SPACE NEWS

SPACE NEWS
--within the Solar System
.

. . To end of 2003.
2006 Solar-area News)

Dec 31, 03: In a phenomenon that has scientists puzzled, the Earth is right on schedule for a fifth straight year. Experts agree that the rate at which the Earth travels through space has slowed ever so slightly for millennia. To make the world's official time agree with where the Earth actually is in space, scientists in 1972 started adding an extra "leap second" on the last day of the year. For 28 years, scientists repeated the procedure. But in 1999, they discovered the Earth was no longer lagging behind.
. . The leap second was an unexpected consequence of the 1955 invention of the atomic clock, which use the electromagnetic radiation emanated by Cesium atoms to measure time. It is extremely reliable.

Dec 17, 03: Earth and its companion planet, Mars, are both enjoying a period of warm climate between their respective ice ages. Earth, too, is considered to be between two ice ages --the last one ended some 11,000 years ago, helping the rise of Homo sapiens as a species-- but for quite different reasons, according to the study.
. . The finger of suspicion in Earth's regular bouts of glaciation points to slight variations in the planet's orbit around the Sun and a minor "wobble" in its rotation around its axis. In Mars' case, the last ice age probably happened when the planet tilted. [Note that the scale referred to is vastly different: Mars is warmer than it was 100,000 years ago. Earth is warmer than it was last month!!]

Dec 16, 03: Australian astronomers have discovered an extra cosmic arm in the Milky Way that they believe wraps around the outskirts of the vast galaxy like a thick gas border. The gas border, which is 6,500 light years thick, showed the Milky Way had a structure similar to those of most other galaxies. The newly discovered gas border is about 60,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way.

Dec 1, 03: For the hit-and-stick scenario to have worked in the present-day Kuiper Belt (KOY-per), the region would have had to contain 10 times the amount of material that's in the Earth. That much stuff would be needed to allow the chance collisions that created so many large objects. Observations so far suggest, however, that the Kuiper Belt contains no more than one-tenth the mass of Earth.

Dec 12, 03: The strength of the Earth's magnetic field has decreased 10% over the past 150 years, raising the remote possibility that it may collapse and later reverse, flipping the planet's poles for the first time in nearly a million years, scientists said today. At that rate of decline, the field could vanish altogether in 1,500 to 2,000 years, said Jeremy Bloxham of Harvard University.
. . Hundreds of years could pass before a flip- flopped field returned to where it was 780,000 years ago. But scientists at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union cautioned that scenario is an unlikely one. Instead, the weakening, measured since 1845, could represent little more than an "excursion", or lull, which can last for hundreds of years. Such a lull could still have significant effects, especially in regions where the weakening is most pronounced.
. . Over the southern Atlantic Ocean, a continued weakening of the magnetic field has diminished the shielding effect it has locally in protecting the Earth from the natural radiation that bombards our planet from space, scientists said. As a result, satellites in low- Earth orbit are left vulnerable to that radiation as they pass over the region, known as the South Atlantic anomaly. Among the satellites that have fallen prey to the harmful effects was a Danish satellite designed, ironically, to measure the Earth's magnetic field.
. . The weakening —-if coupled with a subsequently large influx of radiation in the form of protons streaming from the sun-— can also affect the chemistry of the atmosphere, said Charles Jackman of NASA. That can lead to significant but temporary losses of atmospheric ozone, he said.

Dec 12, 03: Amazingly, a radar pulse from Arecibo can travel 1.2 billion km to Titan, then retrace the journey back to Earth with power enough to reveal information about the surface of that cold, distant moon.
. . Titan is about at the distance limit for Arecibo, which can follow a star or planet across the sky for at most two hours and forty-six minutes. It takes about two hours and fifteen minutes for a radar pulse, traveling at the speed of light, to make the round trip to Titan and back.

Dec 12, 03: "The now confirmed discovery of large hydrogen deposits in the polar regions has changed the Moon from a scientifically interesting body to territory of strategic value, comparable to the Persian Gulf oil fields", Lowman said. He is a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
. . "Although I would not call this a 'race to the Moon,' the fact is that Europe, Japan, India, and China have formal commitments to lunar missions", Lowman said. He added that attention has become firmly focussed on The moon's South Pole region as an objective."
. . At the recent ILEWG program, a few observers flagged a clear problem - one that's part identity crisis, part political tide of the Moon.
. . "My main impression is that everyone is going to the Moon and everyone is doing the same thing", said APL's Paul Spudis. One critical piece of hardware that nobody seems willing to fly moonward is imaging radar. "It's an obvious experiment with all the debate about the ice at the poles", he said.
. . Getting detailed information about the polar deposits, not just from lunar orbit, but also utilizing on- the-spot looks by Moon landers, is a must, Spudis said. "This is a key thing we don't know. Somebody ought to do it."
. . But as one lunar exploration expert told SPACE.com: "The missions are designed around political considerations rather than science from the ground up."

Dec 10, 03: JPL is actively studying three worlds that are ripe for ballooning. For Venus, an altitude-controlled phase change balloon is ideal. On Mars, constant altitude helium balloons or altitude-controlled solar-heated ambient atmosphere balloons are under study. And for Titan, blimps filled with hydrogen or helium look highly promising
. . Engineers at JPL have developed a novel, hot air venting system that for the first time allows repeated, precision soft landing of hot air balloons. On Mars, during the Red Planet's polar summer, such solar powered balloons could remain airborne for many weeks, perhaps even months. The atmospheric circulation of Mars would drive the balloons around the polar region many times before the balloon would cross the planet's terminator.

Dec 9, 03: French astronomers said they had detected for the first time the presence of carbon monoxide (CO) and another lethal gas, hydrocyanic acid,in the atmosphere of Uranus, the seventh most distant planet from the Sun.
. . Very high levels of CO were found on Neptune, another distant gas giant.

Dec 5, 03: India said it has developed a rocket engine that uses supercooled liquid fuel. They plan to send a manned mission to the moon before 2015.

Dec 3, 03: The solar wind pries open immense cracks in the Earth's magnetic field, holding them apart while it gushes through to cause geomagnetic storms, scientists reported. "The only things that humans can really see in a magnetic storm are the aurora lights."
. . The space storms can dump 1,000 billion watts into the atmosphere while they last -- more than the total electric generating capacity of the United States. The researchers estimated the crack was twice the size of the Earth at a point 61,000 kms above the planet's surface. Such cracks evidently open all the time.

Encke is the comet with the shortest orbital period known, taking about 3.3 years.

Nov 24, 03: For years, scientists said the Milky Way's central black hole contained about 2.6 million times the mass of the Sun. They now believe the figure is somewhere between 3.2 million and 4 million solar masses.
. . And a new study suggests all that mass, confined to an area about 10 times smaller than Earth's orbit around the Sun, spins around about once every 11 minutes --about 30% of the speed of light.

Nov 26, 03: The enigmatic icy rocks known as the Kuiper Belt came to inhabit the distant fringes of the Solar System thanks to the gravitational pull of youthful Neptune billions of years ago, a new study says.
. . The Kuiper Belt is a disk-shaped region beyond the orbit of Neptune that is inhabited by tens of thousands of icy bodies, which includes Pluto.
. . The Belt has raised questions --one of them is that it has too little mass to be in its far-flung location. Either it has lost mass over time, or it was created closer to the Sun and moved.
. . The fledgling planets were surrounded by a vast orbiting ring of planetesimals (asteroids), circling about five billion km from the Sun, according to the duo's theory. The gravitational pull of this huge ring was such that the young planets, with the exception of Jupiter, were gradually pulled away from the Sun. As their orbits expanded, the planets gathered further mass from the whirling dust and rocks, and their gravitational force in turn affected the orbit of the planetesimals.
. . Eventually, a remnant of the planetesimals, pushed notably by Neptune --by then a gaseous giant-- ended in the present location of the Kuiper Belt, about seven billion km from the Sun. "The original Kuiper Belt region could in fact have been virtually empty."

Nov 21, 03: The first author of a new study, Basu, said the Permian-Triassic asteroid was probably bigger than the 10km-wide space rock that is thought to have killed the dinosaurs. It sent billions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, enough to darken the sun for months.
. . The dinosaur-killing asteroid left a thin layer of the element iridium across the globe. But Basu said iridium was not found in the fragments recovered from the Antarctica, suggesting the earlier Permian-Triassic asteroid had a different composition.
. . Basu said specimens recovered from Permian- Triassic rock formations in China, however, have a chemistry that matches that of the meteorite fragments found in Antarctica, a discovery that supports the impact theory. Also, shocked quartz, a telltale sign of an asteroid impact, has been found at both sites, he said.
. . At the time of the Permian-Triassic event, Africa, South America, India, Australia and Antarctica were joined in a giant continent called Pangea. Just where the asteroid hit in that land mass is uncertain, Basu said, but it could have been near what is now western Australia.
. . Massive outflows of lava, called flood basalt, occurred around the time of both the Permian-Triassic and the dinosaur extinctions. The outflow continued for thousands of years and thickly covered hundreds of miles. Basu said it is possible that asteroid impacts triggered both eruptions of lava, but the connection has yet to be proven.

Nov 20, 03: A longstanding mystery over what caused five great mass extinctions, including one that destroyed the dinosaurs, has grown with the release of two studies in the journal Science.
. . In one study, researchers make the bold claim that an asteroid is responsible for the death of most life on Earth in a catastrophic extinction 251 million years ago. Other scientists are not ready to accept the claim.
. . The new study uncovered 40 extraterrestrial mineral fragments in the Antarctic, indicating the asteroid impact 251 million years ago. The timing coincides with the well-documented Permian-Triassic mass extinction, the worst of five major events scientists have identified through fossil records. Some 90% of all species disappeared, by some accounts.
. . Scientists generally agree that the newfound tiny grains, called chondritic meteorite fragments, are indeed from space. But agreement stops there. They should have long ago become indistinguishable soil, conventional wisdom holds. The fragments were collected from a layer dated to the Permian-Triassic boundary in time.

A British-built craft designed to scour the surface of Mars for signs of life is scheduled to land on the planet on Christmas Day 03. The Beagle 2 lander is traveling aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express craft. Of 34 unmanned American, Soviet and Russian missions to Mars since 1960, two-thirds ended in failure.

Nov 11, 03: The latest effort by science to answer whether there's ice on the moon has come up empty. There's no sign of a lunar skating rink in the mysterious polar craters.
. . Five years ago, NASA's Lunar Prospector orbiter found tantalizing evidence that deep, permanently shadowed craters at the moon's poles could harbor ice in their sunless depths. Prospector found elevated levels of hydrogen —-a component of water-— around the moon's poles, with the highest readings in the perpetually shaded craters. But the evidence for ice was indirect. Subsequent experiments that bounced radio waves off these craters revealed no sign of thick ice layers, although those tests penetrated only a few feet below the surface.
. . Now, Campbell and colleagues at Cornell University have used the mammoth radar dish at Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory to probe craters more deeply than ever before — as far as 20 feet down. And still there's no sign of thick layers of ice.

Nov 5, 03: As of today, 26 years after its launch, NASA's Voyager 1 was 8.4 billion miles from the sun. That's 90 times the distance separating the Earth from our star.
. . As the robotic spacecraft continues to push far beyond the reach of the nine planets, two teams of scientists disagree whether it passed into the uncharted region of space where the sun's sphere of influence begins to wane.
. . The sun sends out a stream of highly charged particles, called the solar wind, that carves out a vast bubble around the solar system. Beyond the bubble's ever- shifting boundary, called the termination shock, lies a region where particles cast off by dying stars begin to hold sway. That region, called the heliopause, marks the beginning of interstellar space and the end of our solar system. Whether Voyager 1 reached that mark or is still on approach remains unclear, with scientists providing evidence for both claims.

Nov 4, 03: A leading Chinese space official, Hu Shixiang, told a news conference here today that he has three new goals for the next decade: a space station within 10 years, a spacewalk and docking technology. Their budget is small compared to the U.S. space budget, at only about one-tenth as much.
. . Beijing has long been secretive about its space ambitions but suddenly became much more open after astronaut Yang Liwei orbited the Earth 14 times in the first manned Chinese space launch last month.

The two rocks that make up the 'tisimal Hermes take up to 21 hours to complete a revolution. It takes roughly two years to swing around Sol.

Oct 24, 03: The most powerful shuttle solid rocket engine ever tested gives NASA new options for greatly increased payloads and for emergency orbits in the event of a post- launch engine failure. NASA hopes the new engine can one day carry 23,000 extra pounds of experiments into space.
. . Space shuttle engines normally are built with four segments, each 30 feet long and filled with propellant. The test involved a fifth engine segment that added 25% more propellant for greater thrust. Four segment engines generate a maximum 3.3 million pounds of thrust. Thiokol's new five-segmented rocket-booster generated 3.6 million pounds of thrust. The test engine weighed 1.56 million pounds, of which propellant accounted for 1.37 million pounds.
. . The new engine has the equivalent of 19.6 million horsepower. The added thrust should be able to propel the entire spacecraft into orbit if the shuttle's main engine failed.

Oct 29, 03: 144 years ago, in early September in 1859, telegraph wires suddenly shorted out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires. Colorful aurora, normally visible only in polar regions, were seen as far south as Rome and Hawaii. It was three times more powerful than the strongest space storm in modern memory --one that cut power to an entire Canadian province in 1989.
. . Scientists can't yet accurately measure or predict what the strength or direction of Earth's magnetic field will be when a storm arrives. The storms themselves can be predicted.

Oct 29, 03: The Senate injected itself today into a simmering debate over America's future in space, urging NASA's top administrator —-over objections by House lawmakers-— to continue developing a space plane to ferry astronauts into orbit.
. . Last week, two leading members of the House Science Committee urged NASA to defer development of the spacecraft because of concerns about cost and its potential benefit.

In Brazil, Alcantara-based rockets can be sent into space using 13% less fuel than launches at Cape Canaveral, Fla., and 31% less than from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome.

Oct 21, 03: Astronomers have apparently discovered an interesting twist to one of the greatest planetisimal ("asteroid") mysteries of all time. Hermes, a space rock lost to science for 66 years and recently rediscovered, could actually be a pair of orbiting components of roughly equal sizes, new radar observations suggest.
. . Hermes had not been seen since its 1937 discovery until found anew in a collaborative effort last week.
. . The astronomers estimate that each is about 300- 450 meters in diameter. It's estimated that 16% of near-Earth planetisimals are actually double.
. . Later this year, Hermes will pass within about nine times the distance from Earth to Luna. It travels on an elliptical orbit that takes it across Venus' orbit and then well out into the solar system.

Oct 15, 03: Contour had been orbiting the Earth for a month when it fired its rocket motor for 50 seconds Aug. 15, 2002, to send it on a trajectory to collect data from at least two comets. The spacecraft was never heard from again. It was probably destroyed by the heat from its rocket motor.

Oct 8, 03: A small asteroid was discovered in late September, a few hours after it passed closer to Earth than any previously known space rock. Had it struck Earth's atmosphere, it was too small to pose any serious threat.
. . 2003 SQ222 came within 88,000 km of Earth, or less than one-fourth the distance to the Moon. That breaks a near-miss record set in 1994. However, in both cases, the rocks were probably no larger than a house --less than 10 meters in diameter, and to orbit the Sun every 1.85 Earth- years on an elliptical path.
. . Had it been on target, "it would have exploded harmlessly in the upper atmosphere, with an energy comparable to that of a small atomic bomb."
. . Astronomers estimate there are about 500 million undiscovered asteroids as big or larger than 2003 SQ222 that inhabit the general space through which Earth orbits. "In a good month, we find five to 10 near-Earth asteroids."

Oct 6, 03: China said today it would launch a satellite to survey the moon within three years. "The surveying satellite will orbit the moon for a year to explore the geography, soil, environment and resources." Chinese space officials have hinted they are pursuing a multi-pronged human spaceflight program, including space station construction, as well as eventual travel to the Moon, all by 2020.

Sept 27, 03: Pluto has been moving away from the sun for the past 14 years, so the current warm-up comes as a surprise. "The most likely explanation is thermal lag", says MIT astrophysicist James Elliot, one of the team leaders. "On Earth, the days are longest in the northern hemisphere near the end of June, but the hottest month is July. Similarly, Pluto may not reach maximum surface temperature until a decade or so from now." Astronomers hope they will be able to get a close view of Pluto's enigmatic environment before things cool down and the atmosphere begins to collapse to ice. Despite constant threats from budget-slashing, NASA's New Horizons mission is on schedule for launch in 2006, with a Pluto flyby anticipated for 2015.

Sept 25, 03: Astronomers have found two of the smallest moons ever spotted around Uranus, brining the distant planet's satellite tally to 24, the third most in the solar system. All are 12 to 16 km, & were discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope.
. . S/2003 U1 is 97,700 km away from Uranus, whirling around the giant planet in 22 hours and 9 minutes.
. . The smallest Uranian moon yet found, S/2003 U2, is 12 km wide. Its orbital path is just 300 to 700 km from the moon Belinda. S/2003 U2 is 74,800 km away from Uranus and circles the planet in 14 hours and 50 minutes.
. . Jack Lissauer of Ames: "The larger moons must be gravitationally perturbing the smaller moons. The region is so crowded that these moons could be gravitationally unstable. So, we are trying to understand how the moons can coexist with each other." Uranus has 10 narrow rings.
. . One idea is that some of the moons are young and formed through collisions with wayward comets. "Not all of Uranus's satellites formed over 4 billion years ago when the planet formed", Lissauer said. "The two small moons orbiting close to [the moon] Belinda, for example, probably were once part of Belinda. They broke off when a comet smashed into Belinda."

Sept 22, 03: Sound, unlike light, travels by compressing a medium. On Earth, the atmosphere works well as a sound- carrying medium, as does water. The planet itself is very adept at transmitting an earthquake's seismic waves, a form of sound. Space, though not as efficient, can also serve as a medium. Not enough atoms --if any-- would strike our eardrums. "Maybe if we had an amazingly large and sensitive microphone, we could detect these sounds, but to our human ear it would be silent." An amazingly sensitive microphone, in a sense, was used to discover the constant B-flat coming from the black hole. [JKH: the sound "wave" travels much differently than in a real atmo. A propelled atom may travel thousands of Km before hitting another & passing its forward momentum to it.]

Sept 16, 03: Preparations for China's first manned space flight — expected sometime later this year —-are moving ahead "extremely smoothly", a top science official said.

Sept 1, 03: In just five years, astronauts may journey to the International Space Station in a stripped-down four- seater instead of the mammoth —-and aging-— space shuttle. In effect, NASA hopes to commute to orbit in a sleek sedan instead of an 18-wheeler. Eventually, NASA hopes to build a next generation shuttle, a more dependable heavy-lift cargo carrier to replace Columbia's three surviving sister ships. But it may be more than a decade before such a craft gets serious consideration.
. . Such a simple approach has been used in the past to create some of the classic designs in transportation. Vehicles such as the World War II jeep and the DC3. Preliminary studies have settled on some candidate designs. One is flat, resembling a manta ray, with upward folded wings. Others are long and slender, with stubby wings. Those could all land on a runway, as does the space shuttle.
. . Another design resembles a bell-shaped capsule, rather like the craft of NASA's early days. That craft would descend by parachute.
. . The plane will be designed to fly either manned or unmanned. Smith said an auto guidance system will allow the plane could be flown remotely to rendezvous and dock with the Space Station, and then return to Earth. With no humans aboard, the craft could be used to haul light cargo to the orbiting lab.

Sept 3, 03: Data from an unmanned Mars probe suggests the red planet's rusty color might have come not from water as widely believed but from tiny meteors raining on its surface, New Scientist magazine said. Tests have shown that no water was needed to create rust when iron was exposed to ultraviolet light in a chamber containing gases similar to Mars's atmosphere and at temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees Celsius.

Sept 3, 03: The doomsday headlines around the world yesterday morning was, by the end of the day, reduced to innocuous status as additional observations showed it would not hit Earth.

Sept 2, 03: A planetisimal about 1.2 km wide could hit the Earth on March 21, 2014. On impact, a mass of about 2.6 billion tons would be traveling at 75,000 mph. The rock would have the force of 350,000 megatons, or eight to twenty million times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
. . In all probability, within the next month, we will know its future orbit with an accuracy which will mean we will be able to rule out any impact."

Sept 2, 03: A benign and previously unknown aspect of shuttle flights links the space vehicles with the Arctic. Researchers say the shuttle's exhaust, 97% of which is water vapor, quickly migrates to the highest reaches of the atmosphere above the Arctic. There, the vapor spreads out about 75 km high in Earth's mesosphere, just below the thermosphere, the air's highest layer, and settles to form a wispy type of cloud called noctilucent clouds.
. . The scientists found that the amount of water in the clouds was nearly identical to the amount in the shuttle plume. "This (shuttle launch) happens in Florida 5,000 miles away, and within a week we have an effect in the Arctic."

AUG 21, 03: Scans of the surface of Mars have turned up clues about the Red Planet's atmosphere and suggest Mars has always been a cold, barren place, U.S. scientists said. Using the Thermal Emission Spectrometer on NASA's orbiting Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, geologist Philip Christensen of Arizona State University and his colleagues looked for minerals known as carbonate compounds. The compounds provide clues about Mars's past because they form when carbon dioxide gas comes in contact with minerals and water.
. . Because Mars' atmosphere is largely carbon dioxide, scientists have theorized that any bodies of liquid water on the Red Planet could have left large carbonate deposits behind, as has been the case on Earth. Researchers found carbonate compounds all over the surface of Mars, but not enough and not the right kind to have come from dried-up oceans.

Aug 16, 03: A little bit of duckweed and some inflatable houses could help turn the caves of Mars into a home for any future human visitors to the red planet. That's one of the topics on the agenda of a conference on Mars being held in Oregon this weekend.
. . The Martian caves would protect humans from radiation and the severe weather, and may hold minerals, water and ice the colonists could use for life support. "They're a safe place on a dangerous planet, an ideal refuge for research", said Penelope Boston, lead investigator for "The Caves of Mars", a series of experiments partly funded by NASA. Frederick calls duckweed the ideal Martian food. The plant has more protein per gram than soybeans and can double its mass in a day.
. . Although the mouse trials aren't finished, researchers have designed a larger biosphere for humans that should be completed by November, made out of the same kind of plastic and nylon material used for hot air balloons. Mars colonists would inflate it in the middle of a cave. An airlock would let people go in and out of the habitat, and solar panels outside the cave would create power.

Aug 15, 03: India will send an unmanned mission to Luna by 2008, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said, in what is seen as an effort to showcase the country's scientific capabilities.
. . China plans to send an unmanned spacecraft to Luna within the next three years. Only the United States, Russia and Japan have sent missions to Luna so far.

Aug 14, 03: There is no such thing as empty space. Our solar system's natural defenses are down and a vigorous cosmic dust storm is blowing through, according to a new study. The forecast calls for a prolonged and increasing blizzard of small interstellar bits.
. . The number of incoming particles recently tripled and the pace is expected to grow over the next decade. Terrestrial weather and climate will not likely be affected, but more shooting stars could grace the night sky. The fresh influx is related to a periodic weakening of the Sun's magnetic field.
. . While no serious consequences are expected, the extra dust could slightly alter our night sky and might pose an increased risk to spacecraft, which are vulnerable to high-speed impacts from the tiny small particles.
. . When interstellar dust hits comets and asteroids, it's like shooting a tiny bullet at a rock, and more dust is kicked up, and the follow-on dust tends to be bigger.

A craft called Phoenix will touch down in the high northern latitudes of the Red Planet to study the water-ice thought to lurk just beneath the surface. The lander will dig a trench up to a meter deep in the Martian soil and then deploy a suite of instruments to study the accessible ice, soil and rock. It will also analyze the local atmosphere.
. . The craft, which beat off three other design concepts --a Mars plane, an orbiter and a mission to return Martian dust to Earth-- will launch in 2007 and land in 2008. It will touch down in terrain suspected of harbouring as much as 80% water-ice by volume within 30 centimeters of the surface.
. . Included in the instrument payload are microscopic imaging systems capable of examining materials at scales down to 10 nanometres (billionths of a meter), while others will investigate whether organic molecules are contained in ice or soil samples.

July 29, 03: The origin of the two moons of Mars presents a longstanding puzzle, to which one researcher proposed the new solution at the 6th International Conference on Mars last week. The two moons --Phobos and Deimos-- could be the byproducts of a breakup of a huge moon that once circled the red planet, according to a new theory. The capture of a large Martian satellite may have taken place during or shortly after the formation of the planet, with Phobos and Deimos now the surviving remnants.

July 27, 03: From about 55 degrees latitude to the poles, Mars has extensive deposits of soils that appear to be rich in water ice, bearing an average of 50% water by mass, studies show. A typical kg of soil scooped up in the polar regions would yield an average of half a kg of water if it were heated in an oven.
. . A new global map of Mars shows likely locations of water ice based on observations of hydrogen made by NASA's Odyssey spacecraft. The vast water icecaps at the poles may be the source of the subsurface water nearer the equatorial regions, Feldmen and his colleagues say. The thickness of the icecaps themselves may be enough to bottle up geothermal heat from below, increasing the temperature at the bottom and melting the bottom layer of the icecaps, which then could feed a global water table.

When space rocks fall through Earth's atmosphere, a variety of things can happen. Large iron-heavy rocks are almost sure to slam into the planet. Their stony cousins, however, can't take the pressure and are more likely to explode above the surface. Either outcome can be dismal. But the consequences vary.
. . So scientists who study the potential threat of planetisimals would like to know more about which types and sizes of asteroids break apart and which hold together. A new computer model helps to quantify whether an asteroid composed mostly of stone will survive to create a crater or not.
. . A stony space rock must be about the size of two football fields, or 220 meters (usta be 720 feet) in diameter, to endure the thickening atmosphere and slam into the planet, according to the study.
. . A bit lower density and strength and it'll be a low-level air burst, a bit higher and it'll hit as a load of fragments and you'll get a crater." The distinction would mean little to a person on the ground. "An airburst would be a blast somewhere in the region of 500-600 megatons", Bland said. "As a comparison, the biggest-ever nuclear test was about 50 megatons."
. . A presumed airburst in 1908, over a remote region of Siberia called Tunguska, flattened some 2,000 square km (800 square miles) of forest. The object is estimated to have been just 80 meters wide (260 feet). Bland said the event was probably equal to about 10 megatons.
. . Tunguska events ought to occur only about once every 1,000 years. As many as two or three dozen objects ranging from the size of a television to a studio apartment explode in the atmosphere every year. Research in recent years has shown that stony asteroids are often mere rubble piles. The results suggest rocks about 220 meters across (720 feet) are likely to actually hit the surface every 170,000 years or so. Some previous research has suggested a frequency of every 4,000 years or less.

June 20, 03: The head of the Brazilian Space Agency said his country is poised to grab a third of the world's fast- growing market for commercial satellite launches thanks to a proposed tripling of spending on space programs.
. . Bevilacqua said the prospect of a joint space venture with Ukraine using Brazil's tropical Alcantara launch pad is an exciting development for Brazil's space program. Alcantara is seen as one of the most attractive launch sites in the world. Rockets use less fuel to reach orbit if they are launched near the Equator.

June 19, 03: Japan is set to give its final green-light next month to a joint project with the European Space Agency to land mankind's first probe on Mercury. Only one American probe has so far approached Mercury.
. . The Japan-Europe project will be the first full- scale exploration of Mercury and will use a surface lander and two orbiting units. They plan to use Russian Soyuz rockets to send the probes between late 2010 and early 2011. The probes are expected to reach Mercury in 2014.
. . The US probe Mariner-10 orbited the planet in 1974 and 1975 and NASA plans to send another orbiter, Messenger, in March 2004. Messenger is expected to reach Mercury in five years.

Models of Europa's gravitational field show that Europa possesses a surface layer about 100 km thick of material with the density of water, on top of a rocky interior and a metallic core. The surface layer is most likely H2O, but since the densities of solid ice and liquid water are very close, gravity models cannot distinguish between the two.
. . Tidal heating is the most important heat source at Europa, but also the most poorly known. Other volatiles, such as ammonia or salts, could dramatically alter the rheology of Europa's ice.

June 6, 03: The Earth became a major planetary body much earlier than previously believed, just 10 million years after the birth of the sun, researchers say. Experts now believe that the inner solar system planets —-Mercury, Venus, Earth, Luna and Mars-— actually began forming within 10,000 years after the nuclear fires of the sun were ignited about 4.5 billion years ago. Within 10 million years, the Earth had reached about 64% of its present size.

July 9, 03: Researchers found that the solar eruptions can reach up to almost 45 million degrees Celsius, a jump of up about 10 million degrees from previous estimates.

PLUTO: Perihelion was in 1989, which means that, in theory, its surface temperature should fall and its atmosphere should contract, even freeze. But astronomers in the U.S. and France say the opposite is happening: not only has the atmosphere failed to collapse as expected, its pressure seems to have doubled over the past 14 years. Even more puzzling: Pluto's atmosphere, believed to be mostly nitrogen derived from nitrogen ice, has warmed by around one degree C since perihelion.

July 10, 03: A distinguished group of Americans joined together to send a unique request to Congressional leaders - -a request that preparations be made to deaal with the prospect of Earth being slammed by an asteroid or comet.
. . In an "Open Letter to Congress on Near Earth Objects", the communication underscores the danger our planet faces from near Earth objects, also termed NEO's.
. . The letter urges U.S. lawmakers to take a series of three steps, thereby shaping a coordinated program to deal with the impact threat:

. . Step 1: NEO Detection - Expand and enhance this nation's capability to detect and to determine the orbits and physical characteristics of NEOs.
. . Step 2: NEO Exploration - Expand robotic exploration of asteroids and Earth-approaching comets and direct that U.S. astronauts again leave low-Earth orbit
. . Step 3: NEO Contingency Planning - Initiate comprehensive contingency planning for deflecting any NEO found to pose a potential threat to Earth. In parallel, plan to meet the disaster relief needs created by an impending or actual NEO impact.

. . Included among those that urged action on the NEO issue were: Apollo 17 Astronaut, Harrison Schmitt; Neil Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium; Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus of Princeton University; Lucy Ann McFadden, NEO scientist at the University of Maryland, etc.

July 2, 03: As part of the multi-pronged Prometheus Project, engineers and scientists are now tackling plans for the nuclear-powered Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO). This flagship mission using electric propulsion powered by a nuclear fission reactor would showcase a slate of key technologies. It also promises to usher in a new era of solar system exploration. The amount of power available to JIMO from a nuclear reactor would be hundreds of times greater than on current interplanetary spacecraft. JIMO's ambitious interplanetary passport --departing Earth no earlier than 2011-- calls for orbiting three planet- sized moons of Jupiter: Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

July 2, 03: Much smaller than the US shuttle, and unmanned, the Japanese space shuttle system is the prototype for a program —the Hope-X project— that was recently put on ice because of budget cuts. Hope-X, started in the 1980s to develop a reusable unmanned space shuttle, was originally slated for launch in 2004. But lack of funds pushed it four years behind schedule before it was postponed.

July 1, 03: Frozen layers of carbon-dioxide frost or snow accumulate during northern Mars' winter, then dissipate in the spring. That process exposes a soil layer rich in water ice, the Martian counterpart to permafrost. Coupling Mars Odyssey data with laser altimeter information gleaned by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), the amount of dry ice during the northern winter and spring seasons is being revealed.
. . In some places, the water-ice content is more than 90% by volume. Once the dry ice disappears, the remaining surface near the pole is composed almost entirely of water ice.
. . There is evidence that large cold-based mountain glaciers existed on the flanks of the large Tharsis Montes equatorial volcanoes in the recent geological past.

June 19, 03: In the near future, revolutionary space hardware could put an exciting spin on spaceflight. NASA is putting money into Momentum-eXchange/Electrodynamic Reboost tether technology --MXER for short-- an innovative concept that would station 100-kilometers of cart-wheeling cable in orbit around the Earth. Then, rotating like a giant sling, the cable would swoop down and pick up spacecraft in low orbits, then hurl them to higher orbits or even lob them onward to other planets.
. . NASA is footing the bill on five research areas: aerocapture; advanced chemical propulsion; solar electric propulsion.
. . By eliminating the need to launch an upper-stage rocket along with each satellite, Hoyt said that the MXER Tether System means satellites can be boosted into space atop smaller, less expensive rockets. Propulsion costs for space missions would drop by a factor of ten or more. They hope "by the middle of the next decade."
. . At least 17 tether trials have been conducted in orbit so far. The majority of them have been highly successful.

June 6, 03: The rapid winds of Saturn are evolving with surprising rapidity, having slowed down by 40% over two decades, according to a new study that might provide insight into what drives the monster gales. Astronomers have long supposed that winds on outer planets are fueled mostly by internal heat. The Sun's energy, which ultimately powers all wind on Earth, is thought to be less a factor farther out in space. Saturn gets just 1% of the solar radiation that bathes our planet.
. . In the early 1980s, the Voyager mission measured wind gusts near Saturn's equator of 1,056 mph (1,700 kilometers per hour). New Hubble Space Telescope observations reveal the top winds have diminished to 1,000 kph.
. . The stark shift may owe to seasonal change or possibly even shadows cast by Saturn's rings. The new study suggests the equatorial winds do not extend very deep into Saturn's gaseous envelope.

May 22, 03: Jupiter's potato-shaped inner moon, named Amalthea, appears to have a very low density, indicating it is full of holes. "The density is unexpectedly low", said Dr. John D. Anderson, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Amalthea is apparently a loosely packed pile of rubble."
. . The empty gaps between solid chunks likely take up more of the moon's total volume than the solid pieces, and even the chunks are probably material that is not dense enough to fit some theories about the origin of Jupiter's moons. "Amalthea now seems more likely to be mostly rock with maybe a little ice, rather than a denser mix of rock and iron."
. . They estimated Amalthea's mass from its gravitational effect on Galileo, when the spacecraft passed within about 160 kilometers. Amalthea's overall density is close to the density of water ice. This suggests the moon has been broken into many pieces that now cling together from the pull of each other's gravity, mixed with empty spaces where the pieces don't fit tightly together. "It's probably boulder-size or larger pieces, just touching each other, not pressing hard together." Even if Amalthea is mostly gaps, its solid chunks have less density than Io.

May 14, 03: Astronomers say they have detected nearly two dozen more satellites orbiting Jupiter, bringing the number of its moons to an astonishing 60! The 23 newcomers are tiny objects between just two and eight km across, making them the smallest moons ever to be detected from Earth.
. . Saturn: 31 detected so far, followed by Uranus: 21, and Neptune: 11. That's 123 around just the giant planets. Add 2 for Mars, =125. (No, that's all! All planetary moons are between Mars & Neptune.)

May 12, 03: Make way for a revolutionary class of 21st century observing outpost --huge, high-tech facilities that could be assembled in space by a cadre of astronauts and robots.
. . Thanks to the march of technology --in civilian, military, and intelligence-gathering circles-- space telescopes far larger than those now being planned appear workable. The proposed JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) is an orbiting infrared observatory and assigned a parking spot at the L2 Point, some 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) from Earth. Using 36 mirror segments that unfold to form its primary mirror, JWST is on tap to take the place of the Hubble Space Telescope at the end of this decade.
. . Mirrors nearly 50 meters (165-feet) in size were discussed by working groups at last week's gathering.

May 9, 03: Scientists have found evidence on Earth for an ancient asteroid collision in space that appears to have generated a modest rain of fire on the planet for a few million years. The explosive collision might have been one of the largest in the solar system's recent history, the researchers say, involving two space rocks each up to 1,000 km wide.
. . In ancient marine sediments across a large swath of southern Sweden, researchers found sand-sized grains of the mineral chromite that are low in iron, a sign of extraterrestrial origin. The stuff appears to have fell from the sky about 480 million years ago. Based on the number and size of the grains, the scientists determined that bright fireballs would have graced Earth's skies about 100 times more often than occurs today.
. . Biological shifts evident in the soil are due to environmental change, he said, but it's not clear if the asteroid collision was behind the environmental change or not.

May 6, 03: Dr. Stern is responsible for the scientific success of NASA's roughly $500 million New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. He wants to find out if Pluto has more than one moon --if there are additional flyby targets in the Pluto-Charon system for the coming probe. "Very rare but not impossible multi-body encounters could put Kuiper Belt Objects in orbit around Pluto."
. . It's more likely, however, that one or more other satellites could have formed directly around Pluto during its birth, Stern said. Or the planet could harbor a cloud of small objects that were broken up from a collision that shattered a satellite of Pluto long ago. Pluto, less massive but more distant from the Sun, could retain a satellite orbiting as far as 1 million km away.
. . The technology is in place to find moons of Pluto down to 10 km in diameter, if they exist. It's unlikely any moon would be larger than 100 km, because a satellite that large would probably already have been spotted.

May 7, 03: Japan's space agency said it will test launch a reusable, unmanned shuttle in Sweden possibly later this month. It's much smaller than the U.S. space shuttle --the prototype for Japan's 20-year-old program.

May 5, 03: Japan is now preparing a more ambitious, and less controversial, mission: to bring home the first space rocks since U.S. astronauts gathered samples from the moon over 30 years ago. The unmanned Muses-C probe will make three one-second touch-and-go contacts with 1998 SF36, a tiny planetisimal some 180 million miles away from Earth, and bring back a gram or so of its surface.
. . It's only 2,300 feet long and 1,000 feet wide, and has a gravitational pull only one-one-hundred-thousandth of Earth's. Though it will take it about two years to get there, the planetisimal is among the closest neighbors to Earth other than Luna.
. . Muses' first mission will be a three-month survey of the planetisimal with cameras and infrared imaging gear from an altitude of about 12 miles. It will move in close enough to fire a small bullet into the planetisimal and collect the ejected fragments in a funnel-like device.
. . Muses would be the world's first two-way trip to a planetisimal.

May 5, 03: Russia and the United States have agreed to launch a joint program of Mars exploration, officials said here after talks between the heads of the US and Russian space agencies.

May 1, 03: About 30,000 tons of interplanetary dust reaches Earth's surface every year. Almost all of this dust contains water, resembling the paltry 2.8% of known, hydrated meteorites.
. . The researchers conclude that what's collected on Earth is a result of what happens in space. When watery asteroids are shocked at the surface by an impact -- something that happens to all space rocks several times during their histories -- dust explodes into space. When a dry asteroid is hit by a another rock, not much happens, dustwise. "As a result of these differences in shock response, watery material would become the predominant kind of dust particles produced by mutual collisions of asteroids.

Apr 30, 03: A ground penetrating radar system aboard Mars Express, a European Space Agency (ESA) probe set to launch in early June, will use radio waves to map out any water reservoirs as deep as 5 km below the surface.
. . Earlier this year, researchers poring over data from Mars Global Surveyor announced that the planet's ice caps consisted mostly of water, not frozen carbon dioxide as had been previously thought for decades.
. . During the Martian day, MARSIS will bounce signals off the planet's ionosphere to measure the effect of solar wind in the upper atmosphere.

Apr 28, 03: TITAN --If an ocean, it isn't a total cover: A new study relies on narrow infrared "windows", specific wavelengths of light energy that allow researchers to peer through the haze. After analyzing surface reflectivity, they conclude that much of Titan's surface is exposed icy bedrock. "It's not clear what the darker material is, but one possibility is that it is these are organic liquids and sediments."

Apr 28, 03: A 78-million-dollar unmanned lunar mission plan seeks to showcase India's scientific prowess and stake its claim to join a select club for future planetary missions. They'll launch a 400 kg satellite into the orbit within the next five years using a locally built polar satellite launch vehicle. It will go into a polar orbit about 100 km above Luna.

Apr 14, 03: Almost two years before the Columbia disaster, NASA inspectors discovered a serious weakening of a shuttle's protective left-wing panel and ordered a fleetwide inspection out of fear the problem would turn up in other shuttles, internal space agency documents show.
. . As to difficulties detecting such flaws without removing wing panels and cutting them apart? "There is no technology right now to do effective, nondestructive testing", NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It's a conundrum, one we really have to get better at and have to really figure out." They speculated this corrosion appeared on Discovery because it had just returned from its 29th flight, a record number at the time. Columbia was on its 28th mission when it was destroyed.

Apr 11, 03: Astronomers have spotted either seven or nine elusive space rocks near and possibly in orbit around Amalthea, a moon of Jupiter. [ The first moons OF moons?! If not, Jove has 65 or 67.] The rocks are perhaps as small as 10 meters across and no larger than a few km. It is not clear if they are orbiting Amalthea or if they might be traveling with Amalthea.
. . Galileo's science team has since been disbanded and the craft is bound for a purposeful September collision with Jupiter that will end nearly a decade of exploration of giant planet and its environs. The Galileo spacecraft will pass far from Amalthea on its final suicide dive this fall, and it's almost out of fuel, so there is no real chance of a follow-up observation with that spacecraft.

Apr 11, 03: New Moon Found Around Saturn; total= 31. It has an 8 km diameter. It's an irregular, orbiting backward; and in a very eccentric, or elliptical orbit, one that is far from the planet. The size, orbit and composition of each is likely to remain a mystery for many years.
. . There are 21 known Uranian moons. Neptune has 11. More than 30 asteroids are known to have moons, too.

Apr 9, 03: A new study of several meteorites collected on Earth and thought to have come from the same large asteroid reveal the structure of the parent space rock to have been something like an onion, with layer upon layer of differing structure.
. . Researchers already suspected that the initial asteroids, sometimes called planetesimals because they were like precursors to planets, were heated internally by the decay of a short-lived aluminum isotope that was common in the early solar system. The middles of some asteroids would have melted.

Apr 6, 03: Six more moons have been found orbiting Jupiter, pushing the total to 58. The moons are tiny, perhaps just a mile or so across, and orbit at a distance of tens of millions of km.
. . The moons follow retrograde orbits --the opposite direction of Jupiter's rotation. That suggests the moons were captured, perhaps not long after the planet itself formed. Jewitt's team has found 18 Jupiter moons this year and expects to find more. "We think if we keep on pushing it with the cameras and telescopes we have available, we'll get to about 100", he said.

Apr 3, 03: A satellite that relies on solar power to put it into orbit around the moon was unveiled by the European Space Agency, which plans to use the spacecraft in Europe's first attempt at a lunar exploration. The craft, known as the Smart-1, will be launched in July for a two- year mission orbiting the moon to look for water.

Apr 3, 03: The Sun radiates as much energy every second as 100 billion tons of exploding dynamite. The action starts at the core, where the temperature can reach 16 million degrees (Kelvin ...at this temp, it's essentially the same scale as Celsius).
. . Theorists have long assumed that 98.5% of the fusion at the core involves the lightest elements, mostly hydrogen and helium. The remaining 1.5% of the fusion involves nitrogen and oxygen, according to theory.
. . The new study puts a somewhat loose lid on the role nitrogen and oxygen play in the Sun's fusion. The cap of their involvement is now set at 7.3% --still significantly above the theoretical estimate of 1.5%.

Apr 1, 03: The number of known moons in the Solar System is now up to 118. The smallest: Saturn's Pan, which orbits within the rings, at 20 km wide. The Cassini spacecraft may force the issue of what is a moon.
. . Astronomers have developed a loose classification system that roughly separates moons into three types based on size and distance from their host planet: irregular moons, regular moons, and inner moons (sometimes called ring moons).
. . Many irregulars travel in packs that indicate they were once parts of larger objects. Perhaps they ran into an extended envelope of gas that might have surrounded a giant planet shortly after its birth 4.5 billion years ago.
. . It's very difficult for a planet to capture a moon. Unless something slows an incoming asteroid or alters its trajectory --like a highly improbable pass at just the right angle through an atmosphere-- it will either hit the planet or fly on past.
. . Pluto's moon Charon is thought to have been created by collision. The gravitational midpoint around which those two objects revolve is not inside Pluto, but instead out in empty space. Some researchers prefer to call this a binary planet system. More than 30 'tisimals are known to have moons, too.
. . Trojan asteroids. They are technically satellites of Jupiter, some astronomers say, but others, including Burns, consider them mere companions to Jupiter.
. . Proposal: what's spherical is a planet. 700 km is roughly the bulk needed to allow gravity to shape an object into a sphere, depending on density. Two KBOs -- named Varuna and Quaoar -- would become instant planets. More than 600 KBOs have been detected so far, but researchers extrapolate the limited sky surveys done so far to estimate there are about 100,000 of them bigger than 100 km.
. . There's also no mass cutoff to distinguish between large planets and small brown dwarfs. One suggestion: it be set at 13 times the mass of Jupiter, or roughly 4,000 Earth masses. Anything bigger can cause deuterium to fuse in the object's core.

Mar 15, 03: Mars' northern hemisphere is richer in water than its southern half. Near the planet's north pole, frozen water makes up as much as 75%, by volume, of the top meter or so of soil, said William Boynton, one of the mission's scientists.

Mar 10, 03: The tally of Jovian moons has soared to 52 with the discovery of four small moons added to eight that were previously revealed last week. Included in the latest batch are two rocks estimated to be just 1 km in diameter. These are the first Jovian satellites calculated to be less than 2 kilometers. Jupiter has 29 moons that are no more than 4 km wide and several more that aren't much bigger. These small satellites are thought to be captured asteroids or chunks of larger objects that broke apart, though their exact origins have not been determined. Many of them orbit in a direction opposite the planet's rotation.
. . They now estimates that Jupiter might have 100 satellites down to the 1-kilometer range, though he stresses that this is just a guess. Countless smaller rocks and bits of dust are in the planet's gravitational clutches.
. . No other planet has more known satellites. Saturn has 30, Uranus 21 and Neptune 11.

Mar 5, 03: The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, or OWL, would secure the title of world's largest optical telescope with a 100-meter aperture. It'll be in the Atacama Desert, about 5,000 meters above sea level.

Feb 27, 03; A colossal ring of gas has been revealed around Jupiter by NASA's Cassini space probe. The cloud is composed of water and lies along the orbit of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, 670,000 kilometers from the planet. Researcher think the cloud is generated by radiation from Jupiter bombarding the surface of Europa. "Surprisingly, Europa's gas cloud compares to that generated by the volcanically active satellite Io."

Feb 25, 03: Pluto might have more than one satellite, researchers speculated today, and they aim to find out before the end of the year.
. . 16% of NEOs might be binary systems. About 2% of asteroids in the main belt might have companions, he said. There are millions of asteroids out there. More than 1% of Trans-Neptunian Objects are thought to be binaries.
. . The Hopkins New Horizons science team hopes to send a probe to Pluto starting in 2006. It would arrive in about 2015.

Lurking just beneath the surface of Mars is enough water to cover the entire planet ankle-deep.

Feb 23, 03: Recent chemical research has shown that the planet that collided with Earth was a twin to the Earth -- scientists have called it "Theia" after the mother of the Moon in Greek mythology.

February 21, 03: Scientists simulating meteorite impacts on the frozen oceans of Europa have made an electrifying discovery, which raises the chances of finding life on Jupiter's moon. Jerome Borucki, at the NASA Ames Research Center, fired aluminium bullets into a block of ice. They found that when the bullet impacted, sensors embedded in the ice detected an electric shock. A second, and much larger, electrical discharge was observed a few moments later.
. . Evidence for the presence of the molecular building blocks for life comes from the yellow-brown stains seen on the ice by the Galileo probe. No-one had put sensors below an impact crater before.
. . Methane and ammonia are likely to be present in Europa's ice and the energy pumped into the ice by a meteorite impact will melt it. Shock this mixture with electricity, says Borucki, and complex molecules should form.
. . A lander may be sent to the surface of the Europa to look for organic matter. But it will be a long wait -- Greenley estimates the earliest launch date for the mission to be 2011.

The Space Station, which weighs over 410 metric tons, sinks around 200 meters every day. Progress raised the station some 10km in an operation lasting roughly 20 minutes which involved firing its engines when in the correct position. The station has been raised over a dozen times.

Feb 5, 03: The goal of an assembly of experts is straightforward: To significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid "in a controlled manner" by the year 2015. They have dubbed their effort the B612 Project, brought into being by what the group feels is a current lack of action to protect the Earth from the impact of near Earth "asteroids" (NEAs).
. . It's high time to get pushy with Earth menacing asteroids, suggests Apollo 9 astronaut, Russell Schweickart, chairman of the B612 Foundation and a retired business and government executive. The capability and technological wherewithal to anticipate and prevent an asteroid impact is now available, he contends.
. . In an open letter to Pres Bush, astrophysicist Hut said the technological ingredients to prod a 100-meter diameter asteroid so it will miss Earth are at hand. A test mission, he said, could demonstrate the ability to do so. "That way, when we discover an asteroid with our name on it, so to speak, we will be prepared. We could be in a position to save millions of lives, and at the very least we could not be accused of knowing about a danger and ignoring it." ... "Even if we are lucky, and no life- threatening asteroid crosses our path in the foreseeable future, developing the technology to gently nudge asteroids is likely to help us to explore the solar system", Hut counseled the President.

Jan 22, 03: Orbital Recovery Corporation is pursuing a space tugboat billed as the Geosynch Spacecraft Life Extension System, or SLES. The private firm wants to extend the useful life of big-ticket satellites, as well as rescue hardware flung into wrong orbits. Once firmly latched onto the wayward satellite, the space tug would use its own propulsion system to drive the errant spacecraft into a higher, "live long and prosper" operational altitude.
. . SLES would come replete with a primary ion propulsion system.
. . The SLES is designed to attach itself to a targeted satellite's apogee kick motor, doing so using a proprietary docking device. Apogee kick motors are widely used to boost satellites and for station-keeping. The motor itself provides a strong, easy to get to, link-up point between SLES and satellite --one that is always within the satellite's center of gravity.
. . Weighing in at a projected 500 to 800 kg, the SLES is outfitted with large deployable solar panels. Those energy-generating panels power sets of ion thruster packs mounted on the tug's deployable booms.
. . Beyond the rescue of stranded satellites, the SLES is seen as a way to stretch out the operating lifetimes of telecommunications satellites in geostationary orbit, perhaps for 10 or more additional years. Orbital Recovery Corporation has identified more than 40 spacecraft currently in orbit that are candidates for life extension using the SLES.

Jan 14, 03: Astronomers have found three previously unknown moons around Neptune, bringing the total for the distant giant planet to 11. The three new moons were difficult to detect, since they are only about 18 to 24 miles in diameter and their distance from the sun means they are about 100 million times fainter than anything that can be seen with unaided eyes from Earth. The three new satellites were missed by Voyager II because of their faintness and great distance from Neptune.

Jan 10, 03: Tight genes help a nuclear waste-munching bacterium resist the deadly effects of radiation, Israeli and U.S. scientists reported. The DNA of Deinococcus radiodurans, which can also survive extreme cold and dryness, is tightly packed into a circle, the researchers report in the journal Science. That dense ring helps keep damaged DNA in place, allowing broken-off pieces to move eventually back into position.
. . It can withstand 1.5 million rads, a measure of radiation, which is 1,000 times more than any other life form. Its existence suggests that life, in the form of bacteria, could have survived in space and may thrive on other planets.

Jan 9, 03: Astronomers have discovered a new object which shares a very similar orbit with Neptune. Part of a classification of objects called Trojans, 2001 QR322 is 230 km across and requires 166 years to orbit the Sun [same as Neptune, obviously]. Although clusters of Trojans have been found following Jupiter's orbit, none have ever been found to share an orbit with any other giant planet; although, they've been predicted for years.

Jan 6, 03: Just 65 meters in diameter, a tiny planetisimal got within 5.9 million km on Jan 6, 03. "Right now the ['tisimal] is on a slightly slower track just outside Earth's, and our planet is catching up. The combined gravitational effects of the Earth and sun will nudge the ['tisimal] onto a slightly faster track just inside Earth's, and it will begin to pull ahead."
. . In 95 years, the 'tisimal will have advanced all the way around to where it is catching up to the Earth from behind. A similar interaction with gravity from both the Earth and sun will then push the 'tisimal back onto a slower outside track, and the pattern will repeat.
. . [This is like the "dance" done by 2 moons of Saturn. "orbit-swapping". Tho those moons are of like mass.]
. . In about 600 years, though, our little 'tisimal could start looping around Earth like a distant mini-moon for about 40 years before returning to its cat-and-mouse ways, the astronomers said.
. . Even if 2002 AA29 did hit the Earth, it would not cause planetwide destruction as did the 10km-wide rock that hit and killed the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Instead, said Chodas, the small 'tisimal would gouge out a crater about three-quarters of a mile across, similar to the Barringer meteor crater in Arizona.
. . [I bet that in its next pass, we'll be ready to very carefully nudge it into that earth orbit, to be melted down like any earth-bound ore. In 95 years, we'll have the ability, for sure. JKH] Dec 31, 03: In a phenomenon that has scientists puzzled, the Earth is right on schedule for a fifth straight year. Experts agree that the rate at which the Earth travels through space has slowed ever so slightly for millennia. To make the world's official time agree with where the Earth actually is in space, scientists in 1972 started adding an extra "leap second" on the last day of the year. For 28 years, scientists repeated the procedure. But in 1999, they discovered the Earth was no longer lagging behind.
. . The leap second was an unexpected consequence of the 1955 invention of the atomic clock, which use the electromagnetic radiation emanated by Cesium atoms to measure time. It is extremely reliable.