|
By Daniel Fischer Every page present in Europe & the U.S.!
| Ahead | Awards 
The latest issue!
| A German companion! (SuW version) Current mission news: MGS (latest pictures!) + Cassini + Galileo + NEAR |
|
| |
Details of German ISS-bound TV gameshow emergeAlso: MirCorp abandons Mir, aims for key role in Russia's ISS section insteadWho said that manned spaceflight would quickly turn into boring routine once the ISS is up and Mir is down? On the day that Endeavour returned from the most spectacular ISS construction mission yet, two announcements were made that might forge much closer links between the space station in orbit and mankind on the ground. The German TV production company "Brainpool", so far known mainly for several comedy TV shows, and Astrium, the new pan-European space company, on December 12 unveiled a few more details of their project "Space Commander" that aims to send 7 winners of televised game shows to the ISS between 2002 and 2008 (briefly mentioned in the last Update green box). And the company MirCorp, on the same day, said farewell to Mir and turned all its business attention to the Russian section of the ISS.Brainpool is playing the Russian card, too: spokeswomen from the company and from Astrium have confirmed to the Cosmic Mirror that 7 seats on Soyuz capsules that will regularly be sent to the ISS as lifeboats have been booked firmly - since only 2 cosmonauts are needed for these routine "taxi" flights, the 3rd seat is always free for (paying) passengers. A partner in the deal seems to be Space Media Inc., a spinoff of the U.S. company Spacehab (in which Astrium has a stake) that aims to build a multimedia presence onboard the ISS' commercial Enterprise module, to be launched in 2003. There were no negotiations, however, with either NASA or the other Western space agencies building the ISS: Astrium believes (and some U.S. observers concur) that no approval for Russian guests on the taxi flights is necessary, just an announcement. The "Space Commanders" (which will be anything but 'commanders' on either the Soyuz or the ISS, of course) will undergo a basic cosmonaut training in Star City but will probably not be allowed to touch anything: their main task is to be "no ballast for the other astronauts," according to Astrium's spokeswoman. They will be restricted to the Zvezda module, at least at first (though during the later flights Enterprise might play a role), and it is far from clear how much live TV there will be during the 6-day stays before it's off again on the old Soyuz. The key to commercial success is not the mission itself but the many months leading up to it: All public announcements by Brainpool have dealt mainly with the selection process for the "Space Commanders" that's to be turned into the greatest TV (and Internet and UMTS) entertainment event ever. Exactly one winner will be selected out of perhaps some 60,000 initial candidates, and the procedure will eerily resemble all those 'reality TV' formats that have been major ratings hits around the world. The contenders will face quiz shows (like "Who wants to be a millionaire"), "action games" and eventually a "Big Brother"-style isolation experiment. Only when the field has been narrowed down to just a few, the action will shift to Russia and the actual cosmonaut training and selection, though the public will be able to vote on the winners all the way. The kick-off for the project will be the setting up of Recruiting Camps in major European cities this spring: The visitors will have the chance to put themselves forward as a candidate over a period of seven days. 6,000 candidates will then have the chance for casting in the subsequent elimination competitions. For two days all these candidates (male or female, over 23, no taller than 1.85 metres and not over 85 kg) will be comprehensively tested for their physical fitness. Then 600 contestants will take each other on in the hot phase of the qualification. Around 100 TV shows based on these events are planned, in which general knowledge, fitness and the ability to withstand stress are tested. In the quiz shows the candidates have to demonstrate their good all-round education and thus qualify for the next step towards going into space. Following that, a comprehensive fitness test awaits the competitors, and their ability to withstand stresses specific to space travel will be tested in the "action shows." The culmination will be the official Russian cosmonaut test at Star City, followed by a big psycho test for a high level of social skills: The candidates will spend 14 days hermetically sealed off in a mock-up of the ISS and demonstrate that they have strong nerves under extreme conditions. The viewers determine who will win and go into the final round as the national champion ... The Brainpool project, which will run simultaneously in several European countries, has no connections with either NBC's "Destination Mir" nor a similar attempt by the U.S. company Dreamtime to send game show winners to the ISS, nor is MirCorp involved - yet. But that could change, now that MirCorp has kissed Mir goodbye and is planning to come aboard the ISS bigtime. The company's Board has "elected to pursue the following markets: Development and utilization of a man-tended module capable of being docked to the I.S.S.; Commercial utilization of Energia production lines for manufacture of space transportation vehicles on a commercial basis; and Development of commercial infrastructure to support the I.S.S., from communication satellites to the tether program." That MirCorp will become responsible for the Enterprise module, though, has already been denied by SpaceHab. |
| ||||||||||||||||||
Did dying asteroids pollute many solar-type stars?The evidence is very indirect but tantalizing at the same time: Measurements of the iron abundances of 642 solar-type stars show a slight trend with the stars' masses, which could be a signature of iron-rich material accreted from the stars' surroundings. The more massive a star is, the less convective mixing occurs in its outer layers: If asteroids and other debris from the formation of Earth-like planets fall into the stars, there should be a slight excess of iron, with more of it detectable in the more massive stars.Exactly such a trend has now been found statistically (it's too weak to be detected in individual stars or even in the Sun) - and there is no alternate explanation why such a trend should be there. Monte Carlo models show that, on average, stars have accreted about 0.4 Earth masses of iron while on the main sequence. These findings suggest that terrestrial-type material is common around solar type stars - but to conclude that therefore planets like the Earth are very widespread in the Milky Way would be a bit bold. |
| ||||||||||||||||||
X-ray background resolved completelyThe new X-ray observatories Chandra and XMM have all but closed the 40-year old case of the cosmic X-ray background radiation (see also Updates # 167 lead and 209 story 4 sidebar): It's nothing but the combined radiation of a large number of extragalactic point sources, mostly active galaxies. The simplest thing one can do with the data is count the number of sources that one sees to a given depth, that is, determine the cumulative counts per unit area of all sources brighter than flux S. Prior to the advent of Chandra, the deepest counts in the 2-10 keV energy range were those obtained with the ASCA satellite, which already resolved 30-35 per cent of the background radiation at 2-10 keV energy.The cumulative surface density from the Chandra counts is 1.1 x 10^-11 erg/cm^2/s/deg^2 or 55-70 per cent of the background, depending on the normalization. And when one takes into account the contribution from the ASCA sources, the hard X-ray background has now been completely resolved. At softer energies (0.5-2 keV), the X-ray background had been studied extensively with the ROSAT satellite. The deepest ROSAT counts reach approximately 1000 per square degree at a limiting flux of 10-15 erg/cm^2/s; at this level, 70-80 per cent of the X-ray background is resolved into discrete sources. The present Chandra data extends the counts about a factor of five fainter. Chandra's superb spatial resolution even allows us to determine the locations of the X-ray sources to about 1 arcsecond accuracy, which means we can unambiguously identify their optical counterparts. Extremely deep optical and near-IR images from the Hubble space telescope, the two Keck 10 m telescopes and the Univ of Hawaii's 2.2 m telescope were used to make these identifications: The optical counterparts to the hard and soft X-ray sources consist of a mixture of quasars, bright galaxies, and optically faint objects (I>23) of unknown nature; only one source is significantly extended in the X-ray images and thus probably a high redshift cluster. These findings will also allow to better understand the development of galactiv activity over time. |
| ||||||||||||||||||
The smallest ripples in the Cosmic Microwave Backgroundmeasured so far have been reported by the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI), a radio interferometer of thirteen 90-cm antennae located at 5080 meters altitude in Chile. The data show that the power spectrum of CMB anisotropies decreases sharply once one moves to scales even smaller than those measured by the famous balloon experiments Boomerang and MAXIMA (see Updates # 190 story 2 and 200 story 1 sidebar for a joint analysis) - just as predicted by the standard cosmological model. This is the first time that such a decrease has been detected in a single experiment.The Cosmic Mirror has learned that several more CMB studies at high angular resolution will be published in the coming months, which together will draw a detailled picture of the CMB anisotropy power spectrum at scales way below one degree. And this combined data set will narrow down the cosmological parameters much more precisely and either do away with the remaining problems (such as confusion over the density of baryons in the Universe) or proove that there is really need for basic refinements of the Big Bang model, which at the moment stands stronger than ever before. |
| ||||||||||||||||||
No sterile neutrinos in Super-K oscillationsWhen the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan announced two years ago the first clear-cut evidence for neutrino oscillations (see Update # 82), it was not clear into what the 'missing' muon neutrinos had oscillated into, so that the detector could no longer see them. Most bets were on the third flavor of neutrinos, tau, but there was no proof - until now. Data from more than 1100 days of exposure have now been used to discriminate between oscillations between mu and tau neutrinos and the speculative alternative, oscillations between mu and sterile neutrinos (which have neither charged current nor neutral current interactions). Of three independent data samples one would be consistent with the latter scenario, but the other two are clearly not: Super-K does really see the signature of oscillations from muon to tau neutrinos an back! (Fukuda & al., Phys. Rev. Lett 85 [Nov. 2000] 3999-4003) |
| ||||||||||||||||||
Birth of spiral galaxies observed directly?Spectral evidence for an evolved stellar population of old stars with a metal content similar to or higher than that of the Sun in distant Luminous Compact Galaxies (LCGs) seems to demonstrate that these presumed precursors of today's spiral galaxies are the products of galactic mergers - the new VLT data are thus hailed as "spectacular confirmation of the hierarchical scenario of galaxy formation, in which galaxies are formed by the fusion of smaller building blocks." Luminous compact galaxies turn out to be evolved galaxies which are rapidly forming new young stars, and the star formation is triggered and enhanced by interactions with nearby companions and galaxy mergers. Hubble Space Telescope high resolution images of some of them do indeed often reveal the presence of closeby companions with tidal distortions. |
| ||||||||||||||||||
Making a business out of "totally lost" satellitesWhen a telecommunications satellite has lost more than 50 percent of its capacity, the owner usually declares it a "total loss" to the insurance company - and once the payment has been made, the satellite belongs to the underwriters. So what to do with it? The company Hughes Global Services has now made a unique business out of these "lost" spacecraft, of which there are quite a number in good and bad orbits around the Earth: The satellites are being salved and brough back to life, offering partial service that's still good enough for some other customers than the original ones - and the income is shared with the underwriters. Not always is the rescue as spectacular as the one of "HGS-1" in 1999 that involved swing-bys of the Moon (see e.g. these old SpaceViews and CNN stories and this Press Release; the satellite in question has meanwhile been sold to PanAmSat), but in all 5 "lost" satellites have been brought back to service since. (Space News of Dec. 11) |
|
Four more moons of SaturnThe known total is now 28, as an unprecedented surge in planetary moon discoveries is continuing: IAUC # 7538 & 7539, Spacefl. Now, CNN.Cassini's Jupiter images have become truly spectacular and already exceed Hubble's resolution: pictures # 2852, 2851 and 2850, JPL collection, Imaging Diary. Hubble is joining Cassini & Galileo, too, in monitoring Jupiter: ESA HST News, STScI, Space.com. More coverage: RAS Press Release, SPIEGEL. Trojan asteroids predicted for the inner planetsThere are probably other asteroid pockets in the inner Solar System, which are being shepherded by Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury: NSU, CCNet item 5.NEAR is now in a 35-km orbit around Eros, and soon the final approach will begin, with "contact" on Feb. 12, 2001: JHU Press Release. The orbit plan for the final months: version 516. Things we do not understand about Eros: Science Update. New comet at 6.9 mag. as seen from the southern hemisphere: IAUC and current observations listed at JPL and ICQ. Pioneer 6 contacted successfullyNASA successfully contacted Pioneer 6 on Dec. 8, nearly 35 years to the day after the space agency's oldest working spacecraft was launched: FT, SpaceViews, RP.Will it be Pluto or Europa as the first target of NASA's Outer Planets program? Space.com. |
MGS mission extended until April 2002NASA has given a thumbs-up for an extension of the Mars Global Surveyor's mission to study the Red Planet until April 2002 - that enables scientists to zoom in on prospective touchdown zones for future robotic landers: Space.com.What the space agencies plan in Mars exploration in the coming decade is reviewed in AW&ST. 'Mars bacteria' speculations return - magnetite crystals in ALH84001 cannot be explained w/o life, it's being claimed (by mostly the same people who started the buzz in 1996): paper by Thomas-Keprta & al., ISU Press Release (SpaceRef version), JSC Press Release (Spacefl. Now, SpaceRef versions), NSF Press Release, coverage by BBC, CNN, SPIEGEL. Giant tidal tails stream out of a globular clusterTwo well-defined tidal tails emerging from the sparse remote globular cluster Palomar 5 have been found in the SDSS - they reveal that the cluster is subject to heavy mass loss: paper by Odenkirchen & al.DENIS-P J104814.7-395606.1 is an M9 dwarf, according to the Keck spectra of the small, close object (see Update # 210 story 2) which has a distance of 4.1 +/- 0.6 parsec: paper by Delfosse & al.
|
All other historical issues can be found in the Archive.
The U.S. site of this Cosmic Mirror has been visited
since it was issued (the German site has no counter).
Compiled and written by Daniel Fischer
(send me a mail to dfischer@astro.uni-bonn.de!), Skyweek