The next MEPCO is coming ... to Bulgaria, in early August, 1999!
For details on this astronomical conference just before the total solar eclipse click here!

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New: every page on two servers, in Europe and the U.S.!

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While the RE/MAX balloon flight had to be postponed until December,
a Delta rocket is on a Vandenberg launch pad due to launch on Jan. 16:
It carries the satellites ARGOS, SUNSAT and Oersted.

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Update # 118 of January 15th, 1999, at 21:30 UTC

More releases from the 193rd Meeting of the AAS A remarkable view of the Large Magellanic Cloud, showing its velocity field in color. Striking pictures of the Galactic Center region have been obtained with the Very Large Array: the images. An extrapolation of dark matter properties of galaxies of various sizes hints at an undiscovered population of "ghost galaxies" consisting of dark matter and little else: a Press Release. Planets everywhere? Details on the possible detection of an Earth- to Neptune-sized planet by microlensing and of the discovery of a big disk around a young star. The morphology of galaxies should be studied in the infrared than in the visible. And here are some nearby galaxies in the IR.

Superluminal Motion in a galaxy's jet - seen for the first time in the visible: by the HST in Messier 87! How an interstellar jet "hit the wall": a Press Release. "The Dragon's Breath": how molecular clouds are destroyed during star formation - images and explanations. How does the X-ray structure of Supernove Remnants form? A collection of telling images. An amazingly sharp HST image of the Cygnus Loop. How do Planetary Nebulae form? A pioneer of the field had a view with Hubble.

Nozomi to reach Mars only in 2003! When the Japanese Mars probe Nozomi finally left the Earth-Moon system on Dec. 20, 1998, it didn't reach the necessary speed: One of the valves in the bi-propellant engine module did not work correctly. The necessary corrections needed twice as much fuel as originally planned. Now it has become clear that the original mission plan is no longer viable - but the orbit design group of ISAS was able to find an new solution to bring NOZOMI in the originally planned Mars Orbit, which we quote in verbatim: "1. NOZOMI makes three rotations along the current elliptical orbit whose perihelion locates at Earth orbit and aphelion at Mars orbit. 2. In December 2002, NOZOMI makes Earth swing by and changes its orbital plane. 3. In June 2003, NOZOMI makes Earth swing by again and targets to Mars. 4. NOZOMI arrives at Mars in December 2003 (or early January 2004) and burns bi-propellant engine to be captured in the Mars orbit." (Adapted from a memo from the Mars Dust Counter team in Munich)	Munich Dust Counter Homepage Mars Dust Counter & Nozomi News in German and English NSSDC on Nozomi
Cassini in Safe Mode after loss of attitude Cassini entered a "safe" mode Monday, January 11, as commanded by the spacecraft's built-in fault protection software. At about 3 p.m. PST on Monday, the spacecraft was in the midst of an instrument checkout exercise when it sensed a potential error in its orientation. Attitude and articulation control system software sent this information to Cassini's central computer, the command and data subsystem, which executed fault protection routines to "safe" the spacecraft and reinitialize its orientation. The spacecraft was put in a minimum power configuration and thermally safe environment, pointing its 4-meter-diameter antenna toward the Sun to shade the rest of the spacecraft. Communication with the spacecraft is being conducted with the low-gain antenna. Cassini should be taken out of its safe mode later this week after the initiating event has been identified and all engineering data have been thoroughly analyzed. In the meantime, the spacecraft remains in good health as it awaits new commands from controllers on Earth. (Adapted from Cassini Status Report of Jan. 13)	Cassini Mission Status for Jan. 13 (a British mirror, as the JPL site was behaving erratically) A story from ABC
DS 1 exercises its Autonomous Navigation system During the past three weeks, Deep Space 1 has exercised its autonomous navigation system, an advanced science instrument that studies space plasma and a radio system that transmits at an unusually high frequency. In addition, the spacecraft has continued to use its ion propulsion system and advanced solar array. The operations team turned the ion propulsion system off December 18 to turn the spacecraft's helm over to the autonomous navigation system, known as AutoNav. This system, one of the 12 technologies that Deep Space 1 is validating, is designed to find the spacecraft's location in the solar system by taking images of known asteroids and comparing their positions to background stars. Because the autonomous navigation system knows where the asteroids are and where the more distant stars are, it can determine where it is in the solar system when the picture is taken. AutoNav transitioned into spacecraft control by directing the ion propulsion system to pressurize its xenon tanks for thrusting, commanding the spacecraft's attitude control system to turn the spacecraft to thrust in the direction that AutoNav desired and, finally, starting the thruster. On Tuesday, January 5, AutoNav turned off the ion engine, completing the first thrust segment of the Deep Space 1 mission. During that period, the engine accumulated over 850 operating hours. (Adapted from DS Mission Status of Jan. 12)	DS1 Status Report of Jan. 12 (again the British mirror)
Galaxies with redshift 10 in the HDF South? Where is the limit for the redshifts of galaxies? A program to automatically determine approximate redshifts to very faint galaxies from photographs in different colors has now yielded 14 galaxies with redshifts between 5 and 10 and another five with redshifts larger than 10 in the NICMOS IR images of the Hubble Deep Field South (see Update # 111). With current technology it is impossible to measure actual spectra of these extremely faint specks of light, but the Next Generation Space Telescope could be able to do it, "Photometric redshifts" have become an established technique for getting rough distances to many galaxies recently, and most of the time, when real spectra are measured later, the estimates turned out to be quite good. The HDFS galaxies with the possible record-breaking redshifts are so faint, however, that the reliability of the results is uncertain. The redshift record for galaxies stands at 6.68 so far (see Update #104). (Science of Jan. 1st, p. 19-21)	The HDF NICMOS image analysis Galaxies came before clusters: This current thinking has been supported by ROSAT observations. By the way - ROSAT is not dead yet! There could still be some final final observations.

In a Nutshell: A new CCD camera with 67 million pixels is now being used by ESO: some images of galaxies and the Moon. / Sea Surface Temperature maps from the ATSR instrument on the satellite ERS-2 are available from 1995 to the present. / And first results from the SWAS satellite have already been presented, just weeks after its launch: The satellite has detected water in many molecular clouds, but no molecular oxygen.

Have you read the the previous issue?!
All other historical issues can be found in the Archive.

This Cosmic Mirror has been visited times since it was issued.

Compiled and written by Daniel Fischer
(send me a mail to [email protected]!), Skyweek