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By Daniel Fischer Every page in Europe and the U.S.!
| Ahead | Awards 
The latest issue!
| An experimental German companion. Current mission news: MGS (latest pictures!) + Cassini + Galileo + NEAR |
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ESA Science News. / NEAR in safe mode - maneuver delayed! But Eros orbit insertion not in danger: Newsflash, SpaceViews. New burn set for Feb. 3rd: Newsflash, Timeline. / SRTM launch delayed to Feb. 11 or 12: SpaceViews, CNN, Spaceflight Now. / Progress docks with Mir without problems: BBC, SpaceViews.
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SRTM launch scrubbed - next attempt not before February 9thThe news came in the wee hours of February 1st, half a day after the first launch attempt of mission STS-99 had been scrubbed: NASA has decided to replace a suspect Main Events Controller aboard shuttle Endeavour, delaying the planned 11-day Shuttle Radar Topography Mission to at least Feb. 9th. The two Main Events Controllers onboard Endeavour are required for flight: They handle commands from the orbiter's General Purpose Computer for such mission events as solid rocket booster and external tank separation. The problem was with MEC No. 2: It was investigated and the controller returned the proper response after it was powered down and restarted. However, launch managers do not know what caused it to malfunction in the first place.An overnight troubleshooting at the Kennedy Space Center resulted in the decision to replace the box. Replacement, however, will take about one week. Three to four shifts are needed to install a new unit, followed by several days of elaborate testing in order to assure that the new box is healthy and properly connected to numerous pyrotechnic devices used for booster and tank separation. No official launch date has been released yet; the current target date is February 9th, 2000. To avoid a conflict with a scheduled Delta rocket launch, negotiations with the KSC launch range need to be completed. Even if the computer issue would have been resolved within the 2 hour launch window on January 31st, there wouldn't have been a launch anyway: The weather conditions were just too bad. Other worries about loose tiles or the safety of main engine fuel pump seals (that had come up on Jan. 28th after anomalies were discovered in the main engines of Discovery) had been addressed by the 30th, however. But some controversies have erupted over the SRTM itself: the shortening of the radar operations by one day (in order to have a contingency day for retracting the 200 meter boom of the radar) and the restricted access to the data in full spatial resolution (dictated by the U.S. military) have scientists worried that the celebrated goals of the mission are already severely compromised before it even began... |
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Mir's 2nd coming begins: Progress launchedAn unmanned Progress cargo freighter was launched on Feb. 1st, due to dock automatically with the temporarily abandoned Mir space station two days later. In case the docking fails, the two cosmonauts due to crew the station from April to August are on stand-by and could launch with their Soyuz capsule already later in February, dock manually and then guide the Progress in. The freighter and a 2nd one due to launch in April are carrying essential goods needed for bringing the station back to life. Its status isn't that bad, actually: While the air pressure inside has dropped to 600 Torr by now, due to a mysterious leak, the temperature is a comfortable 22 degrees C - and the on-board computer did well during recent tests.While the cosmonauts Sergei Zaletin and Alexander Kaleri will mainly be occupied with technical troubleshooting tasks, they also have a scientific program - and it includes experimenting with an electrodynamic tether that might be used in the future to boost Mir's orbit (see Update # 153!). The tether is being built in the U.S. and paid for by the Foundation for International Non-governmental Development of Space (FINDS) - the same organisation that also brought U.S. financier Walt Anderson in touch with Mir's owner Energia to work on a possible commercial future of Mir. Plans are still being worked out, and by April enough money must have been raised: Otherwise Mir will have to be abandoned for good after August. (With Space News of Jan. 31st) |
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The Sun's magnetic field has a good 'memory'Each time the Sun's field reverses, there is a statistical preference for it to return to the same longitude. Averaged over many years, the interplanetary magnetic field lines tend to point out of one side of the Sun (the Sun's Eastern hemisphere, say) and point in on the other side (or hemisphere), reversing the pattern approximately every 11 years: This "preferred longitude effect" has been found in an analysis of all the solar wind data collected near Earth and by interplanetary spacecraft from the beginning of the space age through 1998 - covering 3 1/2 solar cycles. Another way of looking at this result is that as the Sun rotates, the same magnetic structures have tended to face the Earth every 27 days and 43 minutes over the last 38 years.This result suggests that there is something asymmetric about the interior of the Sun - perhaps a deep-seated lump of old magnetic field. Physicists have struggled for years to understand how the solar dynamo generates and maintains the Sun's magnetic field; these new data must now be taken into account in their theories. The existence of preferred longitudes suggests that the dynamo may operate further below the Sun's surface than previously thought. Present theories place the dynamo near the bottom of the Sun's outer zone which transfers heat outward by convection and where time scales or memories of past magnetic structures are fairly short. The persistence of preferred longitudes means that some of the Sun's magnetism may arise in or be affected by the deeper, radiative zone of the Sun where time scales are longer. |
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Cassini makes distant asteroid flybyThe Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft passed within 1.5 million km of the asteroid 2685 Masursky on January 23th, and several spacecraft instruments, including its camera, visual and infrared mapping spectrometer and UV imaging spectrograph, collected data a few hours before closest approach: Significant Events report, SpaceViews.Mighty Galileo forges on - the spacecraft has defied engineering's actuarial tables to complete more than four years of orbiting Jupiter: New York Times. NEAR prepares for Eros rendezvousThe future orbiter went through a full rehearsal of the spacecraft and instrument activities leading up to the orbit insertion maneuver recently: NEAR News.Eros ever more clearly seen by the approaching spacecraft: Jan. 31 picture. Clean lightcurve measured as well by NEAR - the asteroid is very elongated, about 33 by 13 by 13 km in size: Jan. 19 picture.
Deep Space One drops one target, heads only for comet BorrellyOn Jan. 22 the mission management has decided to forego the opportunity for a visit to the dead comet Wilson-Harrington and to concentrate on the comet Borrelly fly-by (see Update # 152 story 9 for details) instead: AW&ST of Jan. 31, p. 21.What we learned from DS1, technology-wise: Space Daily. Rosetta STM passes acceleration trials - environmental tests on the Structural Thermal Model (STM) of the Rosetta spacecraft are back in full swing after the long break for Christmas and Millennium celebrations: ESA Science News. First light for VLT UT3 "Melipal"The third unit telescope of the Very Large Telescope has started observing, and the images are already quite good: ESO Press Release.An Infrared View of Globulars in the Andromeda Galaxy by Hubble shows that no significant number of younger stars inhabit the bulge surrounding 5 globular clusters, implying it is at least 10 billion years old: Astronomy. |
Mars meteorites in CaliforniaA pair of unusual rocks discovered in California by a private collector two decades ago have been shown to be meteorites - and they are from the planet Mars: Homepage, a fan page, SpaceViews, BBC, Space Daily.Woman finds space fireball debris in the U.K. - the meteorites, totalling 220 grams in weight, are the first recovered in Ireland since 1865: BBC. No response from Mars yet, but more attempts aheadThe latest attempts to receive a signal from the lost Mars Polar Lander have not led to a detection during the last week of January, but antennas around the world, including several in Europe, will turn their ears to the Red Planet again on Feb. 4th in hopes of hearing a reply: JPL Release; Spaceflight Now, CNN, BBC, ABC, Space.com, AP, SpaceScience.com.Evidence builds that it was the MPL on the line, says the New York Times. Earlier stories: Discovery, SpaceRef, JPL Release, SpaceViews, CNN, Fla. Today. Russian dreams of another Mars missionincluding Phobos studies (the news broke here in Update # 152 story 6!) have again been voiced, this time by L. Ksanfomality of Russia's Academy of Sciences' space studies institute: AFP.Nomad's first Antarctic meteorite hunt ends with 3 successesThe wheeled robot had found and correctly classified three indigenous meteorites in situ, when the operations ended on Jan. 30th - and in addition, during "guided search" Nomad classified two more meteorites: final update, all the meteorites, and an earlier AP story. The meteorite search as an Internet event: Space Daily."Wall of Galaxies" in the Hubble Deep FieldMore than half of the galaxies in this very deep HST image are found in a small number of groups, rather than being smoothly distributed in space: FermiLab Press Release. |
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Compiled and written by Daniel Fischer
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