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

The interplanetary spacecraft Voyager 2 took seven images of the new satellite when it flew by Uranus in late January, 1986: These images have been publicly available in digital format. However, nobody recognized the satellite until Karkoschka investigated these images recently. He has studied the Uranian satellites based on images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope and found the new satellite when he compared his HST results with images taken by Voyager 2. Uranus may well have more than 18 satellites, Karkoschka noted: Jupiter and Saturn have satellites of about half the size of the new Uranian satellite. No such small satellite has yet been discovered around Uranus since the dim sunlight at Uranus makes the detection of such small satellites very hard.

The general appearance of the Martian storm seems consistent with an intense low pressure vortex with rising air causing cloud formation, possibly with a small core that is cloud-free, like the eye of a hurricane. The storm was detected using the Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 by a team of astronomers observing Mars near its closest approach to Earth in nearly eight years. When first imaged by Hubble on April 27, 1999, the storm was located near 65 deg. N latitude and 85 deg. W longitude. When next imaged about 6 hours later, the storm appeared to have moved only slightly eastward, but seemed to be in the process of dissipating.

The passage in 2027 could be as close as 37 000 km from the Earth's center but no closer. The miss distance is still very uncertain, and the asteroid could easily pass well outside the Moon's orbit. The probability of a collision in 2027 is essentially zero. But there is still a very remote possibility that asteroid 1999 AN10 could pass by Earth in 2027 in such a way as to return in the year 2039 on an impacting trajectory. First identified by researchers Andrea Milani, Steven R. Chesley and Giovanni B. Valsecchi, this scenario is still exceedingly unlikely, but the probability of collision in 2039 has now increased to about 1 chance in 10 million.

The Remote Agent software was in the middle of what was to be a two-day test. Despite the abort more than a day ahead of schedule, project officials said that the Remote Agent had still achieved 70% of its planned objectives. Remote Agent was designed to carry out a set of mission goals without relying on commands from Earth. The software developed a set of plans to carry out the goals, executed those plans, and worked around any problems that developed with the spacecraft as those plans were carried out. This is probably the most 'futuristic' of the 12 new technologies that DS1 is testing.