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

The age of lava flows can be judged from the number of craters on them: The longer a surface is exposed in the solar system, the more hits it receives. While much of the surface of Mars is heavily cratered and billions of years old, there are a few lava flows with with less than 1% as many craters as e.g. the region on our Moon where Apollo 11 once landed. By comparing impact rates on the Moon and Mars one can conclude that the youngest Martian lava flows date not from Mars' early or middle history (as was assumed) but from within the last one percent of Martian time. (Press Release at the DPS Meeting by W.K. Hartmann)

The negative result proves nothing as there are half a dozen other explanations for the non-detection of any effects that don't force one to conclude that there is no ice. So - let's try it again, the Texans say: While there are no more lunar orbiters waiting to crash, one could as well send old communications satellites from their high Earth orbits to the Moon, for more controlled impacts. And natural meteoroids are hitting the Moon with high energy as well (they're tiny but much faster than the Prospector's 1.7 km/s): The coming Leonids will be an interesting test. (Talk by D. Goldstein at the DPS Meeting on Oct. 13th)

• In the Outer Planets Program that so far consists of an Europa Orbiter, the Pluto-Kuiper Express and the Solar Probe we can expect
  • an Europa lander as a technology demonstration of future subsurface access;
  • a Titan Explorer Mission in which a payload on a balloon or an aircraft investigates the surface and atmosphere of the Saturnian moon in greater detail than Huygens will in 2004; and
  • a Neptune Orbiter Mission that - having reached Neptune after 10 years - will include multiple flybys of Triton.
• The Mars Surveyor Program will continue beyond the first sample return missions with
  • subsurface exploration, both with a synthetic aperture radar from orbit and by landers that dig up to 100 m deep;
  • "robotic outposts" for wide-area exploration and sampling in three dimensions; and
  • an "Earth-Mars Internet" with comsats of increasing power to really connect the two planets - enabling e.g. 1 MB/s video rates.
• The Discovery Program will be continued with the strategic goal of "opportunism" in the best sense: Whenever there is an opportunity to advance our exploration of the solar system with new technologies for a moderate price, it will be done (no missions beyond the current 8 are mentioned because the ideas come all from competitions).
• A fourth class of missions under the title "To build a Planet" will come for important missions that fit under neither of the three other roofs. Early candidates are
  • a comet nucleus sample return mission (that has the highest priority here);
  • a Venus sample return mission (that would spend only 90 minutes on the surface); and
  • a Saturn ring observer, hovering just 3 kms over the rings.
• The New Millennium Program will be re-cast as completely technology-oriented, with science results as a bonus at best. The technologies tried out here for the first time will then be employed in the missions of the other four categories. Despite the much-hated cancellation of the ST-4/Champollion mission, a comet landing could still become part of the NMP.

NASA FY2000 budget - the Conference Report is in

The mission - that would launch in 2004 and bring back Phobos samples by 2008 - is anything but a reflight of the ill-fated Phobos missions of the 1980's. As the U.S. and lately Europe, Russia is going for "faster, cheaper and (hopefully) better" space science as well now. Instead of hoisting 6-ton mega-spacecraft on expensive Proton rockets, the new mission would use the cheaper Soyuz or even a Molniya rocket and would employ solar-electric propulsion (SEP). Furthermore the design is so flexible that very similar spacecraft could be sent to asteroids (Fortuna in particular) as well. Stay tuned... (Talk by M. Marov, Keldysh Inst., at the DPS Meeting on Oct. 12th)

• Former comet Wilson-Harrington will be encountered on January 15th, 2001: This object is listed as an asteroid (4015) since only once did it show cometary activity - it had an ion tail when it was accidentally photographed in 1949 during the first Palomar Sky Survey. For some reason the nearly totally dead body (of about 3 km diameter) had set free a cloud of molecules, without even forming a coma. In 2001 it will only have 12th magnitude: Not much to see even in a bigger telescope. Since there is no more activity, DS1 will aim for a close flyby at perhaps 10 km distance.
• Comet Borrelly however will be an object of about 8th magnitude when Deep Space 1 arrives on September 20th, 2001. This is a "moderately active" comet producing lots of dust and behaving identically at every apparition; DS1 will likely keep 100 km distance from the nucleus. At the moment the comet still far from its perihelion and should have 24th mag., but in the weeks leading up to the encounter it should have reached 9th to 8th magnitude - a simple target for a possible observing campaign for amateurs, just like the International Halley Watch in the mid-80's.

Scientific results from DS1's primary mission

• Spectra of the Planet Mars in the IR show the expected absorption features of carbon dioxide, plus two more - probably from sulfates.
• The size of asteroid Braille could be measured from the only existing pictures from some distance to 2.15+/-.39 x 1.00+/-0.26 km. The albedo is 30+/-5 %.
• Braille's IR spectrum now looks less similar to Vesta's and more similar to Apollo's - Braille belongs probably to the type Q.

FAME, planned for a 2004 launch, will measure the position and brightness of 40 million stars in the galaxy with a precision of just 50 microarcseconds, far exceeding the capabilities of ESA's pioneering Hipparcos satellite. FAME's data will allow astronomers to really calibrate the Cepheid distance scale and to indirectly detect extrasolar planets and dark matter, based on their gravitation effects on stellar motions.