The current phase of the operation, expected to take about a week, will raise that perigee from the initial 840 km to 7000 kilometres by repeated firing of XMM's own thrusters. The spacecraft will then be on its intended path, spending 40 hours out of every 48-hour orbit clear of the radiation belts which spoil the view of the X-ray universe. Technical commissioning and verification of the performance of the telescopes and scientific instruments will then follow; XMM should be fully operational for astronomy in the spring of 2000.

A large number of satellites in deep space as well as in Earth orbit contributed data on the rare event, from ACE, Wind, Geotail and IMP-8 to SAMPEX, POLAR, the Lunar Prospector, GOES, GPS and so on. The solar wind shutdown even opened a rare "window" into the solar corona: Because of the decrease, energetic electrons from the Sun were able to flow to Earth in narrow beams, known as the strahl. Under normal conditions, electrons from the Sun are diluted, mixed, and redirected in interplanetary space and by Earth's magnetic field (the magnetosphere). But in May 1999, several satellites detected electrons arriving at Earth with properties similar to those of electrons in the Sun's corona, suggesting that they were a direct sample of particles from the Sun.

• The elevation of a particular contact (the border between two geological units, such as where one type of surface meets another) is nearly a level surface, which might indicate an ancient shoreline.
• The topography is smoother below this possible ancient shoreline than above it, consistent with smoothing by sedimentation.
• The volume of the area below this possible shoreline is within the range of previous estimates of water on Mars.
• A series of terraces exists parallel to the possible shoreline, consistent with the possibility of receding shorelines.

But now two bursts from SGR 1900+14 have been found to closely resemble the tough, star-killing gamma-ray bursts observed in deep space, aside from the large difference in peak luminosity! While theorists are scrambling to explain how a source a trillion times fainter can still make occasional bursts like a GRB, the possibility has arisen that a few GRBs in the catalogs could actually be misbehaving SGRs after all.

Scientists believe ice is a good environment for primitive bacteria. The bacteria need less food because it's cold, and their metabolism slows down, somewhat like a hibernating bear's. (It is not clear, however, whether the specimen found in the ice core were still alive.) Another finding was that DNA extracted from the microbes present in the team's Lake Vostok sample indicated the presence of only a few subgroups of known bacteria, coupled with low overall microbial diversity.