Compiled and written by Daniel Fischer, Skyweek - older "Mirrors" in the Archive - and find out what the future might bring!

Other programmes to receive approval from the Ministers included further enhancements of Europe's highly successful launcher industry, new developments in satellite navigation, satellite communications, particularly multimedia systems, and further preparations for providing Europe's contribution to the ISS in its early years of operation. The Ministers also agreed the budgets for the ESA Science Programme allocating 1.46 billion Euros for the period 1999-2002.

"Most of the SETI programs in existance today build large computers that analyze that data from the telescope in real time," the project explains the new approach: "None of these computers look very deeply at the data for weak signals nor do they look for a large class of signal types. The reason for this is because they are limited by the amount of computer power available for data analysis. To tease out the weakest signals, a great amount of computer power is necessary. It would take a monstrous supercomputer to get the job done.

The UC Berkeley SETI team has discovered that there are already thousands of computers that might be available for use. Most of these computers sit around most of the time with toasters flying across their screens accomplishing absolutely nothing and wasting electricity to boot. This is where SETI@home (and you!) come into the picture. The SETI@home project hopes to convince you to allow us to borrow your computer when you aren't using it and to help us '...search out new life and new civilizations.' We'll do this with a screen saver that can go get a chunk of data from us over the internet, analyze that data, and then report the results back to us."

"In order to put our limits in more familiar terms," the authors write, "we have compared our results to those expected for a Solar System clone averaging over possible lens system distances and orientations. We find that such a system is ruled out at the 90% confidence level. A copy of the Solar System with Jupiter replaced by a second Saturn mass planet can be ruled out at 70% confidence. Our low mass planetary signal is significant at the 4.5 sigma confidence level, and if this planetary interpretation is correct, then the MACHO-98-BLG-35 lens system constitutes the first detection of a low mass planet orbiting an ordinary star without gas giant planets." (Rhie & al., Preprint of May 12, 1999)

The Chinese space capsule seems to be based on the Russian Soyuz, but there also seem to be plans to develop a small space shuttle - apparently based on very old American design ideas like the Dynasoar (X-20). This, however, is not the spacecraft to be used in the initial flights. Another indication for upcoming manned missions is the recent overhaul of several tracking ships in shipyards in Shanghai: They will be deployed in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. This fleet has never operated far from China.