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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