"Deep Impact" raises awareness of asteroid, comet threat It's the first major motion picture that begins with a star party, it has most of its astronomy, geophysics and space technology about right, and while most reviewers found it boring, astronomers recommend it. "Deep Impact" is now playing in the U.S. (where it earned $41.2m on the first weekend, the 10th biggest opening of all times) and Europe: The almost 2 hr long epic is a mixed bag of the best and the worst in cinema - and yet a must for space buffs (as were "Apollo 13" and "Contact", both much better written, directed and edited, though). The first minutes are fast-paced: A student discovers a comet next to Alcor in UMa and sends a photograph to a professional astronomer. The latter immediately finds out that the comet - on the screen it clearly is Hale-Bopp as seen in late 1996! - is on a collision course with Earth (where did he get a suitable orbital arc, one wonders) and wants to send an e-mail. Alas, the server is down and so he tries to snail mail the data to Carolyn Shoemaker (look at the envelope!) - but he gets killed in a traffic accident on the way to the mailbox. (Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker, among others, were the science advisors of the movie, by the way.) Then "Deep Impact" drags along for over an hour: A TV reporter (from MSNBC - CNN declined to cooperate after its much criticised role in "Contact") finds out about the comet a year later (why had no one spotted it in the meantime?) - and that the U.S. government is already preparing a space mission to intercept it. The spacecraft looks like a makeshift construction indeed (with components from the space shuttle and the Energia rocket, it seems), and it employs a nuclear drive that's based on a real project. So far, so good - but the movie spends most of the time with the personal problems of dozens of characters, at a level that hardly gets one interested. It's pure soap opera in the face of annihilation, and there's even a taxi cab in Washington, D.C., when you need it, hours before the impact... The only moderately interesting character is the president of the U.S., and it's he who explains to the world all the consequences of the impending impact - in a technically more correct way than in any other of the 10+ 'fire from the sky' movies before. Since it's featured in all the trailers, it can be said here: A part of the comet does hit the Earth and causes a formidable tsunami that destroys much of the East Coast of the U.S. The drama in these shots is outstanding (although one set in New York City looks exactly like one in "Independence Day", only with water...) and will really get people thinking about Near Earth Objects and Planetary Defence. Once more, though, soap prevails when one of the "heroes" manages to outrun the wave with a stolen motorbike... Daniel Fischer

An astronomer's review (by D. Morrison, NEOlogist) Another learned review from SpaceViews The Movie's homepage Background info, Pete's Page and Dark Horizon's Sandia simulates the real thing (also reported by CNN, ABC and BBC) Sky & Tel. special pages on the impact problem - and the Nat'l Space Society uses the movies as well... ... as does the Planetary Society How to avoid asteroid panic: with a waiting period before announcing it... Stories by the Boston Globe in April and ABC and CNN in May The National Research Council speaks on NEOs Many discoveries of NEOs with the new LINEAR and many amateur discoveries of all kinds of asteroids from Drebach

Three Records in Astrophysics! The most distant Gamma Ray Burst is the event from Dec. 14, 1997: It was only the third case with an optical afterglow, and now that the glow has faded, a galaxy has become visible in the same spot -with a redshift of 3.42! Thus this GRB must have been an incredibly powerful explosion, that it was visble at the edge of the Universe. The current models for these explosions are challenged... (Science April 24, 1998, p. 514)	CalTech, STSCI Press Releases More info; SAX data Stories by SpaceViews, CNN and ABC Bursts in general
The most distant galaxy is no longer the recent discovery with z=5.34: A special survey with the Keck telescopes has now discovered a galaxy with z=5.64. And the method employed (relying on the Lyman-Alpha emission of young, dust-poor galaxies) has yielded candidates up to z=6.5 and could well be successful up to z=7. We're approaching the time when the first galaxies were born - whenever (= at which z) that was. There is no way, BTW, to convert z=5.6 into a reliable distance or time after the Big Bang, regardless of what the wire stories about the discovery say! (Science News May 2, 1998)	The Science News story AP version (typical wire service coverage - who cares about the uncertainties in cosmological models?)
The coolest known stellar surface has a temperature of only 1700 Kelvins, beating an earlier record of 2600 K: It is the tiny partner of the White Dwarf star WZ Sagittae which has lost most of its matter to the main star. That has led to a drastic drop it its temperature, just as theory had predicted. And from the low temperature of the star one can conclude in turn that the double star is 10 billion years old - setting a lower limit to the age of the Universe.	Press Release der U-Wyo a light curve WZ Sge and similar stars

Very Large Telescope: "First Light" is near! Four weeks from now we should know how well the first monolithic 8 meter telescope of the world works, in the barren desert of Northern Chile on Cerro Paranal: Following the successful installation of the 8.2-m Zerodur main mirror at the first of the four Unit Telescopes (UT1) of the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) on April 16, work is now underway on the optical alignment of the complex system. This has included the integration of the 1.1-m Beryllium secondary mirror (M2) to the M2 Unit at the top of the telescope tube on April 19. Moreover, the delicate work to optimize the active supports on which the M1 rests in its cell has also begun, together with the tuning of the Telescope Control System. This will guarantee that the entire active optics of the VLT UT1 performs correctly at the moment of so-called First Light. So far no images have been taken with the UT1 (which first 'saw' starlight on April 21st): The quality analysis of the optics rests on Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors, the same system that will automatically optimize the extremely thin mirror's shape in the future. Due to a defect in the coating machine on Paranal, the M1 mirror could not be aluminized so far. This is supposed to happen in mid-May now, once the alignment procedures are ready and the machine is repaired: Taking the mirror (in its cell) out of the telescope, bringing it down the 3 km to the Paranal base camp for coating and back up into the telescope should take just 3 days. Even if the mirror cannot be aluminized this month, this will not stop the "First Light" from happening: The first "scientific images" with a CCD camera are planned to be obtained with the UT1 during the night of May 25 - 26, 1998 (Chilean time). It would then be possible to quickly analyze and present the first scientific images less than 24 hours later, in the morning of May 27, at Press Conferences in the ESO members countries and elsewhere. These images (what objects they'll show is a closely guarded secret) will not have the full quality the telescope can deliver: The fine tuning of the optics will go on for another 3 months afterwards. But they will show to the world that the novel active thin meniscus mirror technology works. Only when the 150 actuators push the mirror into precisely the right shape, it can form perfect images - and this proof of concept can be delivered with or without a reflective coating on the mirror. (ESO Press Release # 11 of April 27,1998 + news from an ESO science writers symposium)	VLT Homepage, 1st Light Event, Slide Set Progress reports from April 17 and 27, old and new pictures, an article in Spanish VLT's Archive will be enormous Finding all the targets for the VLT: EIS + 2.2m Survey Other 8 m telescopes with 1st light in 1998 - Subaru: Homepage, Mauna Kea page Gemini: Homepage NRC Report on big telescopes And then there's Keck: Homepage, Interferometer, Palomar Testbed Radio visions for Chile LSA (Europe), MMA (USA), LMSA (Japan) Hubble 8 years in orbit! A Greatest Hits gallery, a BBC story, the complete Proceedings of a major 1995 Hubble Conference online, and the Palomar Sky Surveys online at ESO and STScI
Cassini flies by Venus, takes some data The Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft successfully performed a flyby of the planet Venus on Apr. 26th. "All indications are that the spacecraft did exactly what we expected," said Deputy Program Manager Ronald Draper. Sunday's successful flyby of Venus was on time and on target. "The accuracy achieved by our navigators is roughly equivalent to shooting a basketball from Los Angeles to London and making a swish shot," said Richard Spehalski, Cassini Program Manager. Science instruments on the spacecraft searched for lightning in Venus' atmosphere during the flyby, and the radar instrument onboard was activated to test a bounced signal off Venus' surface. Data from this moderate science program - tiny compared to what Galileo did during its Venus encounter in 1990 - will become available in early May. As planned, Cassini flew 284 kilometers above the Venusian surface at 6:52:14 Pacific Daylight Time, (Earth-received time) on April 26. Because of Venus' distance (136 million kilometers from Earth), it took Cassini's radio signals 7 minutes to travel to Earth. The tug of Venus' gravity gave the Cassini spacecraft a boost in speed of about 7 km/s. This will help the spacecraft reach Saturn in July 2004. Leaving Venus, Cassini was moving at more than 141,000 kilometers per hour relative to the Sun. (adapted from Cassini Mission Status for April 26+29,1998)	Cassini Status Reports for April 26 and 29 Cassini's big Cruise and why it's necessary Reports from ABC, CNN, SpaceViews Meanwhile on Mars... MGS's 3rd pass over Cydonia: Another view of the 'City' and the Pathfinder landing site, as well as more image files Plus some speculation on life signs on Mars - in Viking's data, a historical perspective on Mars beliefs and a famous book about early Mars observations, plans for sample return missions and a huge Mars bibliography
More circumstellar dust disks discovered While there is no direct evidence for actual planets within them, dusty rings detected around three more young stars look just like our own solar system was like shortly after the Sun formed. The disk around the star HR 4796A was found independently by two IR cameras: We see it nearly edge-on - and there is a hole in the center. Planets could have formed here, but other explanations for the absence of dust close to the star (actually a member of a double star system) are also possible. Dusty disks were also imaged around three other stars, one of which (Beta Pictoris) was long known to have a disk. The dust around it, Vega and Fomalhaut takes different shapes, however, according to sub-mm observations: Often there are mysterious blobs of emission offset from the central star, and in the case of Fomalhaut there is again a hole within the ring. But the size of the dusty area is always similar to that of our Sun's Kuiper belt of comets. Only a few lunar masses are contained in the dust, however: If these stars have planets, they must all have formed by now. (Holland & al., Nature Apr. 23, 1998, p. 788-90)	HR 4796A: Press releases from CfA, JPL, UoFL; the MIRLIN images Sub-mm data: JCMT Press release Reports by Science News, CNN and ABC Extrasolar planet catalogs by Schneider, Butler & Marcy and Mamajek, news of more searches, esp. in Australia

Deep Space 1 delayed until October! The beginning of NASA's 'New Millennium' will have to wait for three more months: The first of the New Millennium Missions, Deep Space 1 to an asteroid and a comet, won't launch in July but only in October, NASA has just announced. The delay is due to a combination of late delivery of the spacecraft's power electronics system and an ambitious flight software development schedule, which together left insufficient time to test the spacecraft thoroughly for a July launch. The power electronics system regulates and distributes power produced by not only the solar concentrator array, a pair of experimental solar panels composed of 720 cylindrical Fresnel lenses, but also by an on-board battery. Among many other functions, it ensures that the battery is able to cover temporary surges in power needed so that the ion propulsion system (which needs electricity for its basic operations) receives a steady power supply. The earlier July launch period for DS1 allowed it to fly a trajectory encompassing flybys of an asteroid, Mars and a comet. By the end of May, the mission design team is scheduled to finalize new target bodies in the Solar System for DS1 to encounter based on an October launch date. (adapted from NASA News Release # 64 of April 17, 1998)	Deep Space One's homepage Homepage at Spectrum Astro Launch information
Ulysses completes first solar orbit Today, after travelling for more than seven years and covering 3.8 billion kilometres, the space probe Ulysses completes its first orbit of the Sun. The European spacecraft has provided scientists with the very first all-round map of the heliosphere, the huge bubble in space filled by the Sun's wind. Ulysses was launched towards Jupiter in October 1990 by a space shuttle. Arriving in February 1992, Ulysses stole energy from the giant planet in a slingshot manoeuvre and was propelled back towards the Sun in an elongated orbit almost at right angles to the ecliptic plane. "This month Ulysses returns to the point in space where its out-of-ecliptic journey began, but Jupiter isn't there," explains Richard Marsden, ESA's project scientist for Ulysses. "Following its own inexorable path around the Sun, Jupiter is far away on the opposite side of the Solar System. So Ulysses' course will not be changed a second time. The spacecraft is now in effect a man-made comet, forever bound into a 6-year polar orbit around the Sun." Ulysses now starts its second orbit: It will travel over the poles of the Sun in 2000-2001 just as the count of dark sunspots is expected to reach a maximum. With its operational life extended for the Ulysses Solar Maximum Mission, the spacecraft will find the heliosphere much stormier than during its first orbit.	ESA Press Release Related graphics Homepage of the Mission at ESTEC Homepage at JPL ESA Science Programme
The final Spacelab mission has begun After a day's delay, space shuttle Columbia has lifted off for her 25th(!) mission and the 90th shuttle mission of all: At 18:19 UTC today, seven astronauts and 2000+ animals of all sizes were carried into orbit for a mission of 16 or 17 days. This is the 22nd time that the European Spacelab is being used, and it could well be the last time (although a reflight of the current mission this summer might be possible) - after that's its all ISS. The final mission is called Neurolab because it deals extensively with the effects of microgravity on the nervous system.	Homepage Neurolab ABC and CNN report on the launch Mission overview

Conspiracy buffs lose face on Mars... Sure, if you turn it and invert brightness and darkness and "enhance" it, it might still look like a human (or rather ape? :-) face to a some folks out there who "want to believe" - but for the rest of us, the famous "Face on Mars" is history, thanks to the Mars Global Surveyor, its excellent camera - and quite a bit of luck. It had by no means been certain that the small feature would be hit at all, let alone in the first attempt (see Update #74). Shortly after midnight Sunday morning (5 April 1998 12:39 AM PST), the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on MGS successfully acquired its first high resolution image of the feature in the Cydonia region. The image was transmitted to Earth on Sunday, and retrieved from the mission computer data base Monday morning (6 April 1998). The image was processed at the Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) facility 9:15 AM and the raw image immediately transferred to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for release to the Internet - just as promised. The picture, though, was not what many had expected: Instead of a monolithic big mountain in the general shape of a face or mask, the structure turned out to be a complex mountain range with lots of individual hills. All the complicated derivations of the Face's topography (e.g. by M. Carlotto) had been in vain: The Viking images just weren't good enough. So had it been an interplay of light an shadow after all that had resulted in the face-like feature seen in a few Viking images? If one looks at a negative version of the MGS image (thus mimicking illumination from the opposite side) one can actually recreate part of the general Viking impression. But now gone for good is the apparent symmetry in the structure that had made it so "human": If this is someone's face, one can't but pity those poor ancient Martians... (Headline lifted from The Guardian)

The Mars Global Surveyor images of "The Face": Malin's images, raw and processed A NASA page, where the images came in A NASA HQ page JPL's Cydonia page NSSDC's Mars Photogallery News Coverage: CNN, ABC: April 6, 7 and 8, BBC, SMH, L.A. Times, RP, USA Today The view from the fringe ...: McDaniel, Hoagland ("it looks like a cat..."), Carlotto, v.Flandern, Mysteries...

Out of helium: ISO's mission is over! ESA's Infrared Space Observatory, ISO, has now ended its observations, long after the expiry date of the end of May 1997 foreseen in the specifications for the mission. Instead of the required 18 months, the astronomers have been able to use ISO for more than 28 months, and as a result have gathered a wealth of additional information about the Universe. Altogether ISO has made over 26,000 observations of cosmic objects - 10 000 more than would have been possible otherwise. Early on 8 April 1998, engineers at ESA's ground station at Villafranca near Madrid reported that ISO's telescope was beginning to warm up, above its nominal operating temperature close to absolute zero. This was the sign that ISO had exhausted the superfluid helium used to achieve the very low temperatures necessary for far infrared astronomy. Observations ceased 16 hrs later when the temperature of the instruments had risen above -269 C. The astronomers then handed ISO over to the engineering team for check-outs and decommissioning; the spacecraft will be switched off in about 4 weeks. ISO has advanced IR astronomy a lot. Particularly striking are the repeated discoveries of water in space that might encourage expectations of life elsewhere in the Universe. Water has turned up around dying stars, newborn stars, in the general interstellar medium, in the atmospheres of the outer planets and in other galaxies too. A further link to the investigation of the origin of life is the apparent detection of water vapour in the mysterious atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. (Adapted from ESA Press Releases)

End of Mission for ISO Water everywhere, e.g. in Orion News coverage: CNN, ABC, BBC, Fox In other space astronomy news: Hubble results on how heavy a star can be to avoid going supernova Have a look at the solar corona - the solar minimum is over! (Click at 'C2' for the current view) One more ring for Jupiter? That's indicated by Galileo's dust counts.

ESA council kills Euromoon project! It came as a shock to the scientists who had worked for one year on one of Europe's most original space mission concepts: In late March the council of the European Space Agency has dropped the "Euromoon 2000" project that would have sent an orbiter and a lander to the Moon in 2000 and 2001 - in a unique partnership of the European space industry and the space agency. But when a vote was taken in the council, only a few delegates stood behind the idea: ESA's DG Rodota was forced to kill the project, officially because the "financial risks inherent in the mission" were too great for the member nations. The Cosmic Mirror has learned, however, that the main reason for the sudden death of the idea (that even Rodota had supported) was a general uneasiness among ESA managers with the innovative financing structure proposed for Euromoon (in which the agency would have become a junior partner to the industry, paying only 25% of the overall mission cost of 200 million ECU), so when a key German space manager spoke out against the mission, it's fate was sealed. It is unclear how much commitment from the industry had already been received - but there was a strong desire in the U.S. planetary community to participate in Euromoon: 25% of the payload had just been offered to foreign scientists. Now Europe has embarassed itself - and is once more without a lunar mission (previous LEDA and MORO proposals are long gone). There is only hope now that one part of Euromoon, the orbiter LunarSat, can be rescued: It's capabilities would still exceed those of the Clementine mission.

Euromoon homepage Ancient ESA press release SpaceViews story | ASTRONET coverage Private lunar ideas: overview LunaCorp ISE Lunar Retriever

A "perfect Einstein ring" found in the sky! A team of British astronomers using the UK's MERLIN radio array and the Hubble Space Telescope have found a perfect "Einstein Ring" - a gravitational effect predicted by Albert Einstein over 60 years ago as a consequence of his General Theory of Relativity. The Hubble picture is a beautiful demonstration of Einstein's ideas since, for the first time: It shows a complete ring surrounding the galaxy that created it. Dr. Ian Browne of the University of Manchester admits that "at first sight it looks artificial and we thought it was some sort of defect in the image but then we realised we were actually looking at a perfect Einstein ring!" The size of the ring on the sky is tiny - roughly a second of arc - even though the lens consists of an entire galaxy. The British team found it by using the 135 mile-wide MERLIN radio telescope to image distant radio sources. MERLIN is a network of six radio telescopes spread out across England, with a resolution about the same as that of the Hubble Space Telescope but at a completely different wavelength. Hubble took a detailed picture of the object and this revealed the spectacular bulls-eye. This is only one of over 20 galaxy lenses now known. (adapted from a MERLIN press release)	The press release An introduction to MERLIN Other news from NAM98 (some background): a discussion of the heating mechanism of the solar corona and new IR images of Jupiter, generated from Galileo's NIMS instrument
TRACE launch approaches! April 2nd at 2:40 UT a Pegasus-XL rocket will launch NASA's Transition Region and Coronal Explorer or TRACE: This Small Explorer spacecraft will train its powerful telescope on the dynamic so-called 'transition region' of the Sun's atmosphere, between the relatively cool surface and lower atmosphere of the Sun and the extremely hot corona. Using instruments sensitive to extreme-ultraviolet and ultraviolet wavelengths of light, TRACE will study the detailed connections between the fine-scale surface features and the overlying, changing atmospheric structures of plasma. The TRACE mission will join a fleet of spacecraft studying the Sun during a critical period when solar activity is beginning its rise to a peak early in the new millennium.The spacecraft has roughly ten times the temporal resolution and five times the spatial resolution of previously launched solar spacecraft. TRACE will be launched into a polar orbit to enable virtually continuous observations of the Sun, uninterrupted by the Earth's shadow for months at a time. The TRACE telescope is really four telescopes in one. Its 30-centimeter (12-inch) primary and six-centimeter (2-inch) secondary super-polished mirrors are individually coated in four distinct quadrants to allow light from different bandwidths (colors) to be reflected and analyzed. (adapted from NASA News March 19)	TRACE homepage In other solar news: A new method to measure the total radiance of the Sun A theory for Coronal Mass Ejections The Sun's "Magnetic Carpet" How gas flows from sunspots into the solar atmosphere And: How will the next solar cycle look like?
Mars Global Surveyor to image "controversial" features soon... The MGS Mars orbiter is about to begin a summer-long set of scientific observations of the red planet from an interim elliptical orbit, including several attempts to take images of features of public interest ranging from the Mars Pathfinder and Viking mission landing sites to the Cydonia region. The spacecraft turned on its payload of science instruments on March 27 after suspending its aerobraking. (adapted from NASA News March 26)	press release NASA Fact Sheet, Malin page & "controversial images" new MGS images
In other news from Mars: At a conference the NASA researchers who started the ALH 84001 affair 1 1/2 years ago have presented new evidence for traces of living organisms, crystals of magnetite in a shape found only in magnetite produced by bacteria. On Earth, that is ...	Boston Globe, SpaceViews
While the technical aspects of a manned mission to Mars look increasingly manageable, there is still the question whether the astronauts would be up to the challenge - experiments with isolation chambers can at least answer some of the psychological questions.	BBC report
After a final - largely symbolic - attempt to re-establish contact, NASA has declared the Mars Pathfinder dead, which was last heard from in October, 1997. The analysis of the flood of data continues.	ABC, BBC stories

A galaxy with a redshift > 5 ! Finally the wall has been broken: Just by chance a team of astronomers has stumbled across the most distant galaxy ever spotted - with a redshift of 5.34! They were searching for faraway galaxies allright, but in the z=4 range, using a well-known trick to quickly locate the candidates: If a faint spot does appear on near-IR and red but not blue images of a field in the sky, such a 'blue dropout' object is a high-z galaxy with some likelyhood. In the process of taking a spectrum of such a candidate, another object happened to be in the spectrograph's slit, with strange properties: It was missing from both the blue and the red image of the sky field! A more detailled spectrum of "0140+326 RD1" (RD = red dropout) then revealed just one strong emission line above a faint continuum - and this line is hydrogen's Lyman Alpha, moved from its original UV 122 nm wavelength to 772 nm in the near infrared! Little else is known about RD1: The hydrogen emission is probably created by young, hot stars, but it is not clear whether this is the first wave of star formation here (and RD1 thus a genuine primeval galaxy). Also uncertain: the actual distance that a redshift of z=5.34 corresponds to. The translation to a linear distance and age so heavily depends on the cosmological model chosen that barely the order of magnitude (some 15 billion lightyears) can be stated today...

The original paper JHU News Release CNN's story The previous record holder (z=4.92) Other z>5 objects in the HDF?

Asteroid scare came and went It didn't last long: For some 24 hours it had seemed that a major asteroid had a certain probability of hitting the Earth in the year 2028, but soon enough old pre-discovery images surfaced that allowed to refine the orbit - and the probability of a collision is now down to zero. Still there will be moderately close approaches of 1997 XF11 in 2002 and 2028: opportunities for detailled studies of this body of about 1.6 km diameter. It was the first time that a newly discovered asteroid of such a size was found to have the Earth inside its 'target ellipse': Some estimates put the probability of a hit in the range of 1 in 1000. But that was based on an orbit arc of just 3 months (97 XF11 had been discovered only last December). A press release by the IAU Minor Planets Center caused quite an echo in the media (picture: former BAA director J. Mason shows a newspaper ad on Great Britain's Sky News). That was late on March 11th. The correction of the story came almost exactly 24 hours later when reseachers at NASA's JPL discovered the pre-discovery images that extended the orbital arc to eight years - and clearly put the Earth out of danger. Interestingly the echo to that announcement was even louder, e.g. all U.S. TV networks had very long stories in their evening news (rewritten in the last minute): The overall impression of the level of understanding of the Near Earth Asteroid problem in the media is good.

IAU Press Release (updated version) JPL Press Release Homepage of XF11 Images of the asteroid Discovery photos Scary orbit, refined orbit Some stories by CNN (pre-retraction), ABC, CNN, BBC, SpaceViews, Science Daily, Phil. Inquirer, NY Post, ABC, New Scientist How to deal with asteroids: Hazards homepage Spaceguard Foundation Spacewatch Asteroid Scares... In other news: asteroid discoveries by Hubble

Briefly noted:

The expedition is back from Curacao - and here is already a first report with 7 pictures and many links to related science stories, news reports and funny stuff! Photograph by Daniel Fischer, with a 10 cm Maksutov.

In other News: Prospector did find water on the moon - NASA News, SpaceViews, BBC. | The best Europa images from Galileo were published: Brown Univ., ABC. | The SNOE satellite flies: Homepage.