaurus A, a nearby galaxy noted for its explosive activity. The image shows X-ray jets erupting from the center of the galaxy over a distance of 25,000 light years. Also detected are a group of X-ray sources clustered around the nucleus, which is believed to harbor a supermassive black hole. The X-ray jets and the cluster of sources may be a byproduct of a titanic collision between galaxies several hundred million years ago. According to Dr. Giuseppina Fabbiano, of Harvard-Smithsonian, "The Chandra image is like having a whole new laboratory to work in. Now we can see the main jet, the counter jet, and the extension of the jets beyond the galaxy. It is gorgeous in the detail it reveals," she said. Io close encounter The closest-ever image of Jupiter's moon Io, taken during a daring flyby of the volcanic moon by NASA's Galileo spacecraft on October 10, 1999, shows a lava field near the center of an erupting volcano Visible in the image are new lava flows from the volcanic center named Pillan, an area with erupting lava hotter than any known eruption that occurred on Earth within billions of years. Scientists will be studying this image to determine the characteristics of the eruption, along with other data due to be sent back by the spacecraft in coming weeks. Roton hit rate Public interest in the Roton flight test programme has soared since its first successes were reported (see earlier data banks).

Roton envelope expanding Rotary Rocket Company's Roton ATV (Atmospheric Test Vehicle) approach and landing demonstrator made its first translational (forward) flight in the envelope expansion flight program, flying4,300 feet along a Mojave airport runway, at 07:23 am PDT, last Tuesday. The 65 feet tall by 22 feet diameter conical vehicle was piloted by Dr. Martin Sarigul-Klijn, Roton Chief Engineer, with Brian Binnie, Roton Flight Test Director, as copilot. The flight, the second in the envelope expansion flight test program and the third flight overall, was a low altitude translational flight south to north along Runway 30-12 at Mojave. This flight was to demonstrate the ability of the Roton ATV to fly at varying speeds under full control in a forward direction--exactly the same mode of flying that would be needed by a returning space vehicle maneuvering to land at an airport. In technical terms, the test was to investigate the longitudinal stability and control characteristics of the Roton ATV in forward flight. During the test, the ATV reached a maximum altitude of 75 feet above the Mojave runway and a maximum ground speed of about 53 miles per hour and flew a total of 4,300 feet along the runway. Observers along the flight path noted that "The ATV thundered past them like an express train--a truly awesome experience!" After the translation portion of the flight, the pilots used their remaining fuel allowance to maintain a sustained, controlled, hover before touching down gently, once again demonstrating the ATV's ability to execute precision, soft, landings. The total test duration from rotor start to rotor stop was 9 minutes 45 seconds. The total flight time was 3 minutes 47 seconds, of which 1 minute 50 seconds was in forward flight and 1 minute 57 seconds was spent in hover at the end of the flight.

Pratchett Stats Some Terry Pratchett stats: TP is the decade's best-selling living fiction author. World sales exceed 17 million - one in 50 sold in the UK chain W H Smiths is by him. Discworld books have been translated into 27 languages. Over the last six and a half years, nearly half - three years - TP has been in the Sunday Times top 10 bestseller list (169 weeks from 1/1/93 to 21/6/99) (see Read Out for reviews of The Fifth Elephant and Carpe Jugulum)

London-New York in one hour It won't be instantaneous but it will be the next best thing for now, to instant intercontinental travel. Aerospace engineers are working on the next generation of fast passenger travel craft, to be powered by scramjet, and which are likely to fly four times as fast as Concorde. Engineers at DERA (Defence Evaluation and Research Agency) at Farnborough, UK (Home of the two-yearly International Air Show) are working with the University of Queensland on developing a project called Hyshot. The first test will feature a test scramjet mounted in the nose of a rocket donated by US company Astrotech, which will be launched from the Woomera Rocket site 300 miles north of Adelaide. The booster will take the rocket to 200 miles, then on re-entry the scramjet will fire at about 20 miles and allow performace to be assessed for the first ime. At present jet engines only function - even at supersonic speed - if the airflow through them is slowed. A system of turbines compresses the airstream, which is then mixed with fuel and ignited, and the exhaust from this is the propellant. A scramjet is a straight ductwith no moving parts in which the airflow stays supersonic all the time. It is the high initial speed and special inlet which compresses and heats incoming air, which is then mixed with fued, usually hydrogen, and burned to maintain velocity. The problem so far is that airflow will go subsonic at the slightest reason, and work has been progressing on inlet design to deal with this problem, plus increasing manoeverability - at present the inlet problem has constrained a maintained fixed angle to the flightpath at all times, which would be practically limiting.

Pie in the sky? It may be a great accomplishment in mathematics, but to us it merely seems deeply sad -two Japanese scientists, Dr Yasumasa Kanada and Dr Daisuke Tajahashi of Tokyo Un iversity have calculated Pi to 206,158,430,000 decimal places.

Number six? In at number six of the most memorable TV characters of all time is Mr Spock as played by Leonard Nimoy. The list was compiled by American TV guide magazine. Interestingly, the woman who helped bring Spock to life, by backing the making of Star Trek all those years ago at her Desilu studios in Hollywood beats him to third place - Lucille Ball is third most memorable for Lucy Ricardo. Also of an SF bias is the woman who leatherly karate kicks her way in to the number eight place, Dame Diana Rigg for Mrs Emma Peel, of The Avengers.

Arianespace thriving Arianespace continues to thrive, having just signed its tenth new launch contract this year. Signed on October 12 was a contract for Newskies, to launch NSS-7 by Ariane 4 or 5 towards the end of next year, on completion of construction by Lockheed Martin. This will be a largish satellite, weighing 4,600kg at liftoff. This latest contract takes Arianespace to a contracted schedule for 43 satellites - worth $3.7billion

Housekeeping? Near space is getting messy - so far man in space in orbit around Earth has not been of the tidiest mien. This means that now there are huge amounts of stuff (stuff again) in orbit, getting in the way. Radar and optical telescopes regularly track over 10,000 objects in space. The number they don't because they are from 1 - 10cm in size is huge - estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000. The ISS will need special shields - about 200 of them, to protect against impact with any one of these particulates or larger. Going on at present in Darmstadt, Germany is the 17th annual meeting of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Co-ordination Committee which tries to keep track of all the stuff and set up rules on disposal of spacecraft in geostationery orbit, going into re-entry, dealing with the Leonids and other showers . Their deliberations will feed through to the UN's committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS).

Chandra Shock Horror Probe The Chandra X-ray telescope has revealed what astronomers are calling 'shocking' images of the nebula Eta Carina. Three years ago Hubble revealed that the star was blowing off massive amounts of material, but it seemed it was not a supernova, even though it certainly looked like one. Now X-ray images have confused the astrophysicists - Dr Fred Seward of the Harvard Smithsonian Centre - 'I expected to see a strong point source with a little diffuse emission cloud around it. Instead there is just the opposite, a bright cloud of diffuse emission and much less radiation from the centre The new images show an outer horseshoe shaped ring about two light years in diameter, a hot inner core about three light years across and a hot central source less than a light month across, which is thought to be the superstar which is driving the whole show. The outer ring points to an earlier explosion over a millenium ago. It seems that all three structures are shock waves showing up as matter rushing away at supersonic speeds, and with temperatures ranging from 60millionK in the centre to 3millionK at the edge..

Io, everybody's favourite resort, sends a postcard Since everyone who is anyone in SF calls in on Io for at least part of their plot these days (rule of writing SF number 24) it is nice to know that we will soon know about bit more about how it really is. Galileo flew over Io at a height of only 380 miles ( 611kilometers) on Sunday for the closes look yet. Transmission and image processing times permitting, the first postcards from Io should be available next month - watch this space. (Galileo was 598million K from Earth at the time, and another even closer fly-by is planned for next month - altitude only 300K (186 miles).

Foucault's Pendulum In our coverage of the August eclipse (the Editor got the rain, not the views, remember?) we reported that two scientists were planning to re-work the hard-to-believe measurements obtained 50 years earlier by Nobel laureate Maurice Allais, who, in 1954 reported peculiar readings from a Foucault pendulum during a solar eclipse. The data is in, from sites all along the path of the eclipse and NASA reports number-crunching is in progress. Additionally NASA reports that three probes, Pioneer 10 and 11 and Ulysses have all inexplicably accelerated as they leave the solar system… Again, watch this space.

Sol 10 Could there be a tenth planet? The debate has ranged long and wide, but now a scientist from the UK's Open University is arguing that long period comets seem to follow orbits which are not randomly oriented in space might point to the existance of a large undiscovered body at the outer edge of the solar system, and in orbit around the sun Dr John Murray, writing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, says that the planet would be very faint and slow moving and 32,000 times as far away from the Sun as is the Earth. Long period comets originate in the Oort cloud, as lumps of ice and stuff. When something perturbs their orbit they fall towards the Sun, grow a tail and get called a comet. Present theories on the formation of the solar system work for nine, not ten planets, which would mess up the sums, so the newcomer might be just that, a captured body. For a third time this update - watch this space.

All at Sea The first commercial satellite launch from a platform at sea was sucessful on Sunday, when a Russian Zenit rocket carrying a satellite for DirecTV blasted off from a converted oil rig moored on the Equator, 1,500 miles south of Hawaii. Mission control was in Moscow and the launch was reported to be fully successful. The positioning on the Equator helps put heavier satellites into orbit as they benefit from a boost from Earth's rotation for insertion into geostationary orbit. The Launch company, Sea Launch, is a consortium of Boeing, Kvaerner Maritime (Norwegian ship builders, who built the command ship accompanying the rig at their yard in Glasgow, Scotland) the Russian aerospace company RSC-Energia and KB-Yuzhnoye/PO Yuzmash, builders of the Zenit rocket. This launch methods cuts costs drastically - the command ship can carry three rockets from its home port in Long Beach California USA to the rig, and only 300 people are needed to man the launch. Costs come out at five tons for $40million as against Arianespace's $55million for the same payload. The new firm has 18 more contracts.

Who cares about the critics? To critical disdain comes the great news that the Rocky Horror Show is to have a sequel at long last. After 26 years Richard O'Brien has been persuaded to revisit Denton and tell us all what happened to Brad and Janet. The original show was a £2,000 production penned by a young actor in 1973, at the Royal Court Theatre in London before being made into a film starring Susan Sarandon, Meat Loaf, and Richard O'Brien himself which still plays regularly in cinemas and on TV and which has grossed more than £70million. O'Brien confirmed in the UK papers that he is working on the sequel, is about half way through the writing and it will tell the story of Janet, nine months on. Janet is now pregnant. One critic is already snooty (or snotty) - he would not put money on a sequel he said. Who cares, we will! (See features page for piece on Rocky Horror film)

It's six, not 42? The answer to the question about life the universe and everything is not 42, as per Douglas Adams, but six, according to the UK's astronomer royal, who should know a thing or two about such matters. Sir Martin Rees's new book, Just Six Numbers, confirms the popular SF theory about parallel universes, and that the universe in which we live is just one of millions, existing in its own little bubble. The title comes from his thesis that the essence of the universe is constrained by the need for six constants to be in place correctly for life to develop in that particular universe.

The perfect secretary in space? NASA has come up with the perfect secretary for astronauts aboard the ISS - a sort of football sized personal secretary robot which will be able to hover around after its 'master' taking notes, monitoring life support aboard the station, and reminding the astronaut about his wedding anniversary etc. The principle engineer on the project - called the PSA (personal satellite assistant) credits Star Trek for the idea…

Chandra success The new Chandra x-ray telescope has made a major discovery by revealing swirls of material around the Crab nebula, 6,000 light years from Earth. The Nebula is all that remains of a supernova which exploded in 1054 (its explosion was recorded by Chinese astronomers). The new images show a bright ring of material around the spinning neutron star which is all that remains of the star which exploded.

Gamma Ray mystery solved Astronomers were mystified by a huge burst of gamma radiation which hit Earth on March 26 last year. The burst, for only a few seconds, pumped out more energy in that time as the rest of the universe, and was the result of a supernova explosion. Astronomers have backtracked the burst to a visible afterglow which brightened hugely and then disappeared, with the Keck telescope in Hawaii. Most times we may happen to see the light from a supernova explosion, but Earth has to be in just the right place at the right time to pick up on the burst of gamma radiation.

OOOOOOOOPs - Red faces at NASA When things go wrong for anything all one can hope for to save one's face is that the fault is obscure and unpredictable. Not so for NASA this time. The Mars Climate Orbiter seems to have been lost because NASA was working in metric and Lockheed Martin Astronautics was working in Imperial. The latter supplied imperial figures for the flight plan to NASA who input them into the satellite assuming that they were metric and the satellite, without much choice in the matter, has probably flows into the Martian atmosphere, went past Mars and is now in orbit around the Sun - it isn't talking to NASA though. NASA is now urgently trying to check the figures for the fraternal satellite, Mars Polar Orbiter, due to land near the Martian South Pole on December 3.

SF and the Emmys 3rd Rock from the Sun won two awards at the Primetime Emmy ceremony last week. Kristen Johnston earned the award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Sally Solomon, while John Lithgow was honored with the Outstanding Lead Actor in Comedy Series award for Dick Solomon. At the Creative Arts awards, held earlier, the NBC special Alice in Wonderland led the pack with awards for Best Makeup, Best Music Composition, Best Costume Design and Best Special Visual Effects, all for a miniseries or movie. Star Trek: Voyager picked up an Emmy for Best Special Visual Effects for a Series, The X-Files was honored for Best Makeup for a Series, and Todd McFarlane's Spawn was named Best Animated Program. Finally, the Invasion America earned an Emmy for Best Music Composition for a Series (Dramatic Underscore), and Stephen King's Storm of the Century, Part 2 was honored for Best Sound Editing for a Miniseries, Movie or Special.

Roton Test Flight Success Rotary Rocket Company's Roton ATV (Atmospheric Test Vehicle) approach and landing demonstrator made the first of a series of four envelope expansion flights last week. The 65 feet tall by 22 feet diameter conical vehicle was piloted pilot, Dr. Marti Sarigul-Klijn, Roton Chief Engineer, with Brian Binnie, Roton Flight Test Director, as copilot. The flight demonstrated vehicle's stability and control as it hovered virtually stationary for two and a half minutes, reaching its planned maximum altitude of 20 feet above the Mojave runway. The main test objectives were to validate the performance and cockpit workload improvements implemented since the first flight on July 23, 1999.The scheduled nominal test duration was 5 minutes. The actual test duration was four and a half minutes. The next flight in the series of four envelope expansion tests will be a low altitude, translational flight down Runway 30 at Mojave. This flight will examine the longitudinal stability and control behavior of the Roton ATV in forward flight. Future ATV flight testing will verify the Roton's pilot-guided approach and landing capability over a wide range of operating conditions and demonstrate landings from altitudes of several thousand feet..

The Ultimate convention hotel It will be the ultimate SF convention hotel, THE place for a Worldcon. The Hilton Hotel chain is seriously planning a hotel on the Moon, hosting a meeting of NASA scientists, and engineers to discuss feasibility.

Feared Lost It seems likely that the much awaited Mars Climate Orbiter satellite has been lost, due to a malfunction on firing its rockets to take it into orbit around Mars. First suspicions are that the craft went into the manoever at a lower altitude than it should - seemingly at 37 miles rather than between 87 anmd 93. This satellite was paired with the Mars Polar Lander to research water content of Mars and observe and investigate the planet's weather.

Looking back in Time The space shuttle's imaging radar has scored another archaeological hit with the discovery of ancient roads and mining activity on the remote scottish island of Islay, off western Scotland. In the past the radar has identified lost cities in Saudi Arabia, and temples in Cambodian jungle. Future shuttle missions will carry more powerful radar equipment, promising even more discoveries Websites: http://www.arcl.ed.ac.uk/islayimages/index.html http://www.arci.ed.ac.uk/arch/remotesense/islay/islay.html

More Millennial stuff Still with the millennium (and a year early, we again pedantically note) (and they should know better) the Royal Observatory, Greenwich (on 0degrees lat) UK is opening an exhibition soon to mark the date change. Artwork by Titian, Poussin and Dali will hang alongside a Navajo sand painting, the earliest known watch and a photograph taken by Hubble. In all 500 exhibits will tell The Story of Time. It opens on December 1 at the Queen's House.

Millennium Countdown For those who need to know to the nearest nanosecond how long it is to the turn of the millennium (the governmental one, not the real one) (and how sad might you be if you do?) there is a dream website for you. The UK's National Physical Laboratory has a countdown site. At the lab they can measure time down to a billionth of a second. Five atomic clocks, accurate to one second in 300,000 years, are ticking away in Teddington, West London. These clocks are co-ordinated with 260 other time labs in Western Europe, America, Australia, Japan, Canada and Russia. Website: http://www.npl.co.uk/cgi-bin/countdown.pl

Skylon funding? Interest in Reaction Engine ltd's new project, the unmanned shuttle vehicle Skylon was raised this week with the news it may receive a cash funding injection from the UK government and thence from ESA, which has said it will support future launch technology programmes only if they are also supported by their own governments. Skylon is the brainchild of MD and chief designer Alan Bond. It is a single stage launch to orbit unmanned vehicle, designed to slash costs. While the USA's equivalent vehicle, Venturestar has hit technical and financial problems, initial testing on the technology of Skylon has proved very successful. Research at Cranfield, York and Kingston Universities will support the design work, while some systems testing, such as that done by Bristol on the heat exchange system, has shown it to be the most efficient of its type ever constructed. Skylon is a 246ft reusable launch vehicle, weighing 275 tonnes. It would fly from a runway like an aircraft, needing very little between flight maintenance, since its outer shell is made from a ceramic composite material. Flight control will be by neural net AI computers. Two wingtip mounted airbreathing rockets would take it up to a velocity of 4,000mph at an attitude of 16 miles, scooping oxygen from the atmosphere. To achieve escape velocity the engine would switch to on-board liquid oxygen and hydrogen to reach 18,000mph.

Who again? Once again there are rumours of a Dr Who revival. This time it seems that Hollywood is getting in on the act, with a £14million project to again revive the nine-lived time lord of Gallifrey. The BBC is reported to be in talks with Impact Pictures, and the people behind films such as the Blair Witch Project, and an announcement is predicted in the UK for November, when the BBC has scheduled a night of Dr Who to mark the anniversary of its inception in 1963. The BBC has for many years had an ambivalent reaction to one of its most popular products, cancelled on TV some years ago after a couple of very sad series which saw the series being reduced to a near-joke and its premises ignored in favour of an 'its science fiction and the people who watch it are idiots' attitude which dismayed all viewers who had loved the series for many years. The first revival starred Paul McGann as a sort of time travelling all action hero, and was okay in parts, but showed him kissing a girl, which put it beyond the pale for many. A BBC person said that the present plans were for a very English script that was witty and suspenseful, with no obvious love interest. There has been no announcement as to who will play the ninth - and theoretically therefore the last - doctor. Patrick Stewart is tipped, as is Laurence Fishburne. Just as important may be the right script editor - someone of the calibre of the late Terry Nation or Douglas Adams, who will understand both the Doctor and SF.

Big Brother for $30 A new satellite, due to be launched next Friday, will put us all into the position of being Big brother - Ikonos 11, 1,600lb of high-resolution imaging equipment will be able to look down and resolve images as small as one square metre. And the images will be downloadable on demand for about $30. The satellite will look at each bit of the earth once every three days. Site: http://www.spaceimaging.com

R for Andromeda Another concept by Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, has been given the go-ahead to go into production as a TV series. To be called 'Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda' it will tell the story of Dylan Hunt, the last starship captain of the Earth-based government known as the Commonwealth, which spans a thousand worlds and embraces hundreds of races and cultures. The Commonwealth has suffered a civil war, and Hunt is determined to restore the society to its former greatness. The series will star Kevin Sorbo. Hunt teams up with a group of mercenary aliens and together they travel space seeking out peaceful life and old commonwealth civilisations to save.

Star Trek Stamp While on the subject of Star Trek, the US post office has issued a stamp marking Star Trek. The 33c stamp shows the USS Enterprise against a background of the Star Fleet insignia.

Chandra Success The high resolution camera aboard Chandra (the X-ray observatory) has been used for the first time, to photograph LMC X-1, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a neighbouring galaxy to our own Milky Way, about 180,000 light years away. Scientists are delighted with the clarity of the images. Our picture, from NASA, shows N1 32 D, a supernova remnant in the LMC. It shows a highly structured remnant of the 10million degree gas explosion, equivalent to 600 suns worth of material. It appears to be colliding with a giant molecular cloud, this shows up as the brightening on the southern rim of the remnant. Also visible in the picture is relatively weak X-ray radiation on the upper left, showing the shockwave from the explosion expanding into a less dense region on the edge of the molecular cloud, and the small circular structures and the large circular loop at the top of the remnant have yet to be fully explained. Sites: progress, http://chandra.nasa.gov and http://chandra.harvard.edu.

The Hugos The 46th Annual Hugo Awards were announced Saturday, September 4, at the 57th World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, Australia. The winners and categories are: Best Novel To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra) Best Novella "Oceanic" by Greg Egan (Asimov's, Aug 1998) Best Novelette "Taklamakan" by Bruce Sterling (Asimov's, Oct/Nov 1998) Best Short Story  "The Very Pulse of the Machine" by Michael Swanwick (Asimov's, Feb 1998) Best Non-Fiction Book The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World by Thomas M. Disch (The Free Press) Best Dramatic Presentation The Truman Show (Paramount) Best Professional Editor Gardner Dozois Best Professional Artist Bob Eggleton Best Semiprozine Locus Best Fanzine Ansible Best Fan Writer Dave Langford Best Fan Artist Ian Gunn John W. Campbell Award Nalo Hopkinson The Hugo Awards are named in honor of Hugo Gernsback, "The Father of Magazine Science Fiction," and are presented annually by the World Science Fiction Society. Both the nominees and winners are chosen by a popular vote of the WSFS.

Double red Mars, the red planet, will be passing just north of the red star Antares tomorrow (Wednesday September 15). The two bright red celestial objects will be separated by less than 3 degrees, above the southern horizon.

Pern on TV Alliance Atlantis Entertainment is going into production on Dragonriders of Pern, a TV series based on Anne McCaffrey's novels. The special-effects-laden show is scheduled to go into production in early 2000, and on air the following year. The company has been working to get the special effects right for a year before deciding to move to production. The show will center around the characters Lessa, F'lar, F'nor and Jaxom, at the story will take place at the time of the Ninth Pass. Most of the stories will be drawn from Dragonflight and All the Weyrs of Pern. The dragons will be imaged using computer-generated imagery in the colors of gold, bronze, blue and green. Website http://www.pern.com

ESA competition To celebrate the December launch of XMM, its new X-ray space observatory, the European Space Agency is challenging young Europeans. The competition is divided into three age groups: Draw a telescope - School classes of 8 to 12 year-olds draw a telescope inside a 20 - 50 cm diameter circle Deadline for entries : 8 October 1999. What's new, Mr Galileo? -An essay competition for 13 to 15 year-olds challenges English classes, to submit a single page (500 words maximum) description of space-based astronomy and its benefits for humanity. Deadline: 15 October 1999. Stargazing - For the final-year class competition, ESA is providing a unique opportunity to use the XMM telescope. Here, the physics class, assisted by the scientific community, has to submit an observation project. The 14 winning proposals will be put into practice in 2000 at a summer camp. Further details will be announced once XMM is in orbit. All competition details on: http://sci.esa.int/xmm/competition.

We knew it all along..! Smug mode: The powers that be organising all the Millenium hoopla in the UK have admitted that they know they are celebrating a year early. Lord Falconer of Thornton, the minister responsible for the government's Millenium stuff said that they had to, because otherwise Britain would look "proper Charlies". The Millenium Commission is spending more than £100m…

Energy and Black Holes Massive black holes, long-thought to make only a modest contribution to the universe's total energy output compared with ordinary stars, may actually be responsible for up to half of all the radiation produced in the universe since the Big Bang. Details of this theory, based on measurements of background X-radiation and the growth of massive black holes obscured by gas, were presented to the X-ray Astronomy 1999 meeting in Bologna, Italy, by Professor Andrew Fabian, a Royal Society Research Professor at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. The black holes responsible for this energy production are probably present in the centres of most galaxies and contain the mass of millions, or even billions, of suns compressed into a region smaller than the solar system. Distant galaxies with suspected massive black holes within their exceptionally bright cores are commonly known as quasars. They produce energy in an accretion process, when gas approaching the black hole swirls inwards, attaining very high velocities and temperatures in the extremely strong gravitational field. This hot, fast-moving gas is very luminous, emitting radiation across a broad spectrum -- from visible light, through the ultraviolet to X-rays - before disappearing within the event horizon of a black hole. The event horizon is the black hole's point of no return, beyond which gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape. Outside the event horizon, there is a larger region where the black hole exerts a powerful gravitational influence, but not so powerful that nothing can escape. This is the region where accretion occurs and the intense radiation is emitted. "The background of X-radiation found in space cannot be explained by stars or by ordinary quasars," says Professor Fabian. "What is required, following earlier ideas, is a population of obscured quasars. For every ordinary quasar about ten more obscured ones are needed, meaning that most massive black holes growing by accretion are hidden from the view of observers looking at visible light, or in the ultraviolet and near infrared wavebands." Visible light and ultraviolet radiation from the accreting gas try to escape from the black hole region but are absorbed by nearby dust and gas. The X-rays are not absorbed and therefore provide a true measure of the total amount of energy being emitted. The absorbed energy, however, can also provide a useful measure of black hole power. This absorbed energy is re-emitted in the form of far infrared radiation (alternatively known as sub-millimetre radiation), which also penetrates the dust and gas. Energy emitted from the regions close to massive black holes has been underestimated, Fabian says, because orbiting X-ray observatories have so far not been able to detect the dust-penetrating X-rays and also because there are no superior far infrared telescopes to observe the re-emitted black hole radiation. Stars, on the other hand, are well documented because they radiate their energy largely as visible and ultraviolet light. This radiation is measured by world-class telescopes both in orbit and on Earth. "Recent ground-based observations in the submillimetre band made with the United Kingdom's Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, and the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE) on NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite do support the idea that much of the energy in the universe has been absorbed and re-radiated at much longer wavelengths. However, the process of absorption and re-radiation conceals whether the energy is from stars or black holes," said Fabian. Observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, launched in July, and ESA's XMM X-ray satellite, scheduled for a December launch are expected to provide the first accurate cosmic census of the power of black holes over the age of the Universe, and detect gas-obscured X-ray sources. Professor Fabian is one of the Interdisciplinary Scientists for the Chandra Observatory.

ET Spam For those of you with the urge to communicate with the stars and the residents thereof - or who are privy to email addresses denied to most of us, the ultimate in email cachet…ET's address. Or not, perhaps. A company in California is offering to send email on to aliens for you. Bentspace.com takes standard emails, feeds them through space radio transmitters and broadcasts the result into the Universe. So, how much to spam ET? $10.95 per 1,000 words.

For Information Not strictly within FTL's remit, but probably of interest to at least some of you, is the news that the British Library is going online. From next Monday (September 13) there will be direct access to the library's online catalogue, listing more than nine million items, ranging from Beowulf in original anglo-saxon to the latest sex magazine. Also going online is the Cambridge International Dictionary, including american and australia variations. Links http://www.britishlibrary.net http://www.bl.uk http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/elt/dictionary

No More a Mystery An object in the sky which was baffling astronomers for some months, as they could not decide what it was (it wasn't a star, or a galaxy nor any other category of stellar object ) has been classified as a rare type of quasar. First spotted by Dr George Djorgovski of Caltech, the identification has been made by Dr Frederick Chaffee, director of the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Previously it had been thought that the object, in the constellation Serpens, was not a quasar since it was not emitting radio waves, but the Keck spectrum indicates that, despite this, it is a quasar, of a special type called a broad absorpsion-line quasar.

Leonid display prediction November's Leonid meteor shower will produce good displays this year andnext, and strong storms of meteors in 2001 and 2002, according to Drs David Asher, of Armagh Observatory, and Rob McNaught of the Australian National University. In the latest Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society they say that when Earth passes through the dense streams of matter in space that produce meteor showers can now be predicted with remarkable accuracy. In the early hours of November 17 last year, meteor watchers awaiting the Leonid shower were taken by surprise when a spectacular display of bright meteors occurred 16 hours before predicted maximum. Dr Asher and his colleagues Professor Mark Bailey of Armagh Observatory, and Professor Vacheslav Emel'yanenko of South Ural University, Chelyabinsk, Russia, and was published in April (see RAS Press Notice 99/09). They showed that the bright meteors were seen when Earth passed through a dense arc-shaped cloud of particles shed from Comet Tempel-Tuttle in the year 1333 and they proved for the first time that meteoroid streams can have complex braid-like structures within them. The latest analysis, covering Leonid meteor storms over the past two hundred years, shows that the peak times of the strongest storms and sharpest outbursts are predictable to within about five minutes. The technique involves mapping the fine `braided' structure of the dense dust trails within the Leonid meteoroid stream. Although comet Tempel-Tuttle, the 'parent' of the Leonid stream, passed close to the Earth in 1998, Asher and McNaught predict strong meteor storms in both 2001 and 2002. 1999 and 2000 will be less spectacular, but good. In 1999, observers at European longitudes are favoured, and may see up to 20 meteors a minute (in ideal conditions under a clear, dark sky) at around 2 a.m. on the morning of November 18. Meteors, also known as shooting stars, can be seen on any night, given a sufficiently clear, dark sky. They are produced by the impact on the Earth's atmosphere of small dust grains released from comets. Most meteors arrive in 'showers' at fixed times of the year, when the Earth passes close to the orbit of the parent comet. But occasionally - just a few times a century - a phenomenon known as a meteor storm occurs. During a storm, meteors appear at astonishing rates, sometimes several per second. The most famous example, the incredible Leonid display of 1833, is credited with starting the serious scientific study of meteors. However, while the display is a dramatic treat for observers, it can spell disaster for satellite operators., as satellites can be disabled by the impact of even a small dust grain. While the hazard from man-made space debris is well known, the danger from meteoroids has been more difficult to assess. Prior knowledge of the detailed structure of the Leonid stream is potentially of immense value, as operators will be able to take appropriate avoiding action.

Arianespace launch Arianespace's flight 120 successfully launched Koreasat 3 fir Korea Telecom on Friday evening. The third Korean telecom satellite was built by Lockheed Martin and will provide direct TV and multimedia broadcast services. The launch was by a 42P launcher, an Ariane 4 with two solid strap-on boosters.

Next Gen shuttles debut Nasa has formally unveiled the next generation of space shuttle vehicles, which it hopes will make earth orbit much cheaper and easier in a few years. Three different craft will reduce the cost of a typical mission from about £6.35m per day to just over £600,000. This comes about because the craft are not only next generation engineering and materials, but because the turn-around time between flights will be at a rate of five flights per 21 days, rather than the cumbersome many weeks for the now very old shuttle fleet. Cost per lb into orbit for payload will plummet also - from between £12,500 to £3,000 down to an estimated £600. The three new craft are the X-33 from Lockheed Martin, wedge shaped and designed to fly directly into orbit with no boosters, and is scheduled to start test flying next June. It is 69ft long and launches vertically, landing like a conventional airplane on a runway. Its initial altitude limit will be 31 miles at it will accelerate to Mach 11; the X-34 is built by Orbital Sciences. Designed as both the workhorse of the fleet and as a testbed vehicle for future development, the X34 should make up to 27 test flights next year. Finally, the X-37 will be carried into low orbit by shuttle, then move to higher altitude under its own power, finally landing like an aircraft. These craft have been part financed by their makers, which shows that space is starting to be perceived as financially viable: Nasa contributed £588m to the cost of the X-33 with industry putting in £179m, for example.

Mini-rockets To launch mini-satellites - the mini rocket. Aerospace Corporation of America has announced the development of miniscule rocket engine, smaller than a 1p or 1c coin, which will be used in space to power smaller satellites into orbit on release from the ISS when it is operational. A prototype of the engine has been tested. It consists of three very thin layers. The top holds a series of igniters, the middle layer has the propellant and the final layer is a series of nozzles used to direct the thrust. The first test for the new system was run successfully aboard the shuttle last July and the first full use will probably be aboard the ISS in 2001.

Missing moon water On July 31 NASA crashed Lunar Prospector onto the Moon's surface in an attempt to kick up a plume of water - to try to establish if there is water on the Moon. The dream result would have been a plume of water revealing up to 40lb, but in reality no water was spotted by the many professional and amateur watchers. Indeed no dust plume was spotted at all. Instrument study of the ejecta has not yet revealed any water either -but the scientists are still studying the data and hope to release more detailed findings in a few weeks.

New Plasma data The planet Earth is surrounded by many different forms of shell - one of the most important and still somewhat unknown in the magnetosphere. This magnetosphere is a complex system of interacting electric and magnetic fields, electric currents and charged particles, and part of its function is to make a barrier between the planet's atmosphere and the solar wind, the plasma given off by the Sun. This consists of a mixture of negatively charged electrons and ions (atoms which have lost electrons, which gives them a positive electrical charge) Plasma is the fourth state of matter, it is not gas, solid or liquid. It often behaves like a gas, but it conducts electricity and is affected by magnetic fields. It is 99% of the Universe. Now Dr Dennis Gallagher, of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre has developed a general model of the density and behaviour of the plasma surrounding Earth - the plasmasphere. This new refined model will help predict problems with radio and power line transmissions, both of which can be affected by fluctuations in the plasmasphere, as are all orbiting craft - since a build-up of an electrical charge can cause an electrical arc or discharge which may destroy electronics aboard.

Eclipse Fever - the Sequel In the wake of the eclipse, holiday firms are reported huge interest in the next solar show, in Africa on June 21, 2001. The path of totality is due to pass across the centre of the continent and totality woll last for about four minutes. Skies are predicted to be clear (see Ed's diary for her eclipse experience).

Mir After 77,000 orbits and 1,600 breakdowns, Mir was finally shut down on Friday, when the three man crew - two russians ( Viktor Afanasyev and Sergei Avdeyev) and a frenchman (Jean-Pierre Haignere), finally pulled the hatch closed and went aboard a Soyez for the trip back to Earth. After exceeding its designed life of five years hugely - Mir has been operating for 13 years - the station is mothballed for lack of money rather than irrevocable mechanical breakdown. It will of course be superceded by the ISS in a few years (see features section). Mir is where mankind learned to live in space on a routine basis, rather than as an occasional and highly technologically protected visitor. Indeed Avdeyev holds the longest time spent in space record - 742 days. The stations final end, barring an injection of cash which is not expected, is to burn up, next year. Links: http://www.space-frontier.org/ if you want to keep Mir in operation. http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/temp/mir_loc.html reports exact position.

Satellite Support Less than a month ago, on July 22 at the United Nations UNISPACE III conference in Vienna, ESA and CNES pledged to pool their satellite-based resources and provide timely, pertinent information on parts of the Earth struck by natural or man-made disasters. This initiative was implemented to provide as much information as possible by remote sensing as quickly as possible in the wake of the earthquake in Turkey. SPOT 4 yielded detailed pictures of the Izmit and Istanbul areas for August 20 and 23, while ERS provided data on the disaster area for August 23. More information is expected in the coming days. The data provided by the satellite systems is being analysed at ESA's research institute Esrin (located in Frascati, Italy) and at Spot Image, a French company. Information about the extent of the affected areas and about the effects of the catastrophe on the ground will give valuable information to public authorities and organisations working to repair the damage.

Mars Landing Site NASA has announced that the Polar Lander will land (unsurprisingly) at the South Martian Pole on December 3. The exact site was chosen because it is relatively level and bland (no more than 10 degree slopes and no cliffs)

Solar Power Solar wind sails are a common theme in SF - now a University of Washington in Seattle scientist has found a way to make them both practical and cheap. Working under a grant from NASA he has created a design concept for a craft which uses a device about the size of a coffee jar - a mini magnetospheric plasma propulsion system (M2P2) The device is powered by solar cells and these are used to generate a small magnetic bubble filled with plasma (electrons and ions). These are then shot out of an electrical field created by a series of coils, forming a huge magnetic balloon in space, estimated to be about 33km across. This would deflect the ionised gasses in the solar wind and act as a huge sail. Creator Dr Robert Winglee estimates that a spacecraft of weight 140 kg could achieve a top speed in 290,000kph.

Starchaser Steve Bennett successfully launched the latest version of his Starchaser Rocket- the 3a, from the beach at Morecambe on Friday. While several earlier flights had been hit with technical problems this flight went smoothly - the 220lb craft was spot-on its flightpath. The craft achieved 700 mph within three seconds, developing four tonnes of thrust from nine rocket motors, before deploying two parachutes to bring it back down softly. The next craft, next step in Bennett's plans to put a man into space, will be 26ft long and six times bigger. He aims for a passenger carrying launch test in 2003, which would bring him not only record status as the first amateur to achieve space, but a £10m (£6.4m) prize as well. http://www.starchaser.co.uk

Soho Lecture The Royal Aeronautical Society will be hosting a lecture on SOHO - the Solar and Heliospehric Observatory - next month. The lecture, at the Society's lecture theatre in Hamilton Place, London, will be given by Eric Sawyer, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He is a project manager for CLRC, currently for the GERB instrument, which will be flying on the next generation of Meteosat satellites. Before that he was in charge of the Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer on SOHO. The talk will be on September 13, starting at 6pm and admission is free. More details   mailto:conference@raes.org.uk

BBC BBC Radio 4 is planning a discussion on science and science fiction with Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter, Ian Stewart and Mark Brake, course leader of the new science and SF degree course at Glamorgan University as part of the The Material World series on Thursday September 30 at 4.30pm.

Cassini Flyby The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, on its way to Saturn, was due to make a close flyby of Earth to get a gravity assist, early this morning (August 18.99) Cassini is a joint NASA and ESA project, and is due to reach Saturn in 2004, after a seven year journey. The project has cost a total of $3.4 billion (£2.1billion). Cassini has also had an assist from Venus on its circuitous route, and will get a further boost from Jupiter. The Earth fly-by was at 35,000mph and the boost was due to be of the order of about 11,000mph During the Earth flyby, nine of the twelve scientific instruments on Cassini were turned on to gather data on the Earth/Moon system. The Huygens Probe and its six scientific instruments remained dormant during the Earth flyby. The next bi-annual in-flight Probe checkout activities will take place in mid-September. The Cassini-Huygens mission is to study Saturn, its magnetic and radiation environment, moons and rings for four years. The European Space Agency's Huygens probe will separate from Cassini and parachute to the surface of Titan. Titan is especially interesting, not least because of its many Earth-like characteristics, including an atmosphere made up mostly of nitrogen and the presence of organic molecules in its atmosphere and surface. Lakes or seas of ethane and methane may be found on its surface. Cassini-Huygens will enter orbit around Saturn on 1 July 2004. The Huygens probe will separate from Cassini to parachute through the atmosphere to the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in November that year.

PC SETI ET Over one million people have volunteered to join the desktop PC search project for extra-terrestrial intelligence organised by Berkeley in the last three months. Details: databank archive "ET phone FTL" or - Websites: The Planetary Society - http://planetary.org or SETI at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu

Website Accuracy At FTL we maintain proper journalistic practices for accuracy of our information. To the best of our abilities all the facts contained in FTL are correct. However, seasoned surfers will suspect or know that not all websites are as scrupulous or painstaking: The Washington Post recently reported a study by researches from the University of Michigan which suggested that many medical websites may contain misleading, inappropriate or just plain wrong information. Because of the sheer number of medical and medical information sites on the Web, few researchers have attempted any kind of accuracy check. The Michigan study, headed by J. Sybil Biermann, an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in cancer treatments, assessed the quality of information available for Ewing sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. This was chosen because the amount of information would be manageable. About 250 Americans per year (mostly children or young adults) are diagnosed with this disease annually. Four spellings of Ewing sarcoma were entered into seven search engines (including Yahoo and Alta Vista), yielding 400 sites culled from the 27,000 pages retrieved. One of the most basic statistics - the survival rate for people with this form of cancer - varied from 5% to 85% among Web sites. The majority of oncologists predict a survival rate of 70 to 75% for this cancer. The Web site maintained by the Encyclopaedia Brittanica erroneously listed a mortality rate of "about 95 percent even with radical therapy". The researches estimated that around 6% of the sites they reviewed contained erroneous information, and many more were misleading, for example, failing to distinguish between treatments appropriate for Ewing sarcoma and those which were not. Biermann's study lists all 400 sites searched in the study. Patients and others seeking information about cancer or other diseases are referred to the following sites: National Cancer Institute CancerNet: http://cancernet.nci.nih.gov Intellihealth: http://www.intellihealth.com/IH/ihtIH American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org Drkoop.com: http://www.drkoop.com University of Michigan Health System: http://www.med.umich.edu

Successful Launch The Telkom 1 telecommunications satellite for Indonesia was successfully launched by an Ariane 42P launcher on August 12, from French Guiana. This was flight 118 and the 45th successful launch in a row for Ariane 4, now the world's most reliable commercial launch vehicle. The next two Arianespace launches due are 120 on September I, when an Ariane 42P will place the Koreasat 3 communications satellite in orbit for Korea Telecom and 119, an Ariane 5 launch towards the end of this year.

With our own eyes One of the first news items to come out of the astronomy conference held in the Channel Islands over the eclipse is that there has been a confirmed optical sighting of a planet in another solar system. Until now planets have been inferred because their gravitational effects, though minute, were measurable as wobbles on their stars, if they were big enough. As the new observational method is refined it is hoped that the astronomers will be able to see the planet's size and composition, including whether it has an atmosphere. This first planet is circling a sun-sized star called Tau Bootis, which is 50 light years away. The discovery was made by a team from Harvard University. Also working on the discovery is a team from St Andrews, in Scotland, which has obtained similar results. The planet is about 1.4 times the size of Jupiter. The new method involves utilising the Doppler effect to split off the light reflected from the planet, travelling at 150km/sec round its primary.

Today’s Eclipse Info UK met office weather forecasts for the path of the eclipse on web at www.met-office.gov.uk/eclipse

Why Galaxies get together A team of astronomers from the University of Durham is now able to explain, for the first, time why galaxies cluster together in space . Simulations of the evolution of the universe, carried out using the largest supercomputers, show that great clusters of galaxies populating the universe now are the descendants of primitive superclusters already in existence when the universe was only one tenth its present age. In an important breakthrough, American astronomers recently discovered an enormous supercluster of many tens of galaxies already in place when the universe was no more than about one tenth of its current age. Now, a team from Durham University in the UK has shown that these incipient superclusters are the progenitors of today's great clusters of galaxies. Their simulations follow the evolution of the clustering pattern of galaxies, from their infancy to the present, revealing the complex processes by which galaxies like our own Milky Way have grown over 10 billion years of cosmic evolution. The American researchers used the largest telescope in the world, the 10-metre Keck telescope located in the island of Hawaii, to measure how fast these galaxies are receding because of the expansion of the universe. From their velocity, or redshift, astronomers can determine how far away these galaxies are and for how long their light has been travelling before it reaches telescopes on Earth. These galaxies are so distant that their velocities are a significant fraction of the speed of light and we see them as they were when the universe was a small fraction of its current age. They appear very young and are undergoing their very first episode of rapid star formation. Astronomers were puzzled to find that these galaxies were not distributed at random in the early universe, but seem instead to have congregated in groups, clusters and superclusters, much as their descendants do, 10 billion years later. For the past twenty years, theorists have speculated that the main agent responsible for the formation of galaxies is a kind of dark matter known as cold dark matter, which is composed of exotic, yet to be discovered, elementary particles, much smaller than individual atoms. If these particles exist, they would dominate the evolution of the universe and cause ripples in the early universe to grow into ever larger structures. Ripples in the early universe were discovered earlier this decade by NASA's COBE satellite. They are the fossil records of the embryos from which galaxies later grew. The first models of a hypothetical cold dark matter universe were calculated in the mid 1980s using computers that, by today's standards, were feeble. Yet, these first calculations indicated that, if the universe were indeed dominated by cold dark matter, then early galaxies would be born already congregated in the kind of superclusters that have now been observed with the Keck telescope. To explain why galaxies are clustered the way they are, the Durham team found that they needed to invoke, in addition to cold dark matter, a mysterious form of energy known as the "cosmological constant". This is precisely the form of energy that observers claimed last year to have discovered from studying very distant supernovae. The cosmological constant, first proposed by Einstein in the 1930s, plays a key role in regulating the rate at which our universe expands. Cosmologists and supernova experts seem to be converging on the same explanation for their findings. Not only are distant supernovae dimmer than anticipated due to the existence of the cosmological constant, but the entire pattern of galaxy clustering reflects the influence of this energy acting over the lifetime of the universe. The energy associated with the cosmological constant will ensure that our universe continues to expand forever at an accelerating rate. The work was done by a team of Durham astronomers Andrew Benson, Carlton Baugh, Shaun Cole, Carlos Frenk and Cedric Lacey. The supercomputer simulations by the Virgo consortium were carried out at the Max-Planck supercomputing centre in Garching, Germany and at the Edinburgh Parallel Supercomputer Centre.

Technicolour Evolution Cambridge astronomers are studying colour images from the Hubble Space Telescope of very remote galaxies, and have found strong evidence that galaxies grow when smaller clumps of stars and gas merge. They have also discovered that the bar structures seen at the centres of some spiral galaxies formed relatively recently. Professor Richard Ellis and Dr Roberto Abraham (Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge) and Dr Nial Tanvir (now University of Hertfordshire), together with Cambridge graduate students Jarle Brinchmann and Felipe Menanteau have developed new techniques to study the information available from the "internal" colours of distant galaxies revealed by the Hubble Deep FieldSince these galaxies are very distant, we see them as they were long in the past, typically half the present age of the universe. Nearby galaxies come in three categories: spirals, characterised by their elegant swirling arms; ellipticals, which appear like smooth featureless collections of stars; and irregulars which have no symmetric structure. Hubble can identify such galaxies to enormous distances [figure 1], corresponding to eras when the Universe was only half its current age. In earlier work, the team showed that many very distant (and hence young) galaxies do not resemble their present-day counterparts. The team has now developed powerful techniques to study the colours of structures inside galaxies (structures such as nuclei, central "bulges", and spiral arms, to discover the physical processes that govern the evolution of galaxies. . A popular theory claims that most elliptical galaxies formed from the collision of two spiral galaxies. In this scenario, the spiral arms are destroyed and the gaseous material is expelled or converted into stars. The Cambridge team has found striking evidence that distant ellipticals are varied in their internal colour properties [figure 2a], supporting the idea that merging has indeed taken place. This provides strong support for the theory that galaxies grow via the collisions of smaller structures. Their work has also addressed the history of spiral galaxies, such as our own Milky Way. A long-standing puzzle is why some of these systems have bar-like features in their centres [figure 2b]. By counting the fraction of barred and non-barred galaxies existing at different eras in the past, the Cambridge team (with Professor Mike Merrifield at the University of Nottingham) have provided the first evidence that bars may be a relatively recent phenomenon. Few bars are found in the most distant spirals seen more than 5 billion years ago. (The age of the universe is thought to be about 12 to 14 billion years.) This may be because bars develop as unstable features only when a spiral has grown to a certain size. This work has taken on added importance with the growing acceptance by astronomers that our own galaxy, The Milky Way, is also barred.

Eclipse safety Eclipse viewing glasses which have been imported in thousands in France and may have also been imported into other countries have been recalled because they may be unsafe for watching next week's solar eclipse. If you have viewers made by Minipack Colombia of Bogota do not use them. Although they have been stamped with the safety CE label the protection they offer is so poor that there is a very real danger of permanent eye damage if they are used to look at the sun. The glasses, labelled Protect Vision (Sic!) were sold in France for 50f. About a million were imported.

DS 1 Deep Space 9 may have finished now, but Deep Space 1 is not only alive and kicking but really flying past asteroids. Nasa's DS1 is a barrel-shaped space craft, eight feet long and it was launched last October form Cape Canaveral. It went past an asteroid called Braille (?!) on July 28, and approached within 15 miles, while travelling at 35,000mph. DS 1 is the first of Nasa's New Millenium craft, and is the test craft for much new technology, including the ability to decide its own course, so that it can find its own way around in space, within set parameters and an ion propulsion system. The encounter took place about 188million miles from Earth.

As it happens If you want to watch Lunar Discovery crash into the south lunar pole, it will be happening just before 11am UK time tomorrow (Saturday July 31). Tune in on the web on quest.arc.nasa.gov/interactive.hst to catch the live stuff from Hubble.

A new planet Asronomers at the European Southern Obervatory have found a planet circling around a star much like our sun, Iota Horologii, in the Horologium (Pendulum Clock) constellation. However, even though the star is like our sun and the orbit is Earth-like, the planet is nothing like Earth. It is 720 times bigger - much more like Jupiter.

FIRST ROTON ATV FLIGHT SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED Mojave, Calif., July 23, 1999 Rotary Rocket Company's Roton ATV (Atmospheric Test Vehicle) approach and landing demonstrator made its first flight at 0840 am PDT, Friday July 23, 1999. The 65 feet tall by 22 feet diameter conical vehicle was piloted by a two person crew. The crew for the first flight comprised the pilot, Dr. Marti Sarigul-Klijn, Cmdr. USN-Ret and Roton Chief Engineer, with Brian Binnie, Cmdr. USN-Ret. and Roton Flight Test Director, as copilot. Both crewmembers are highly qualified and experienced flight test pilots. During the test, the Roton ATV performed three takeoff and landing maneuvers. These maneuvers demonstrated the crews' ability to control the vehicle in the critical touchdown phase of the landing approach. They also verified the accuracy of the ATV's integrated flight simulator, which the crew had used prior to the test for flight rehearsals. The scheduled nominal test duration was 5 minutes. The actual test duration was 4 minutes and 40 seconds. During the test, the ATV flew at a height of approximately 8 feet, which centered the ATV within the 5 to 10 feet nominal hover height planned. This first flight test was the culmination of the initial vehicle test program that began in May at the company's Mojave, CA facility. Prior to the first flight, the test program had verified vehicle structural integrity, flight instrumentation, flight controls, landing gear, tip rocket propulsion and rotor operation. Future ATV flight testing will verify the Roton's pilot-guided approach and landing capability over a wide range of operating conditions and demonstrate landings from altitudes of several thousand feet. The primary function of the Roton ATV is to gather performance data and demonstrate operational flight of the vehicle's unique tip thruster powered rotor-blade landing system. The Roton ATV is similar in concept to the Space Shuttle Enterprise that NASA built and flew to test the orbiter's landing characteristics before proceeding to build space-worthy version Space Shuttles. Gary C. Hudson, President and CEO of Rotary Rocket Company said after the successful conclusion of the flight, "It is this demonstrated performance that provides creditability to Rotary Rocket's aims of achieving low-cost space flight." He went on to congratulate the flight crew and other employees of Rotary Rocket Company for their superb efforts in successfully achieving such an important milestone in the development of the Roton piloted space vehicle. Rotary Rocket Company's Roton piloted space vehicle will serve the telecommunications satellite market, a more than $30 billion market, at a fraction of the price of existing commercial rockets. The Roton will enter into commercial service in 2001. Rotary Rocket Company has offices in Redwood City, California, Mojave, California and Washington D.C.

Wizards Among Us The University of Warwick awarded an honorary degree (a Doctor of Letters - Hon DLitt) to best-selling author Terry Pratchett at its recent summer degree congregation. Just before that ceremony began Terry held a short ceremony to make the University's own Professor Ian Stewart and Dr Jack Cohen honorary Wizards of Unseen University in recognition of their co-authorship of best-seller Science of Discworld.

ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY On Monday, August 9 about 250 astronomers will assemble in St Peter Port,. Guernsey for the 4-day National Astronomy and UK Solar Physics Meetings beginning the next morning. The dates were chosen specially to include the total solar eclipse on Wednesday August 11, when participants will travel to neighbouring Alderney, where the eclipse will be total. On Tuesday, Thursday and Friday there will be a full programme of professional scientific talks covering the whole of astronomy. On Monday and Tuesday at 8.00 p.m., Heather Couper will present a public lecture "Darkness at Noon: secrets of the Sun and its Eclipses".

‘On’ Again The on-off saga of the film of Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy seems to be on again. Douglas Adams himself is working on a script for Disney and planning a move to the USA More: http://www.douglasadams.com

Happy landings It seems incredible, but until now no-one had sat down and transferred the ability to land on autopilot to craft travelling off-Earth. Computer and space scientists at Dundee University in the UK are working on a system that allows a PC with a ‘landscape map’ to communicate with another holding an autopilot system. The work is being funded by ESA which is hoping to develop a safe landing system for lunar craft, initially unmanned, but possibly manned in the future.

Earth’s Child? Nasa claims to have solved the mystery of the origin of the moon. The latest theory, based on the moon’s core having too much iron, comes in a paper to be delivered by Dr James Williams. Overall Dr Williams finds that the moon’s total iron content, contained in a central core, is about the same as Earth’s and much more than asteroids. Dr Williams believes that the Moon was created by a chance collision between Earth and a rogue planet about the size of Mars, when both bodies were still semi-molten. The large chunk torn off the future Earth solidified into the Moon. This new theory comes fittingly at the time of the anniversary of the lunar first landing, since it is based on data obtained from 30 years of work firing lasers at the reflectors left on the Moon by each mission. These mirrors have allowed Nasa to accumulate a vast database of information on the interaction between the Earth and the Moon since they have allowed incredibly accurate measurements of the distances between them, to an accuracy of less than one inch. Since they are placed all over the facing surface they have allowed also accurate measurement of the distortions on the Moon caused by minute gravity effects.

Why Space matters Natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, forest fires or tropical storms and man-made disasters such as oil-spills continuously strike Earth. Data from Earth observation satellites can provide authorities information to complement conventional ground-based and airborne systems. At the UNISPACE III conference in Vienna ESA and CNES announced a System Operators’ Charterto promote efficient support for disaster management. Charter signatories will support organisations involved in disaster assistance and rescue by making available Earth observation assets, including satellites, instrumentation, ground facilities and archive image data resources on request. This Charter will be open to all space agencies and satellite operators around the world.

The Torino Scale While such scales as Richter’s, Moh’s and Beaufort’s (earthquakes, hardness and wind strength) are pretty familiar stuff for measuring on Earth, until now there has never been a scale for assessing an incoming to Earth impact risk scale (nor has there been much need?) Now the Torino scale is launched. Named after the town in Italy where it was formulated and promulgated, the new scale will attempt to assess the risk of an Earth collision with a near-Earth body.

Water on the Moon Is there water on the Moon or not. The answer to this straightforward question might yet determine how soon mankind starts travelling to the stars since the Moon is an ideal base from which to build ships and travel, but only if such resources as water are available (to transport enough water to sustain a viable colony would be prohibitive at present technology and capability). Earlier this year Dr. David Goldstein of the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues suggested an unorthodox way to settle the question: Simply crash Lunar Prospector into a shadowed crater and see if any water flies out of the impact site. The Lunar Prospector mission is nearly over, they reasoned, and the spacecraft would eventually collide with the Moon anyway. A kamikaze-style crash into a polar crater could liberate up to 40 pounds of water vapour that might be detectable from ground- and space-based observatories. A positive detection of either water vapour or OH (the hydroxyl radical formed when solar ultraviolet radiation frees a hydrogen atom from water) would provide definitive proof that water ice exists. The crash will occur on July 31, into a shadowed crater near the lunar south pole. Mission scientists caution that any clouds of water vapour and hydroxyl will be very tenuous, and it may not be immediately obvious whether or not these gases were detected. Data analysis could take up to 3 months. In the meantime, The Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (ALPO), a group of amateur and professional astronomers, has issued a call for all lunar enthusiasts to monitor the south polar region of the Moon on July 31 for visible signs of Prospector's impact. Observations of all types are invited - written, sketched, photographic, and electronic - and observers are encouraged to report their results to ALPO. Will amateur astronomers really be able to observe the crash? "It's doubtful," says Lunar Prospector's principal investigator Dr. Alan Binder, "but I would encourage anyone to try." More detailshttp://lunar.arc.nasa.gov

Eurospace? The Russian Yuri Gagarin was the first man in orbit; the American Neil Armstrong the first man on the Moon, on 21 July, 1969. Is there a chance that the first human being to set foot on Mars will be a European? Attendants at the 1999 Alpbach Summer School will be putting their minds to this challenging question. Seventy-four students from member states of the European Space Agency will be attending the Summer School from August 3-12in the small mountain village of Alpbach in the Austrian Tyrol. They will be defining a future Mars Exploration Mission. 25 European experts will provide them with an overview of all aspects of the Red Planet. Basic questions such as the chemical and mineralogical composition of its surface, its geophysics and geochemistry or the search for life on Mars will be addressed. A review of past, present and future exploration of Mars will be presented. The annual Summer School is co-organised by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Transport, the European Space Agency and the Austrian Space Agency.

Stellar Quakes Scientists are puzzled by an offset or "braking glitch" in the spin rate of a soft gamma repeater or SGR. A graph of the star's spin rate shows a steady increase in its rotational period, but with a break in the line that may have been caused by a massive starquake. The difference only 1 millisecond, a massive difference for an object that packs as much mass as our sun into a ball only 20 km (12 mi) across. If the magnetar theory is correct, then SGR outbursts are caused by massive starquakes as the magnetic field wrinkles the star's crust. These wrinkles are only a few millimetres high, but release more energy than all of the earthquakes that the Earth has ever experienced.

Just the right degree The University of Glamorgan, in Wales, UK has just announced that it will be offering what it believes is a unique new degree from September. The degree will be a BSc in science and science fiction. Based in the Astronomy Department, the course will be lead by Principle Lecturer Mark Brake who said of his new course (which was only validated late last month) "Science fiction can be regarded as a device for conducting a type of theoretical science, namely, the exploration of imagined worlds. "A cosmologist may construct mathematical models of idealised hypothetical universes, and then investigate their properties. Science fiction has more scope. Science fact is supposed to stay within the boundaries of the accepted laws of physics, SF isn't. Nevertheless, the spirit of "What if...?" pervades both enterprises. "Commercially SF has an impressive track record. And since many people's main exposure to science is through SF, the portrayal of the scientist and the nature of scientific activity is of crucial importance. The best science fiction tackles deep philosophical or ethical issues and widens the audience's vision of the universe "In spite of the evident popularity of science fiction as a major vehicle for the public dissemination of science, there have been few serious academic studies of the genre and its socio-scientific dimension. "We shall address the place of science fiction in our society and the treatment of science therein. We shall also provide a robust discussion of pseudo-science, itself a growing and alarming influence on the public perception of science. "Finally we shall also address issues relating to the status of science itself. Why is science often considered culturally inferior to the arts? Why is science rarely appreciated as a cultural activity at all? If science is to be restored to its rightful place in our cultural heritage then science fiction may help to play an important " Further details Mark Brake mbrake@glam.ac.uk

China Aims for Space China is aiming to be the third space-going nation, after announcing that it aims to put a man into space aboard its own vehicle within the next few years. The target has been made a top priority within research institutions and universities, and tops off more than 30 years of putting its own satellites into orbit. More info: http://www.poac.ac.cn

Space Shunts? Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to photograph 81 objects that are pairs of colliding galaxies or the remnants of recent collisions. The new images bolster a prediction of some cosmological models that big galaxies form by means of collisions between smaller ones. Some of the new images show distorted galaxy shapes and streamers of stars stretching from one galaxy to another. http://science.nasa.gov/

The Ultimate Surf? The Ultimate Surf? Solar scientists believe they may have solved yet another long- standing enigma about the Sun. Working on data from the ESA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and NASA's Spartan 201 spacecraft, researchers have found that the solar wind streams out of the Sun by "surfing" waves in the Sun's atmosphere: "The waves in the Sun's atmosphere are produced by vibrating solar magnetic field lines, which give solar wind particles a push just like an ocean wave gives a surfer a ride" said Dr John Kohl, principal investigator The outermost solar atmosphere, or corona, is only seen from Earth during a total eclipse of the Sun, when it appears as a shimmering, white veil surrounding the black lunar disc. The corona is an extremely tenuous, electrically charged gas, known as plasma that flows throughout the solar system as the solar wind. The waves are formed by rapidly vibrating magnetic fields in the coronal plasma. They are called magneto - hydro - dynamic (MHD) waves and are believed to accelerate the solar wind. The solar wind is made up of electrons and ions, electrically charged atoms that have lost electrons. The electric charge of the solar wind particles forces them to travel along invisible lines of magnetic force in the corona. The particles spiral around the magnetic field lines as they rush into space. "The magnetic field acts like a violin string: when it's touched, it vibrates. When the Sun's magnetic field vibrates with a frequency equal to that of the particle spiraling around the magnetic field, it heats it up, producing a force that accelerates the particle upward and away from the Sun," says Dr. Ester Antonucci, an astronomer at the observatory of Turin, Italy.

Mars Images A couple of months ago Mars was nearer to Earth than at any time since 1990, and Nasa used the opportunity to get some superb images of our nearest neighbour. Using Hubble's wide field and planetary camera, images of Mars when 54 million miles from Earth were resolved so accurately that features only 12 miles wide showed up. The new images show that Mars changes almost as much as Earth, again as a result of climate, as winds move sand and dust around, revealing and concealing fixed features on the surface. The first image shows Mars near where the Pathfinder mission landed. Dark sand dunes of pulverised volcanic rock surround the polar ice cap The second region shows a volcano, one of the largest known in the whole solar system, Tharsis. It is 340 miles across and 17 miles high, and shows in the picture as a bright ring. The third picture features another volcano, Elysium. The small dark markings are the result of sand and dust movement. To the upper left is a storm, composed of water ice clouds (chevron shaped), and there is another cloud formation on the right edge, around the well-kniwn volcano Olympus Mons Finally the fourth image shows a dark area known as Syrtis Major, which features small dark impact craters - also an impact crater is the large circular feature below them Mars is spottable tonight (July 4) at about 30deg above the SW horizon. It is showing at about 5degrees to the left of blue coloured star Spica, at magnitude-0.4 and is distinctly orangy coloured.

Mir privatisation? As a last-ditch attempt to keep Mir aloft a little longer, Russian space officials are planning to sell shares in Mir. The russian people are no longer very interested in Mir -a fundraiser for the old space station raised all of £50. It is hoped that China, Pakistan or India might be interested. In return for about £30m to keep the station going for another year any new shareholders would have the opportunity to put astronauts and experiments aboard.

Bringing Back Blakes? There are strong rumours going around the loyal band of fans that Blake's 7 may be on its way back.. After a campaign of 20-some years by a remarkably loyal band of fans, a sequel is on the cards after the show was (literally) killed off by then BBC TV controller Michael Grade. Based on a premise approved by the show's creator, the late Terry Nation (also creator of the Daleks and much else in UK TV SF over the years) details are scarce, but from hints leaked it seems likely that at least Paul Darrow is likely to reprise his role as Kerr Avon, computer mastermind and all-round leader-hero. Since many of the original cast returned earlier this year to appear in two Blake's 7 radio plays it seems likely that they will be available to again fight for freedom or the Federation (depending on your view of the politics of the Galaxy at the time). It is likely that the story will be picked up some years after the end of the final TV episode Blake. Since cancellation the show has become popular around the world, both on terrestrial and satellite, with cast members still very much in demand for conventions. Producer is likely to be Brian Lighthill, producer of TV episodes Gold and Orbit and radio episodes The Sevenfold Crown and The Syndeton Experiment. Two 75 minute episodes are planned, with a subsequent release on Video towards the end of next year. Link: http://www.Horizon.org.uk.

Europe goes to Mars The European Space Agency's Mars Express mission has won unanimous approval. The Agency's Science Programme Committee (SPC) approved Mars Express, the first European mission to Mars, after ESA's Council, meeting at ministerial level in Brussels on May11 and 12, had agreed the level of the science budget for the next four years, just enough to make the mission affordable. As well as being a first for Europe in Mars exploration, Mars Express will pioneer new, cheaper ways of doing space science missions. "With a total cost of just 150 million euros, Mars Express will be the cheapest Mars mission ever undertaken", says Roger Bonnet, ESA's Director of Science. Mars Express will be launched in June 2003. When it arrives at the red planet six months later, it will begin to search for water and life. Seven instruments, provided by space research institutes throughout Europe, will make observations from the main spacecraft as it orbits the planet. Just before the spacecraft arrives, it will release a small lander, provided the UK, which will look for signs of life. The lander is called Beagle 2 after the ship in which Charles Darwin sailed round the world in search of evidence supporting his theory of evolution. But just as Darwin had to raise the money for his trip, so the search is on for public and private finance for Beagle 2. Europe's space scientists have envisaged a mission to Mars for more than 15 years. But limited funding had prevented previous proposals from going ahead. The positioning of the planets in 2003, however, offers a particularly favourable passage to the red planet Mars Express will be joined by an international flotilla of spacecraft that will also be using this opportunity to work together on scientific questions and pave the way for future exploration. ESA is now able to afford Mars Express because it will be built more quickly and cheaply than any other comparable mission. It will be the first of the Agency's new flexible missions, based on maximum re-use of technology off-the-shelf and from other missions (the Rosetta cometary mission in this case). Mars Express will explore the extent to which innovative working practices, now made possible by the maturity of Europe's space industry, can cut mission costs and the time from concept to launch : a new kind of relationship with industrial partners is starting. "We are adopting a new approach to management by delegating to Matra Marconi Space (the prime contractor) responsibility for the whole project. This means we can reduce the ESA's management costs " says Bonnet. http://sci.esa.int

SOHO shows us the far side of the sun! European team of scientists headed by Jean Loup Bertaux, of the CNRS Service d'Aronomie has found a way of studying the hidden far side of the sun allowing better predictions of the imminent appearance of solar storms originating out of view behind the sun. "Strong ultraviolet emissions from active regions at the back of the sun behave like the beams of a lighthouse sweeping over the sea", said Bertaux, "The 'beams' rotate through the sky with the sun," taking approximately 28 days to complete one cycle, "and allow us to monitor activity on the far side of the sun without observing it directly. This method could be used in future studies on space weather, which is capable of disrupting orbiting satellites and earth-based electronics." "SOHO has allowed us to study the sun extensively, from its interior to the space surrounding it. It is fascinating to think that now we can detect what's coming at us from the other side of the sun". The SWAN (short for Solar Wind ANisotropies) experimental package, (which is part of SOHO)was designed to create an ultraviolet map of the entire sky. It has chalked up another first by recording the biggest shadow ever observed in our solar system: the shadow of a passing comet. Although most of the hydrogen atoms in the solar system blow in from interstellar space, comets are surrounded by large hydrogen clouds of their own. When comet Hale-Bopp blazed past the sun in 1997, sporting a tail 100 million kilometres in length, SOHO was on duty in orbit. Scientists studying the data recorded by SWAN have now detected a remarkable, hitherto unknown feature: the comet cast a shadow more than 150 million km long on the sky behind it. "This allows us to calculate directly the amount of hydrogen and water released by the comet, about 300 tonnes per second," says Jean Loup Bertaux. Roger Bonnet, Director of ESA's Scientific Programme, expressed his appreciation for the SOHO results: "After many years, SOHO is still at work and fully operational. As in the case of the comet's shadow, it keeps making discoveries and amazing observations." Says Bernhard Fleck, SOHO Project Scientist for ESA: "The nice thing about this discovery is that with SOHO we're not just confined to studying the sun. Here we are contributing to a different and intriguing field. We are learning more about comets and their physics." The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. The spacecraft was launched by an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral on 2 December 1995. Links: http://sohowww.estec.esa.nl Images of the far side of the sun and the comet's shadow are available at: http://sci.esa.int/soho.

Long FUSE NASA is to launch its Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer on Wednesday, June 23. The FUSE mission will examine both nearby planets and the farthest reaches of the galaxy. The main scientific focus will be the study of hydrogen and deutronium, both of which were created in the instants after the Big Bang. Eventually the data obtained should help understanding of the formation of stars and planets and the evolution of the universe. Distribution patterns of deutronium (a form of hydrogen) will allow scientists to, in effect, look back in time, as well as roll back time to examine conditions in the universe just after the Big Bang, and what has happened since. Conversely, is there a huge galactic matter circulating pump which simply churns stars, galaxies, elements, over and over. FUSE was devised and developed by Johns Hopkins, and is the first solely university based project to be launched by NASA. It consists of spacecraft and science instrumentation, and was built by Orbital Sciences of Germantown MD, USA. Launch is scheduled from Cape Canaveral aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket into orbit 477 miles up, with a 100 minute orbit. It cost $204m.

DeForest Kelley FTL notes with sadness the death last Friday (June 11) of DeForest Kelley, at his ranch home near Hollywood, California, aged 79. DeForest Kelley was born in Atlanta Georgia and went to Hollywood in the early 1940s, as a teenager, initially to sing. He starred in several westerns, including the seminal Gunfight at the OK Corral in 1957, before landing the part which was to make him the most famous doctor on this planet. Initially Kelley was to play Spock, but he instead was cast as the simple, straightforward 'country doctor', Dr Leonard McCoy, chief medical officer aboard the Starship Enterprise. He was to stay aboard the Enterprise, most happily, for all her voyages and incarnations, until his last appearance in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. 'Bones' McCoy even made a special appearance in the pilot episode of Star Trek, the Next Generation, although by then he had been promoted to head of Star Fleet Medical. Even though he was a star of Star Trek, the initial series of 79 episodes themselves did not make him a rich man - all the cast settled for flat fees with limited repeats. It was not until the Enterprise appeared on the large screen that fortune followed fame, although DeForest was always a popular guest at Trek conventions . He is survived by Carolyn, who he married on September 7, 1945

Magnetosphere Earth's magnetosphere is to be studied by a network of three remote sensing satellites to provide new information about the solar wind which bombards the planet and can disrupt communications and power supplies. The magnetic forces around the planet cause the solar wind to part and slide around the globe, although a gust in the solar wind can squeeze the magnetosphere, forcing some of the particles in it into the atmosphere, along magnetic force lines When these particles are energised enough to penetrate into the upper atmosphere they produce the spectacular aurora borealis and magnetic storms. Additionally the magnetosphere has a million kilometre long tail. The solar wind would not be discernible to anyone on earth, being incredibly faint, but when considered as an effect on the earth it becomes a powerful force. When a pressure wave hits the bow of the magnetosphere the aurora brightens at local noon. As the wave travels down the magnetosphere the aurora brightens at the side. The effect can take minutes or hours, depending on how much energy has been built up in the magnetosphere.

True Colours A new study of the spectral 'fingerprints' of solar flares is showing that they fall into two broad categories. This finding is important as the sun builds to a solar maximum. A solar flare is a spectacular thing - a huge explosion on the surface and in the atmosphere of our sun, with materials heated to many millions of degrees and released mega-explosively. Eventually these particles, some travelling as fast as 1.6 million km/h will hit earth. This finding, presented today at the Centennial Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Chicago, could yield new insight into how particles may be accelerated to high energies in solar flares. It could become especially important over the next few years as the Sun's activity peaks during solar maximum. "Right now, we can basically account for the gross properties of solar flares in our numerical simulations," explained Dr. Elizabeth Newton, a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. These "gross properties" are like having a basic understanding that people have two arms, two legs, and walk upright. It's when you look more closely that people begin to take on different characteristics, like fingerprints. The same is apparently true with flares, but only to a point.

Model Behaviour "When we 'build a flare' in a computer simulation, we can reproduce things like the total number of particles being accelerated, the energies they attain, and the time scales over which these things occur," remarked Newton. So the next logical step in the development of their understanding is to probe the details, and see if their computer models can meet more detailed observations, such as how the distribution of emitted energy (called a spectrum) varies with time in a flare. "We call this variation with time 'spectral evolution,'" Newton continued. "Is it the same in every flare? Are they all different? Are there 'classes' of flares? This is what we're after." Solar flares are tremendous explosions on the surface and in the atmosphere of the Sun. In a matter of just a few seconds they heat material to many millions of degrees and release as much energy as a billion megatons of TNT.

Mir The Mir Space station, which has performed long past its expected lifespan, is finally to be closed down and allowed to burn up. Russian space officials have announced that due mainly to a lack of funding they will not be replacing the crew when the present cosmonauts leave in August. Mir was expected to last for about five yars, instead it has been in orbit and manned for 13, although its last year or so has seen many systems problems.

Discovery link-up Shuttle Discovery, launched successfully last week, has docked with the international space station. The station, which is costing £40b is now seven stories high and orbiting 240 miles up. The shuttle crew comprises five americans, one russian and one canadian.

Mapping Mars The results of last year's exercise to map Mars by bouncing laser light off the surface from the Mars Global Surveyor satellite has revealed a huge dent in the south of the planet, probably created by an asteroid impact. The Hellas basin is six miles deep and 1,400 miles in diameter. The debris from the impact lies in a huge nimbus radiating at least 2,500 miles. Remarkably the whole southern hemisphere is about three miles higher than the northern, so that the planet is slightly pear shaped. This fits in with the theories that much of the northern hemisphere was covered by water - it simply flowed there downhill! Mars will next be visited in December, by the Polar Lander which will be heading for the south pole to look for ice - which will be vital if Mars is ever to be colonised. Websites: http://Ida.wr.usgs.gov and http://mars.sdsc.edu

Space Armour A designer has drawn on his study of medieval armour to design a better spacesuit for NASA. Chris Gilman, an Oscar winning designer in Hollywood, has created replica space suits for many years. Now NASA, faced with the problem of increasing problems caused by a design which hasn't been changed since the Apollo days, has asked him to produce the real thing. To increase mobility Gilman has used the jointing system employed in armour to allow the shoulder joint to move more freely, by creating a two-joint mechanism. He has also completely re-designed the helmet, since the current version is severely limited as to field of sight and has a cumbersome neck ring to seal it to the rest of the suit. The new design puts the helmet onto the suit at an angle to the front of the suit, thereby increasing the field of vision greatly.

Moving sounds If you have ever shouted at your car to get it going, it might not have been quite as silly as it seems, for at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, scientists are working on a way to power an engine with sound waves. This new concept would be environmentally green. By a process of engineering helium is agitated with sound waves to produce energy to power an engine or to cool a refrigerator. Added advantages are no moving parts and increased efficiency The original concept - that of heating and colling gasses to drive a piston, was the discovery of Robert Sterling, a C19 Scottish inventor.

Youth culture Is the universe getting younger - well yes, according to the latest from astronomers. Latest calculations using the Hubble constant seem to show that the universe can lop about 1 billion years off its previously calculated age, making it now abouyt 12billion years, give or take. Oh, and at Princeton University they have announced that galaxies are indeed moving apart at an increasing rate, suggesting that the universe will keep expanding for ever. (There's a rude joke or two in there somewhere....)

Two and two makes...err Heavily into the ooops department: the first message we on earth have sent to them out there is a bit of an ooops, with two errors. In 23 pages of sums and stuff designed to be understandable to them, there are two mistakes, with the wrong signal used for an=sign in a geometry page. This is the first time a message has been sent out since 1974, and if someone has been listening out they are going to conclude we haven't got very far...

May the Bank be with you Okay so we're cynical, but George Lucas is set to make $2b from SW1, personally.

Interstellar internet NASA is planning a network of satellites to provide full communications and navigation cover for Mars, to come on line as exploration of the planet proceeds, with the first launch due as soon as 2003. The six satellites will form a communications ring around the planet, provided precise navigation data for human or robot visitors. It will also pick up weak signals from the surface (or anywhere in the viscinity) and boost them back to earth.

Hols..update

The price of a trip into space seems to have dropped rapidly. Latest news is that the going rate is now a more modest £60,000. That is how much the director of the Adam Smith Institute, Madsen Piries, is reputed to have paid for a flight in 2002. Pirie has apparently paid a £3,000 deposit through Wildwings, Britain's only truely up, up and away hol agent.
However, since Richard Branson has registered Virgin Galactic Airways as a brand name, maybe the truth is nearer than we think! Watch this space.
Finally a couple more book reviews. Clive, when not our marketing and advertising manager, is an accomplishd artist and sculptor in his own right, working only to (very expensive) commission. He was not overwhelmed by either of the books of artworks which I asked him to consider.
Add to that the other books which we have featured and which have all been a disappointment and we all begin to crave something really good. We want to enjoy what we read for you, but if a writer or artist is not producing of what we think is their best, we are going to tell it like it is (and then duck)

Too good to be true;

It is hard to report this with an entirely straight face, but it isn't April 1 and it is true - NASA is looking into developing anti-matter propulsion for space travel. Preliminary work shows that the engine of a craft thus powered would use molecules of matter which, when they collide with their anti-matter counterpart, create huge amounts of energy - one gram of matter /anti-matter in collision would release the same amount of energy as 23 of the space shuttle's external tanks. One of the big problems is storing anti-matter..put it in any sort of container and it needs must come into contact with matter and collide messily. NASA has clearly been watching their Star Trek though, as they are designing magnetic containment fields. Working prototypes are expected within two years with mainstream production within 20. Actor James Doohan ('Scotty') always used to quip that he was the only fully qualified starship engineer around - I expect he's waiting by the phone…. Flying saucers - for real

Stranger than fiction department -

Nasa is experimenting with designs for flying saucers. The US space agency is testing designs for saucers because the shape has obvious aerodynamic advantages, it says. Initial testing on a 25kg craft have been so spectacular that the programme has moved to larger models and wind tunnel time, and a 16ft prototype to carry four people is in early design.
Fuelled by a ground based laser beam (an idea first proposed in the 1970s by Prof. Leik Myrabo of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York State, USA)
The concept is that the laser provides the power to get the craft to the edge of the atmosphere and then is used to heat on board hydrogen to power the rest of the travel, by which time the ship will be travelling at Mach five.
The laser works by being focussed on a small point on the ship and then heating air which acts as a jet to accelerate the craft.
Myrabo even envisages a microwave powered craft as the next generation. Not surprisingly the conspiracy theorists are claiming that this work is instead the work of back-engineering . Nasa refutes this. 

A cert for a cloudy night

Remember last November, when we were all exhorted to go outside and watch the skies for a spectacular display from the annual Leonid meteor shower? And remember what a washout it was, as well as (of course) cloudy over most of the UK? Well, now the astronomers have worked out why the display was at its best not over Asia but over the Pacific and 16 hours earlier than it was supposed to be. Seems it was all the fault of something which happened in (which 1333, when some particles left the comet Tempel-Tuttle is the source of the Leonidsa ), and assumed a different orbit, shepherded by Jupiter, by process of dynamic resonance (the same thing that keep Saturn's rings in place).
This year the Leonid display is due November 18, at about 2am

Risk assessment department

It is a theme with which Hollywood has flirted, along with several TV shows - the rogue asteroid bearing down on hapless and helpless earth until the scientist comes along who can save us all.
Well, there seem to be more asteroids out there than we thought, but latest estimates of collision risk put the danger as very low.
Last year 55 asteroids with the potential to collide with earth were tracked, more than in the previous six years. NASA reckons the total is about 2,000, and has traced 163 so far.
It seems that with increasingly sophisticated tracking systems and planning for interception or destruction the danger is minimal- for example 1999 AN10 which has an orbit which is tilted at 70degrees and which intercepts the earth's orbit twice a year in February and August, and is about a mile in diameter, is rated at odds of one in a billion to impact within the next 40 or so years.

Buckets and Spades are dead

If you've done all the' in' resorts and activity holidays, in the next few years space will be the destination to die for. ESA - the European Space Agency, at a conference this week in Bremen,Germany, predicted short sub-orbital flights will be available - at a price of course - within about ten years, and the first hotel in space, featuring zero gravity amusement parks and swimming pools will be opening for business by 2020. Since the technology and engineering skills to construct the hotel itself already exist, the problem will be the problems of travel to and from, but these are likely to be solved fairly soon. Start saving now, though, as ESA reckons that a one hour flight will cost about £50,000.
(and then what will happen to all those jokes about how do you tell the difference between a(star) trekkie and a (star) trekker?

Mapping Britain

Britain is going on the map - or at least more accurately on the map, with the launch of a £42m project by Ordnance Survey .
The re-mapping will take at least ten years and involve the taking of about 65,000 aerial photographs a year. These will be done by using cameras triggered by global positioning satellites for incredible accuracy.
It seems remarkable but the landscape of Britain is changing more rapidly than at any time in recent memory - in the last few decades many roads have been built and railways disappeared, mines have closed and shopping malls have spread over vast areas of farmland. Tower blocks have come and gone.
The whole project will be run from Blackpool Airport - just a couple of miles from the FTL office.

The Martian Chronicles...chapter two

NASA has found a way to extract oxygen from a simulat ed Martian environment, paving the way for exploration and even colonisation in the future.
The method of extraction will be tested in 2002 as one of the experiments on board the Mars Surveyor Lander.
The Martian simulation was set up at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, and featured a nice spring on Mars - the atmosphere was 95% carbon dioxide, and 150 times thinner than here on Earth, and the chamber was cooled to -60c. Then a very thin ceramic disc of zirconia was placed in the chamber, in between two platinum electrodes and heated to 750c.The zirconia breaks down the carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen.

Wormholes - bypasses in space

NASA is on the trail of real live wormholes. Latest research is tending to confirm what those guys boldly going have always known: that wormholes will offer short cuts around space and ; also that you never know where the other end is until you try it.
Wormholes were postulated first by Einstein 64 years ago , but until recently it was thought that they were unenterable since anything approaching one would be squished by the huge gravitational forces which they generate. Now scientists believe that these forces could be negated by using negative mass - space from which all the energy has been sucked out. The existence of this sort of matter was once considered theoretical at best but its existence has now been demonstrated , and a team led by Matt Visser, associate Professor of Physics at Washington University in St Louis,Missouri has further calculated that such matter could be used to enlarge a wormhole enough to allow passage by a ship.
Taming wormholes would allow mankind to realise a Star Trek future since travel to any part of the galaxy would become possible.

Shorter odds

The odds that we are not alone just shortened with the announcement by astronomers from San Fransisco State University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge Massachusetts that they have made a confirmed discovery of three planets in stable orbit around the 44 light years distant star Upsilon Andromedae.
That there was one planet orbiting the star was already known. That one is about threequarters the mass of Jupiter and was in an orbit so close to its primary that it whizzed round it in less than five earth days.
The two new planets are bigger. One is twice the mass of Jupiter and orbits in 242 earth days while the largest found so far is four times Jupiter in mass and orbits once every four earth years.
The find is important, not only because it shows the increasing sophistication of the work done by astronomers in calculating minute peturbations which are followed up by optical work. The first planet was found in 1966 but it's presence alone did not fully explain the wobbling, and a three planet computer model was the only one which fitted the observed facts. The discovery means that the new solar systems very different composition throws into question the existing theories on system formation - theories which were founded on only one model - since the general thinking was that such huge planets could only form at least four AU (astronomical units ie four times the average distance from the earth to the sun) from any star where ice would start to condense out and begin a process of planet formation. Buit all three planets are within this theoretical boundary.
However, no-one is as yet saying whether these planets are capable of sustaining life in any form.

Earth is weird enough for now

While it is easy enough to become enthralled by the news above, that a new planetary system has been found, our own home world still has plenty of surprises for us - a giant bacterium has been found livingon the ocean fllor of Namibia in the sediment.
It is so big that compared to the average bacterium was the size of a newborn housemouse, then this leviathan would on the same scale be the size of a blue whale, while the previously known biggest is comparatively lionsized.
This new bacterium, Thiomargarita namibiensis, grows by loosely attaching itself to its relatives, like a string of beads.
For food they live on sulphides which they can oxidise with the help of the nitrates which are found in seawater. If the ooze in which they live becomes locally depleted of food they have the ability to store food and survive for months - necessary when so big that the food goes quite quickly, presumably.
The larder is replenished by underwarter storms which stir everything up

Solar Power

Japan's national space development agency is working on a new concept in providing power for ships in deep space - a huge solar sail, about 1,500 sq ft in area, which will be deployed to generate 2.5 megawatts of electric power. Using this furoshiki material will mean that ships will not need to use nuclear power . Furoshiki has been picked as the base material as it can be tightly packed and then deployed without wrinkling. Its surface would be coated with solar cells. The concept can also be used as a huge communications antenna, capable of ultra-high-speed large volume data transmission from geostationary orbit. Such antennae would replace the present dishes, which are fine meshes which often prove difficult to deploy. Ultimately the 'handkerchief' in space could even be used as a solar wind sail to propel a craft.

Big bang a bit of a squibb

There are apparently too many stars mooching around between galaxies. These old stars, at the end of their stellar lives have been hiding away from astronomers until now, but scientists from Sydney have now managed to spot about 160 and extrapolate from this that there are many, many more, and this means that there are far more than are predicted by current big bang theoretical thinking. Even before these shy old stars were spotted it was looking like there was just too much normal matter in the universe for the big bang theory, but these stars have upset the calculations even more.

Space station funding

The International Space Station (ISS) has hit yet another funding crisis with the news that the Russians cannot afford a second £40m Soyuz spacecraft,which is the designated ferry to and from the station as well as a liferaft in case of emergency.

Both NASA and ESA are developing their own spacecraft. NASA's, the X-38 is still only at experimental stage, with no decision even made on whether to proceed to full-size construction of a prototype. In any case, neither vehicle would be ready before 2004.

The problem is that if NASA funds construction of the second Soyuz, the money will probably come from the research budget . NASA counters by saying that with only one craft the crew will be limited to three at any one time and this will, of itself, limit the research capability.

The ISS itself is late. The first phase is already more than a year overdue and a launch is not likely before November at the earliest. At the same time, without the propulsions system on the module, the two sections already in space - Zarya control module and Unity main docking hub - will re-enter late next year. So far the plan is to adapt a navy satellite to provide propulsion if necessary. Worst-case senario is to launch the Interim Control Module early.

Balloon Debate

With geostationary orbit slots at a premium, balloonist Per Lindstrand, best known as Richard Branson's co-pilot in his unsuccessful attempts to fly a balloon round the world non-stop, has designed a new communications platform...a solar-powered airship which could provide a pollution free platform for communications, with launch of a prototype as soon as 2001.

The High Altitude Long Endurance airship (HALE) is long and streamlined - about 600ft by 160ft . in diameter and would be built of very lightweigh composite materials. Main advantages would be its cheap construction costs and low costs in operation and servicing

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