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Ten years ago, a revolution in scientific publishing began when the first paper was posted on the now-famous 'LANL Preprint Server' - while started by physicists, the possibility of distributing preprints online without delay was soon adopted by astronomers as well, and nowadays some don't even go to the regular library anymore: the first ever and the first astronomical paper published that way, and a detailled article on how traditional journals might/should bite the dust soon... (Incidentally, the rebel computer operations system Linux is also 10 years old this month: BBC.)

Update # 227 of August 25, at 17:15 UTC Posted in part from the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Kiruna, Sweden

Leonids confusion / Amateurs finds comet / Messier 22 confusion / Intergalactic insights / Genesis launched!

Confusion mounts over the 2001 Leonids meteor storm The picture is not nearly as clear-cut as it had seemed (see Update # 211): Although no one doubts the general physics of meteor storms anymore, there is considerable confusion right now about the details - which translates to great uncertainty about whether there will be a big Leonids storm this November at all and if so, whether it will be best in East Asia & Australia or rather in North America. All models published so far are based on the famous dust trails that worked well in 1999 and 2000 and apparently in the past centuries as well. But among the four major groups or individual theorists working on predictions for 2001, three markedly different results have been achieved: The classical result, basically the same for D. Asher & R. McNaught as well as E. Lyytinen, has two strong peaks of the meteor rate on Nov. 18, 2001, one around 10 UTC with about 2000 meteors/hour and the bigger one around 18 UTC with 6000 to 15,000 meteors per hour. As far as the CM has learned, none of these authors have revised their predictions which remain basically the same after the 2000 observations (which were forecast correctly in time, though not the maximum ZHRs). A very different result has been obtained by B. Cooke of NASA's MSFC who - taking into account worldwide observations of the Leonids in 1999 and 2001 - comes to the conclusion that there will be only one veeery broad and shallow maximum, peaking at a mere 1300 meteors/hour around 13 UTC. Again completely different is a model presented by P. Jenniskens at the Meteoroids 2001 conference in Kiruna earlier this month: He sees again two peaks, at the times predicted by Asher, McNaught & Lyytinen, but with the intensities the other way around. He expects a whopping 32,000 meteors/hr at the 'American' 10 UTC peak and only some 2000/hr at the 'Asian' 18 UTC one. This model is work in progress, however, the final paper hasn't been released yet, and it is already being criticized, as the CM has learned. How can the same basic model yield three very different results? The problem is that there has never been a situation like in 2001 (or 2002) when the Earth is coming rather close to certain dust trails, but several years after the parent comet Tempel-Tuttle came by. Thus there is no way of telling beforehand how much dust there is in the trails so far behind. And there are also several very poorly understood mechanisms that can shift the trails away from the Sun (Cooke) or towards it (Jenniskens). While the observations of the Leonids activity from 1998 to 2000 are excellent, the data for the decades and centuries before are often poor or contradictory, and the 3D shape and location of the trails are just not constrained enough. And where does all that leave the eager observer of the 2001 Leonids storm, perhaps the last one for decades to come (see Update # 222 story 7)? In the middle of nowhere, unfortunately: There is only one small region on the whole globe from where the Leonids radiant is above the horizon and the Sun well below it at 10 UTC as well as at 18 UTC - in the Polar Ocean between Eastern Russia and the North Pole! Even airplanes would have a hard time to catch both peaks under good conditions. Thus a decision has to be made whether to position oneself in the U.S. (Arizona is said to have the best weather prospects in November) or Asia or Australia - and by November 19 we will know which of the three models listed above was correct ...	Prediction pages of the modellers: Asher (mentioning the new confusion briefly), McNaught, Lyytinen, Cooke and Jenniskens (the latter still representing the 'old' wisdom). The Perseids of 2001 brought only a flat plateau with a maximum zenithal hourly rate of about 85 on August 12; higher peaks on August 13 are not confirmed: IMO Shower Circular, some nice intensified video clips (as animated GIFs), a few still pictures and previews by Science@NASA, S&T, Astronomy, BBC, CNN, SC. Manmade meteors - the reentry of a Molnyia rocket stage in mid-August: photos and what happened. Large Earth-Crossing Asteroid found A newly discovered rare asteroid, 2001 OG108, may be the largest Earth-crosser known, but an impact is unlikely anytime soon: Astronomy. Another asteroid scare flops: CCNet of Aug. 23 and 24 plus SC. The U.K. will get a NEO information center, as a first meager consequence of the Task Force Report (see Update # 204 story 4): Gov't and BNSC [SR] Releases, BBC, ST, Reuters, The Independent, The Sunday Times and CCNet with lots of stories. Tagish Lake meteorite yields clues to carbon evolution The first results are in from the organic analysis of the Tagish Lake Meteorite, a rare, carbon-rich carbonaceous chondrite that fell on a frozen Canadian lake in January 2000 and is the most pristine specimen ever studied: ASU, Brown Press Releases, PhysicsWeb, SciAm, CNN, SC, WELT. NEAR's final approach to Eros in a clever montage: APOD.
Amateur discovers comet during star party! It had seemed that comet hunters of the human kind just couldn't compete anymore with the automated telescopes hunting for comets and asteroids these days - at least that's how many beleaguered sky watchers have been feeling. But on August 18th, 2001, a Canadian amateur proved that humans can still bag a comet and do it the old-fashioned way! Vance Petriew of Regina, Saskatchewan - a computer consultant by day and an amateur astronomer by night - was at the Saskatchewan Summer Star Party when he turned his 20" telescope toward the Crab Nebula. Hopping from one star to another across the constellation Taurus, Petriew guided his telescope toward the famous supernova remnant - but he never made it. He stopped instead at a curious smudge that appeared unexpectedly in his eyepiece. There was something intriguing about the smudge, something that made Petriew investigate further. "Thinking it might be a galaxy, I looked at my star charts to see if any were nearby. Just then Richard Huziak happened to walk over for the first time that night." Huziak was familiar with the region of sky and knew that no eye-catching galaxy was in the vicinity: The pair quickly realized that Petriew had stumbled onto an unknown comet. Unfortunately the 11th-mag. object is already fading, but it appears that Comet Petriew may be traveling around the Sun once every 5.5 years following an elliptical path that stretches from a point just inside Earth's orbit (0.95 AU) out to the realm of the giant planet Jupiter (5.3 AU).	IAUC # 7686 with the discovery, more background & pictures, an ephemeris, a detailled story from Science@NASA and an article from CBC. More comet LINEAR pictures (it's now down to 10th magnitude) by AstroStudio, IAS (Namibia), MBKTeam, Crni Vrh and Gaehrken. Transneptunian object 2001 KX76 measures 1200 to 1400 km This follows from a better orbit, after historical positions have been retrieved thru 'Astrovirtel' - the just discovered object (see Update # 225 story 6) beats Ceres hands-down as the largest asteroid, as well as Pluto's moon Charon: ESA and ESO Releases, SN, BBC, AFP, Plan. Soc., SC, CNN, NZ.
Three opinions on the "lone planets wandering through a globular cluster" (namely Messier 22; see Update # 225 story 3) have now been published in rapid sequence: One theorist excludes their existence from analytical formulae, one group of computer modellers does so, too - but a different computer model (on a custom-designed machine) still allows the HST discovery to be true in principle. The only evidence for a huge number of free-floating planets in M 22 are six rapid brightenings of background stars that the HST seems to have observed and that are being interpreted as microlensing events. A computer model by de la Fuente Marcos and de la Fuente Marcos finds that all planets that may have formed around stars in M 22 will long have been ejected from the dense cluster. The only scenario that would fit the HST observations would be a - highly speculative - "Robust Association of Massive Baryonic Objects" or RAMBO, a dark cluster of planets located somewhere along the line of sight from the Earth to M 22 ... Calculations by Gaudi confirm this numerical model independently: Neither around stars in the cluster nor in its outskirts are nearly enough planets likely to explain the six HST events. And it can also be excluded that the lensing planets would be spread equally through the Milky Way as one would need a huge number of them. Thus the RAMBO idea is the only one still viable - and there is no evidence whatsoever that such objects exist. Along come computer modellers Hurley and Shara who worked with the latest incarnation of the GRAPE computer, constructed for the sole purpose of simulating star clusters. Their first take on the M 22 is that surviving, free planets inside the globular cluster may be possible after all, but only if each star in the cluster used to have some 100 planets in the beginning. Apparently the fate of planets inside globular clusters - if they can form in this environment in the first place (the lack of planets in the cluster 47 Tuc [see Updates # 193 story 3 and 208 small items] may mean something) - has hardly been understood. More theoretical work is clearly called for, but what about more observations? Groups # 1 and 3 call for more HST observations of M 22, but Gaudi is already so convinced that there cannot be any free-floating planets in the cluster that he explicitly speaks out against more HST observations: They would be, in his opinion, a big waste of precious resources ...	The papers by de la Fuente Marcos & de la Fuente Marcos, Gaudi and Hurley & Shara. Another planet for 47 UMa A 2nd roughly Jupiter-sized planet has been found to orbit the star 47 Ursae Majoris - and both are on circular orbits, making the system the closest analogue to the Solar System found to date, although terrestrial planets further in are unlikely for dynamical reasons: NSF and Berkeley Press Releases, NYT, Science News, ABC, BBC, ST, Astronomy, SN, SC, SPIEGEL, RP, WELT. Earth-like planet formation is not inhibited in double stars and perhaps even helped along by binary partners and/or big planets, a complex simulation shows: PhysicsWeb, SC. Beta Pictoris is indeed surrounded by comets - FUSE measurements of the chemistry of the circumstellar disk (which apparently lacks H2, but has plenty of CO) confirm the view that there are tons of comets in orbit inside the disk: GSFC Release [SN], SN, FT, ST, SC. Optical spectroscopy of the "isolated planetary mass objects" in the Sigma Orionis cluster (see Update # 206 story 3) shows spectral types in the range late M to mid L - thus most of these objects have masses below the deuterium burning limit and cannot be Brown Dwarfs: paper by Barrado-y-Navascués.
Deep insights from the early intergalactic medium are making headlines: Subtle signatures intergalactic gas has left billions of years ago in the spectra of distant quasars can finally be read with modern telescopes and sophisticated spectrographs, promising insights into the development of the young Universe. The end of the "Dark Age", when the neutral hydrogen got re-ionized by the hard radiation of the first quasars about 800,000 years after the Big Bang, has left traces in the spectra of the most distant quasars known (some just discovered by the SDSS; see Update # 225 small items): papers by Djorgovski & al. and Becker & al., Press Releases by UC Davis and MPG and stories by NYT (earlier), SC and SPIEGEL. Ionized helium as a tracer for the thinnest intergalactic gas is now available thanks to the FUSE spacecraft - the He II to H I column density ratio ranges from 1 to >1000 which also provides clues on the ionization mechanism (in addition to quasars, young stars also contribute): paper by Kriss & al., STScI, NASA and GSFC Press Releases and SC. The primordial deuterium abundance as imprinted in quasar spectra seems to fit the value derived from the cosmic microwave background radiation after all - the D/H value has now been measured for 6 quasars, with a weighted average of (2.2±0.2)x10-5, which corresponds to a baryon density of (0.025±0.001)/h2: paper by Pettini & Bowen.	Galaxy cluster found using gravitational distortion Astronomers have used the distorting effects of a weak gravitational lens to discover and locate a dim cluster of at least 15 galaxies at a significant distance from Earth, using only the mass properties of the cluster, not its visible light: NOAO Press Release, SC, APOD, New Sci., SPIEGEL. The Cosmic Web of structure in the Universe: NYT. Brian Schmidt, a cosmology pioneer: UT. Controversial evidence for a changing finestructure constant in quasar spectra: NSU, NYT, New Sci., SciAm, WP, SC. "Doubly Strange Nuclei", Hydrogen-5 created in labs; latter may exist in stars: BNL Press Release, PhysicsWeb, BBC.
Genesis launched After more than a week of delays because of (unfounded) technical worries, bad weather and a crowded Cape Canaveral, the Genesis spacecraft has finally made it into orbit on a Delta rocket on August 8! The mission continues to proceed exceedingly well. Since the spacecraft's signal was acquired by a Deep Space Network ground station at Goldstone, Calif., on Aug. 9, the mission team has continued to monitor the status of spacecraft subsystems: All of them are performing normally. Ground controllers established a two-way communication link between Genesis and Earth, enabling the navigation team to start collecting data to assess the spacecraft's flight path. Genesis' flight path was adjusted successfully on Aug. 10: The small thrusters burned for 53.5 seconds. This moved the spacecraft about 5.2 m/s into a path to reach the Lagrange 1, or L1, point, where the gravities of the Sun and Earth are balanced. Genesis will reach L1 in November 2001. The mission is expected to capture about 10 to 20 micrograms of the solar wind, made up of invisible charged particles expelled by the Sun. The particles, about the weight of a few grains of salt, will be returned to Earth with a spectacular mid-air helicopter capture. Scientists will preserve this treasured smidgen of the Sun in a special laboratory for study. The researchers hope to answer fundamental questions about the exact composition of our star and the birth of our solar system. The spacecraft carries four scientific instruments: the bicycle-tire-sized solar-wind collector arrays, made of diamond, gold, silicon and sapphire, designed to entrap the solar wind particles; an ion monitor, which will record the speed, density, temperature and approximate composition of the solar wind; an electron monitor, which will make similar measurements of electrons in the solar wind; and an ion concentrator, which will separate out and focus elements in the solar wind like oxygen and nitrogen into a special collector tile. Sample collection will conclude in April 2004, when the spacecraft returns to Earth. Genesis will then become the first mission to return a sample of extraterrestrial material collected beyond the orbit of the Moon - and the first-ever robotic sample return mission for the U.S. (so far, only the Soviet Union did that, with the Luna missions in the 1970's).	JPL Releases of Aug. 10 and 8 and lauch pictures. Launch Journal, Status Center, the Homepage. Launch coverage: SN, CNN, FT, BBC, AFP, SC, ST, AN, SPIEGEL. The new launch date: KSC Release. The scrub: CNN, ST. Earlier: JPL, KSC Releases and delay coverage by CNN (earlier), ST (earlier), AFP (earlier), FT ( earlier), Wired, BBC, New Sci., AN, RP, SPIEGEL. Still earlier: LANL Press Release and pictures, JPL and Purdue Releases and advance coverage by WP, Astronomy, NYT, ABC, AN, SC, WELT, MW. GOES-M reaches orbit, is renamed GOES-12, sends first picture After a 20-day journey and nine motor firings, the newest U.S. environmental satellite, equipped with the latest solar flare warning technology, has safely reached its geostationary position, has been renamed at that point and has started sending data: the 1st picture (really large), GSFC Release (earlier), NOAA Release.

ISS Update Discovery has visited the ISS for change from Expediton 2 to 3; soon after undocking SimpleSat was released. ISS Status # 25, 24 and 23, Mission Status Reports # 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, MSFC Status, ESA Press Release, Science@NASA of Aug. 15 and Aug. 7 and the Mission Status Center. Coverage of Aug. 24: SC ( other story), WELT. Aug. 23: FT. Aug. 22: SN, CNN (other story), BBC, ST, AFP, RP, SPIEGEL. Aug. 21: SC (earlier), OS, ST, FT, NZ. Aug. 20: SN, AN, ST, SC, AFP, RP, WELT. Aug. 19: SC, FT. Aug. 18: SC, ST, SN. Aug. 17: AN, FT, SC (earlier), AFP, ST, CNN, WELT. Aug. 16: AP, SC. Aug. 15: ST, CNN, SC, FT.

Aug. 14: SC, FT, CNN. Aug. 13: CNN, New Sci., FT, ST, SC (earlier), RP, SPIEGEL. Aug. 12: SN, BBC, ST, FT. Aug. 11: SC, BBC, FT, SPIEGEL. Aug. 10: Launch pictures, FT, AP, ST (other story), SC (other story), AN, InterFax, CollectSpace, AFP (other story). Aug. 9: WP, BBC, AFP (other story), SC (earlier), FT ( other story), OS ( other story), New Sci., ST. Aug. 8: NYT, AP. Aug. 7: SC. Aug. 6: ST, SC (other story). Aug. 5: SC. Aug. 3: SN. New ISS pictures with small amateur equipment: Analemma and DJ Cash! Send a LEGO robot to the ISS: Space Competition, TeachersNews, RP. Anonymous owner offered Russian shuttle prototype on eBay, found no buyer: item, coverage by FT. "Flight to the Edge of Space" in a Russian Mig. Boy group to save NASA's image with the young generation? New Scientist, SPIEGEL.

Next solar sail test aims for orbit! The next flight in the Cosmos 1 solar sail project will be an orbital test of an eight-bladed sail, the Planetary Society has announced on August 22 - the experience gained preparing and integrating the suborbital payload that wasn't deployed properly on July 20 (because of a problem solely located in the rocket) is considered "valuable enough to allow us to proceed to the next step": Press Release, pictures from Murmansk, SN, CNN, ST, New Sci., Space News (earlier), FT, NZ. Another 'update' on the X-43A/Pegasus disaster that has close to zero content on what went wrong: DFRC Release. Ariane 5 mishap explained A combustion problem with an upper stage engine has been identified as the cause of a failed Ariane 5 launch last month according to a report released August 7th - an inquiry board found that a "combustion instability" in the Aestus engine that powers the booster's upper stage degraded the engine's performance, lowering its thrust and causing it to use more of one propellant than planned: Report, Recovery Plan, ST, AN, Space News, AFP, Reuters. Athena launch from Kodiak set for Sept. 17, with 4 satellites on the small rocket, including a new Starshine: KSC Release. Orbital module of Shenzhou-2 reenters After spending 260 days in space and successfully completing its mission, the Shenzhou-2 Orbital Module made a firey exit from orbit on Aug. 24 - the SZ-2 OM reentered into the atmosphere on orbit number 3460 at about 9:05 UTC: SD (earlier). First H2-A launch delayed again - to August 29th, it seems - because a malfunction was found in a pressure controlling valve of the second stage liquid oxygen tank: News Page, NASDA Release ( earlier), AFP (earlier, still earlier), AN, BBC, Reuters, ST. Why the H2-A is important: AW&ST, SD. NASA shuts down operating atmosphere satellite Citing the $10m-a-year operating costs, NASA is pulling the plug on the UARS satellite that has studied the Earth's atmosphere for 10 years - the big satellite will either be plucked from orbit by the space shuttle or allowed to crash back to Earth after 2016: AP [ABC], ST. Jason-1 launch delayed until December - the launch of the U.S.-French Jason-1 oceanography satellite will be delayed so technicians can check out a potential problem with the spacecraft's solar array deployment mechanism: Space News. NASA to accept TDRS-H satellite despite flaw, a performance shortfall on the Multiple-Access (MA) phased array antenna aboard the spacecraft: GSFC Release [SN]. Galileo flies by Io, finds little magnetic field, has camera trouble NASA's Galileo spacecraft completed a close flyby of Jupiter's moon Io August 6th, and a first look at the data already suggests that Io's internally generated magnetic field is either absent or quite weak - sampling of other early data indicates that Galileo's camera appears to have resumed functioning after another glitch, in time to capture some of the final images planned during the flyby: Mission status of Aug. 16 and Aug. 6, SC ( earlier), CNN. AN, ST. What was planned: Science@NASA. Callisto insights from Galileo - the Jovian moon is portrayed in new images as a world with continuing erosion: JPL Release, PIA... 3455 and 3456, Science@NASA, SD, Astronomy, ABC, BBC, CNN, SC, Wired, SPIEGEL, NZ. What Deep Space 1 will do at comet Borrelly with its camera MICAS is explained in this Log. Major problems on the spacecraft, apparently overcome: SR. ESA considers new space probes based on Mars Express design Space mission planners have devised several proposals to re-use the satellite design created for the Mars Express spacecraft - if ESA decides to proceed with at least one mission, the flight would launch in 2005, just two years after Mars Express itself launches in 2003: SN. Mars Express passes CDR: Press Release. Mars Odyssey radiation experiment MARIE fails - but a good orbit insertion has priority at the moment: Mission Status, CNN, FT, Astronomy, ST, WELT. Mars plane prototype flown: Ames Release, AD. The Mars Tumbleweed idea: JPL, Science@NASA, ABC, CNN, RP, NZ. The Mars Scout proposals: SD. Comeback of the 2001 lander as a Scout? SC. Evidence for underground ice from impact crater shapes: SC (this was already discussed 2 years ago in Update # 152 story 3 sidebar 2, by the way). Flying wing surpasses altitude records for non-rocket aircraft NASA's solar-powered Helios experimental aircraft lifted off from Hawaii on Aug. 13, Monday, reaching a height of 29.4 km - the $15 million aircraft failed in its attempt to reach an altitude of 30.4 km, but it broke several altitude records for non-rocket powered vehicles: Homepage, Dryden Release, CNN, BBC, AP, SC, AN, AFP, RP, SPIEGEL. Earlier: NYT. Russia moves ahead with air-based space launch - talks with Arab investors are underway to fund the "Vozdushny Start" project: AN, AFP.

Fred Hoyle, famous & controversial U.K. astronomer, dead at 86 Professor Sir Fred Hoyle, Britain's best-known and most controversial astronomer and science and science fiction author has died on August 20 - his lasting contribution remains the understanding of stellar nucleosynthesis, while his militant fighting for fringe ideas in cosmology and biology has tainted his later scientific career: a collection of obituaries from CCNet, biographical info and individual articles from The Times, Daily Telegraph, Independent, NYT, PhysicsWeb, ST, SC, BBC, Ananova, SPIEGEL, RP, NZ. The most convincing simulation of the formation of the Moon thru a Giant Impact yet gets the cosmochemistry and the angular momentum right - another triumph for this scenario which has been discussed for the last 25 years or so: SWRI Press Release [SR, SN], NSU (more), Wired, BBC, ST, New Sci., SC, PhysicsWeb, RP, NZ, SPIEGEL. "Hyper Extremely Red Objects" in the Subaru Deep Field SDF data have revealed a population of objects with extremely red colors; their surface number density drastically increases at K >~ 22 and becomes roughly the same with that of dusty starburst galaxies detected by submillimeter observations - these colors are even redder than the known population of the extremely red objects (EROs), and too red to explain by passively evolving elliptical galaxies which are the largest population of EROs. Hence these hyper extremely red objects (HEROs) should be considered as a distinct population from EROs, best explained by primordial elliptical galaxies reddened by dust, still in the starburst phase of their formation at redshifts around 3: paper by Totani & al. "Cool" stellar systems at the centers of active galaxies have been detected with VLT spectroscopy: ESO Release, SC. Mysterious hot gas in the galactic plane could constitute an unknown component of the interstellar medium - Chandra data show that a long-known X-ray glow is not coming from point sources but a diffuse medium: Chandra and NASA Releases, SC, SPIEGEL. Lots of lead in 3 distant binaries are in excellent agreement with predictions by current stellar models about the build-up of heavy elements in stellar interiors: ESO Press Release, SC. Burst of star formation drives bubble in galaxy's core HST snapshots reveal dramatic activities within the core of the galaxy NGC 3079, where a lumpy bubble of hot gas is rising from a cauldron of glowing matter: STScI Release, CNN, NZ, SPIEGEL. What to do with the HST: SC. How a Planetary Nebula's structure forms thru shocks has been studied with the HST in the Rotten Egg Nebula: ESA HST Release, CNN, SPIEGEL. The first global atlas of light pollution demonstrates that two thirds of the population of the world and 99% of people in the continental USA and western Europe never see a truly dark starry sky from where they live - this is the first time that the artificial illumination of the night sky around the world has been properly quantified and related to where people live: the paper by Cinzano & al., the related website with the detailled maps, a NSU and a RAS Press Release and coverage by BBC, CNN, Astronomy, SC, SN, WELT, RP. Light pollution in Tucson: Tucson Citizen. Radio pollution is also a problem: NYT. Nova Cygni 2001 #2 rises to 6th mag., drops to 8th Akihiko Tago, Tsuyama, Okayama, Japan, has photographically discovered a nova in Cygnus at magnitude 8.8 on films taken on Aug. 18 - since then it has risen briefly to 6.6 and then dropped to about 8 mag.: AAVSO Alert and News Page, IAUC. Aurora seen on August 17 after a coronal mass ejection from Aug. 14 hit the Earth: gallery. Recent sunspot images by Gaehrken. And a very detailled sunspot drawing of June 21, the day of the big African eclipse. Planets in the July/Aug. morning sky: gallery. An introduction to deep sky astronomy plus reports and pictures from an astronomy expedition to Namibia (both in German). And why "Paint the Moon" will fail: SC. A detailled X-ray image of the jet of Cen A has been obtained with Chandra: picture, SC, SPIEGEL. Ulysses spacecraft observes surprising reach of solar activity - even at polar latitudes, where only Ulysses has gone before, spacecraft can be exposed to almost the same solar energetic particle environment as spacecraft on the plane of the ecliptic: Univ. of Chicago. Satellites in wrong orbits - America's spy satellites are not in the orbits the Pentagon says they are: New Scientist. More Etna space pictures, this time from Terra and the ISS. How satellites monitor volcanoes: SC. The Grand Canyon from space in a 3D view: JPL. Topex 9 years in orbit: JPL. Calibrating weather satellites with the Moon as a brightness reference: CSIRO Press Release & picture, RP, NZ. Kennedy tapes show JFK less interested in the Moon as a visionary goal - he saw Apollo mainly as a means to beat the Soviets: JFK Library Press Release [SR, SN], SC, CNN, AP, NZ.

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