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By Daniel Fischer Every page present in Europe & the U.S.!
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The latest issue!
| A German companion - only available here! Current mission news: MGS (latest pictures!) + Cassini + Stardust |
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Opportunity and Spirit busy on the surfaceEach of NASA's two Mars Exploration Rovers is using its versatile robotic arm for positioning tools at selected targets on the red planet. Opportunity extended its arm on Feb. 2 for the first time since pre-launch testing. It will now examine a patch of soil in front of the rover: A microscope on the arm will reveal structures as thin as a human hair and a M�ssbauer Spectrometer will collect information to identify minerals in the soil. Then the rover will turn the turret at the end of the arm in order to examine the same patch of soil with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer. Spirit is now in good working order after more than a week of computer-memory problems: It will brush dust off of a rock with the rock abrasion tool on its robotic arm and then use the microscope and two spectrometers to examine the rock. Later in the week, Spirit will grind the surface off of a sample area on Adirondack with the tool to inspect the rock's interior. After observations of Adirondack are completed, the rover will begin rolling again.Opportunity has left the lander platform!Because things have been going so well on Opportunity, the rover has already rolled off the platform early on January 31! At 11:03 UTC the first pictures of the now empty station arrived at JPL via the Mars Odyssey orbiter, greeted by the now-usual cheers at mission control. For the first time in history, two mobile robots are exploring the surface of another planet at the same time. Opportunity's twin, Spirit, started making wheel tracks halfway around Mars from Meridiani on Jan. 15. The flight team had needed only six days since Opportunity's landing to get the rover off its lander, compared with 11 days for Spirit - "we're getting practice at it," says the activity lead for the procedure. Also, the configuration of the deflated airbags and lander had presented no trouble for Opportunity. Meanwhile Mini-TES on Opportunity has shown that gray granules covering most of the crater floor contain the hematite that was the reason for going there in the first place: Crystalline hematite is of special interest because, on Earth, it usually forms under wet environmental conditions. The concentration of hematite appears strongest in a layer of dark material above a light-covered outcrop in the wall of the crater where Opportunity sits.»Coolest geological field trip in history« in store for OpportunityAmazingly fine-layered structure in the outcrop / Spirit problem is nearly understood / Beagle 2 all but given up»Some wonderful finely-layered rock« in the bedrock outcrop at the Opportunity landing site can be seen in the latest hi-res Pancam views downlinked to Earth - and for chief scientist Steven Squyres it will be »fascinating beyond words« to get the rover closer. Some of the layers are only 1 cm thick, others more massive, and there are also overhangs. Still completely unknown is whether these are layers of volcanic ash or sediments deposited by either wind or water, but close-up views revealing the rock's texture should answer that. The rover itself is fine (apart from a minor issue with a heater at the robot arm's shoulder), the HGA is deployed and working, and it will soon stand up. Meanwhile Spirit's computer troubles have been tracked down in all likelyhood to just too many files in the flash memory - they can't be handled properly by the software. This problem should be rather easy to solve (for starters delete all the old files from the cruise phase), meaning that Spirit could soon roll again - and Opportunity could learn from the scary experience, too. |
On the other side of the world British and ESO officials have given
up most hope on Beagle 2 as it didn't call even after a
prolonged radio silence from Earth - which should have pushed
the lander into an emergency transmission mode if there was any
life left in it. "[W]e have to begin to accept that, if Beagle 2 is on the
Martian surface, it is not active," concedes PI C. Pillinger: "That isn't
to say that we are going to give up on Beagle. There is one more thing
that we can do - however, it is very much a last resort. We will be asking
the American Odyssey spacecraft [...] whether they will send an embedded
command - a hail to Beagle with a command inside it. If it gets through,
it will tell Beagle to switch off and reload the software. We are now
working on the basis that there is a corrupt system and the only way we
might resurrect is to send that command." Meanwhile, the academia-industry
"Tiger Team" at the National Space Centre in Leicester is beginning to
concentrate on detailed analysis of the possible causes for failure of
the mission and the lessons that can be learned for future missions.
Welcome to a »bizarre, alien landscape«: Opportunity in Meridiani Planum after another picture-perfect landingDark, mysterious soil on flat, rock-poor plain / For the first time a bedrock outcrop within reach / And a working hypothesis for Spirit; could roll again in 3 weeksCrowning a month full of continuous space excitement that begain with the orbit insertion of Mars Express (see Update # 267), the 2nd Mars Exploration Rover has made a perfect landing in Meridiani Planum - that in some respects even exceeded the success of Spirit three weeks earlier (see Update # 269). This time there were live signals during the whole entry, descent and landing phase without any interruption, and Opportunity spoke loud and clearly from the ground right away, confirming that it had arrived in excellent shape. And when the first batch of pictures arrived via the orbiter Odyssey, 4 hours and 7 minutes later, they were of even better quality and quantity than what Spirit had sent at that time and included even some Pancam »postcards.«And what the views from the hazcams, Navcam and Pancam showed! The landscape of Meridiani Planum is vastly different from Gusev crater, plains covered by a dark, strange soil (perhaps compacted fine-grained powder, »sort of pebbly«) with very few isolated rocks - but on the horizon beckons the first bedrock outcrop ever encountered by a Martian lander! This brighter rock formation is »sort of slabby«, but the first (compressed) Navcam pictures can't tell yet whether this is volcanic or sedimentary. In any case, this is where Opportunity will head, as the trafficability of the terrain is even better than in Gusev crater. The health of the rover is excellent, the tilt of the platform is only a few degrees, the solar arrays are out and working, and the thermal conditions are perfect. Around sol 4, the rover will stand up and drive off in one or two weeks. Meanwhile the health of Spirit had been upgraded »from critical to serious« a few hours earlier: There is now a working hypothesis on what went wrong (though still no explanation why). It's either the flash memory or its associated electronics or the software to write into this nonvolatile memory that has a serious bug. But Spirit has a good power and thermal state and is following Earth's commands again: As long as the flash memory isn't used, it follows orders in a so called »cripple mode«. The next task is to carefully read out the flash memory to look for clues to the root cause of the problem (that ocurred during the motion of a mirror) - and work around it. When that has been achieved, Spirit can start roving again, perhaps three weeks from now. Even if only the volatile RAM can be used in the future, most of the science program is still possible - and there is now hope that the overall lifetime of the MER is way beyond the 3 months mentioned so far! Severe anomaly hits Spirit, but it talks again (slowly) - more Mars Express results - Opportunity near MarsAfter over two weeks of practically flawless operations on the surface of Mars, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has suddenly gone into a deep safe mode on January 21st and has stopped sending data - however it is still marginally communicating with Earth and careful rescue attempts are underway. When the rover was 'pinged' by Earth on the 22nd, it did respond with a bare 'I am still alive' signal: This means that Spirit has energy and its electronics are still working but not doing the right thing - perhaps like a computer that has crashed but is still running. Mission controllers - already stressed by the upcoming arrival of Spirit's twin - succeeded on Jan. 23 to get some data at very low rate from the rover, which may eventually help to systematically deal with the apparently quite serious problem for which there had been no warning.Meanwhile early scientific results from Mars Express have been presented on Jan. 23: One of the main targets of the Mars Express mission is to discover the presence of water in one of its chemical states, and through the initial mapping of the South polar cap on Jan. 18, OMEGA, the combined camera and infrared spectrometer, has already revealed the presence of water ice and carbon dioxide ice. This information was confirmed by the PFS, a new high-resolution spectrometer of unprecedented accuracy. The first PFS data also show that the carbon oxide distribution is different in the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars. Yet another exciting experiment was run by the SPICAM instrument (a UV & IR spectrometer) during the first star occultation ever made at Mars: It has simultaneously measured the distribution of the ozone and water vapor, which has never been done before, revealing that there is more water vapor where there is less ozone. |
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ISS, STS, Columbia, Manned Space, NASA Budget UpdateOne year after the Columbia disaster, the FY 2005 budget request begins to set a new direction for NASA. An OMB document on the FY 2005 NASA budget (8 page PDF), the "Homepage" of the "vision" (also of its predecessor, an utter failure, and of the Apollo program), a directive, an info for NASA employees, a letter to the STS team, an ESA Press Release and an ISS Status and a DLR Pressemitt. on the latest Progress to the ISS, a NASA Release on ISS science, a chapter from a new book on Columbia and coverage (and commentary) of Feb. 3: WP, BBC, Rtr. Feb. 2: SR, FT (earlier), BBC, WP, AFP (earlier), ST. Feb. 1: FT (other story, OpEd), WP, AFP, Coshocton Trib., Daily Camera, SC, ST (other and another story). |
Jan. 31:
AIP FYI,
FT,
BBC,
SR,
AFP,
SC
(other story),
ST
(other story),
NZ.
Jan. 30:
FT
(other OpEd and
another and
another one),
Dsc.,
WP,
AFP
(other and
another story),
SC
(other and
another story),
Welt,
NZ.
Jan. 29:
AD,
FT
(other,
another and
quite some story)
SN,
SMH,
AFP
(other and
another
story), CSM,
AP,
Rtr,
BBC,
SC,
ST
(earlier).
Jan. 28:
FT
(other story),
CSM,
SC.
Jan. 27:
FT
(other story),
SMH,
New Sci.
Jan. 26:
SpaceRev 1,
2,
3,
GovExec,
New Yorker,
Cornell Daily Sun,
USA Today,
BBC,
SR,
SC.
Jan. 25:
AW&ST.
Jan. 24:
CounterPunch.
Jan. 23:
FT,
IDS News,
Wisc.SJ,
SC.
Jan. 22:
SF Gate,
FT,
Spectator,
SC,
ST.
Jan. 21:
KnRidder,
FT,
BBC.
The HST crisis - NASA has decision reviewed by CAIB's Gehman following massive protests against SM4 cancellation: a frequently updated AAS Page, a letter by O'Keefe and coverage by S&T, BBC, AFP, AP, SC, Wired, SpaceRev, ABC, DenvPost, WashUnivDaily, PressAtlCit, ST. Earlier: a letter by Mikulski, a statement by the JHU, an FAQ list and coverage by BBC, New Sci., S&T (earlier), AP, SR, WJZ, SC (earlier), Tor. Star, FT, Virginian P., ZEIT. |
First Auxilliary Telescope at VLT!The Auxiliary Telescope no. 1 (AT1) forms part of the VLT Interferometer; it has a main mirror of 1.8-m diameter and can be moved around: ESO Press Release.How often are astronomical papers cited over time? Some astronomers like to study their own profession, such as Pearce. Oxygen and carbon detected in atmosphere of extrasolar planetFour transits of the planet orbiting the star HD209458 were observed with the STIS on HST, and absorptions were detected in HI, OI and CII: a paper by Vidal-Madjar & al., ESA [SR] and UA Releases and coverage by BBC, SciAm, Age, AFP, SC, Welt, NZ.HST pictures of Uranus & Neptune with enhanced colors: STScI Release, UA News. Old star observed before & after going supernovaThe star was imaged by the Gemini Observatory and the HST less than a year prior to the gigantic explosion - and it was the Red Supergiant theory expected: Gemini Release. How neutron stars get kicked: Ast. Neutron star seen changing into a magnetar: GSFC Press Release. Nucleosynthesis in the oxygen-rich supernova remnant G292.0+1.8 from Chandra X-Ray spectroscopy: PSU Press Release.How to make a Planetary Nebula - with jets or with two stars? NYU Press Release, S&T. Chandra X-ray spectra of V 471 Tauri provide important clues to the different evolutionary histories of the two stars making up the system: Chandra Spectrum Release. Controversy over distance to PlejadesIs the Hipparcos value off by 10% - and if so, why? Caltech, JPL Press Releases, New Sci., AP [USA Today], RP.Sun-Like binary stars lose their companions with time - with increasing age there are fewer and fewer multiple systems: USNO PR. Young star in Rosette nebula ejects complex jet of material riddled with knots and bow shocks: NOAO Release. |
The first X-ray light echo from a GRBhas been tracked by XMM-Newton - dust sheets in our galaxy scatter the X-rays from the burst: paper by Vaughan, ESA and PPARC Press Releases, APOD, Ast., SC, RP.Violent formation of massive stars in the Orion nebula: UCLA Press Release & pictures. Stellar statistics close to the Sun: AppState PR. Structure of gas in the disk of Beta Pictoris revealed with the VLT: Stockholm Univ. PR. Water molecules in disk around young star: Bucknell PR. Cosmic Rays are not the cause of climate changeA recent paper attributing most climate change on Earth to cosmic rays is incorrect and based on questionable methodology: AGU PR, BBC.Suborbital mission looks at Mercury, seeks VulcanoidsA new major scientific payload flying in space aboard a Black Brant rocket successfully explored the UV spectrum of Mercury and also searched for Vulcanoids that may lie even closer to the Sun than Mercury: SwRI Press Release, SC, BdW.On-line volunteer finds Earth-approaching asteroid - analyzing on-line images for the Spacewatch program a volunteer has discovered a small asteroid that missed Earth on Jan. 22: UA News. X-43A completes captive carry flight, launch scheduled for FebruaryAn X-43A hypersonic research vehicle completed a captive carry flight under the wing of a B-52 on Jan. 26, clearing the way for a full-fledged test flight on about Feb. 21: DFRC Press Release, SC (earlier), ST.Trans-Atlantic NavSat controversy continues as frequency demands for Galileo, GPS clash: New Sci., DW, Rtr. Meteosat 2nd Gen. #1 operational!As "Meteosat 8" the much improved European weather satellite is now feeding data into the forecast system: EUMETSAT Press Release [SN].Envisat completes 10,000th orbit - it was launched on 28 February 2002: ESA Note. The growth of "The Palm" as seen from space by ESA satellites: Press Release. |
All other historical issues can be found in the Archive.
The U.S. site of this Cosmic Mirror has been visited
since it was issued (the German site has no counter).
Compiled and written by Daniel Fischer
