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!

---

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

---

Some first pictures of the February 16 eclipse are now available, including shots of the chromosphere like the one shown here. Have a look! There's also a short story while more links are provided in Update #122, 3rd story.

---

Update # 124 of March 29th, 1999, at 19:30 UTC

Sea Launch: Trial Launch a Success! The Sea Launch rocket successfully completed its maiden flight on March 27th (28th UTC). The event, which placed a demonstration payload into geostationary transfer orbit, marked the first commercial launch from a floating platform at sea. "We are now ready to begin full-scale service, as a proven and cost-effective commercial satellite launch service," Sea Launch's president A.Ashby stated after the long-awaited test flight (for which no paying customer had been found). Present at the equatorial launch site at 154 degrees West longitude was the Odyssey, a self-propelled launch platform, and the Sea Launch Commander, a floating mission control center and rocket assembly factory. On board the Odyssey in an environmentally controlled hangar was a 200-foot, flight-ready Sea Launch rocket, complete with demonstration payload. Sea Launch uses a uniquely modified Zenit rocket, configured to enhance reliability and meet the program's performance objectives. During pre-launch preparations, the Odyssey was partially submerged for added stability. The rocket, with payload, then was withdrawn from its hangar on the platform, lifted into a vertical position, fueled with kerosene and liquid oxygen (LOX), and launched. The fueling and launch was completely automated and cordinated from the Sea Launch Commander - the Odyssey crew having transferred to the assembly & command ship and, subsequently, moved 5 km away to a safe operating locale.	Sea Launch Homepage. Pictures & Stories from Florida Today, and coverage from ABCNEWS, BBC Online, Space Daily and SpaceViews. By the way: This was not the first space launch from a platform floating in the sea! Italy has used the San Marco platform off Kenya for several Scout launches. 9 satellites made it to orbit here from 1967 til 1988, including the famous X-ray observatory Uhuru.
Asteroid's moon imaged directly That some asteroids have little moons of their own has been known for a while: Ida's moon Dactyl has been imaged in detail by the Galileo spacecraft, and in several cases satellites of asteroids have been detected indirectly by changing the main bodies' light curves when they move behind or in front of them. And now the first direct imaging of an asteroidal moon has been successful in the case of (45) Eugenia: with the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, an near-IR camera and an adaptive optics system. "S/1998 (45) 1", as the body is called, is 6 magnitudes fainter than Eugenia and was tracked intermittently on five nights over a 10-day span. The orbit is about circular, with a period of about 4.7 days, inclined to the line-of-sight by about 45 deg, with a maximum elongation of about 0.8 arc seconds. The discovery images were obtained last November, and the body was recovered this January.	IAUC # 7129, announcing the discovery. In other asteroidal news: DS-1 is bound for its asteroid 1992 KD after it has resumed firing its ion engine. The asteroid hunting telescope NEAT has discovered a supernova, 1999am.
Two ESA astronauts to service Hubble European Space Agency astronauts Claude Nicollier and Jean-Francois Clervoy will be part of a team of experienced astronauts that will be launched on the Space Shuttle in October of this year on an earlier than planned mission to service the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. Nicollier and three NASA astronauts, who had already been training for a Hubble servicing mission planned for June 2000, have been reassigned to this earlier mission (STS-103). Jean-Francois Clervoy and two other NASA astronauts will complete the STS-103 crew.	ESA Press Release, NASA News Release. SpaceViews story

The Mars Global Surveyor has deployed its antenna on March 29 and is now able to communicate efficiently with Earth: a report from ABCNews. And on March 30th the contract for ESA's Mars Express will be signed in Paris. Prospector confirms lunar origin theory: Gravity data from the Lunar Prospector show that the Moon's core is small, favoring the popular Giant Impact model of its formation (NASA Release, CNN story). The MMT has received its new 6.5 m mirror: The replacement for the previous 6 small mirrors was installed on March 25th on Mt. Hopkins. MMT Homepage and Homepage of the mirror maker.

The instrumentation for the Planck and FIRST satellites has been approved by ESA; the cosmology & IR satellites will be launched together in 2007. More speculations about 'fossils' in Martian meteorites were featured at a major conference - but they didn't convince. The German Weather Service has now a Website for the Aug. 1999 eclipse, too. "Cold Fusion" is 10 years old - and there are still believers ... Stardust's first picture shows not much: Mars as a dot and a lot of space... :-) And finally: A new homepage for the ST-4/Champollion NASA comet lander (the sample return part of the project has been cancelled recently) features two of my photographs of comet Hale-Bopp!