From: Craig Tupper (dtupper@hq.nasa.gov)
Greetings from NASA Headquarters in lovely Washington, D.C.!
The news has been a little slow lately around the holidays, so it has been
a couple weeks since my last message. But there are several things of note
lately:
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Galileo made another close pass by Jupiter’s moon Europa on January 3, and
survived the awful radiation environment quite well. And the good news is
that it picked up powerful new evidence that a liquid water ocean lies
beneath Europa’s icy crust. Get yer fishin’ poles ready! In other Galileo
news, we have decided to extend the mission and continue to operate Galileo
beyond January 31, the previously planned termination date. Stories
available at the Galileo page, http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/
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Sixteen experienced engineers, scientists and executives have been named by
NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin to form the Mars Program Independent
Assessment Team. The team will evaluate several recent successful and
unsuccessful NASA missions to deep space, including Mars Pathfinder, Mars
Global Surveyor, Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander, Deep Space 1 and
Deep Space 2. It will analyze the budgets, content, schedule, management
structure and scientific organization of these missions. It will then
assess how these roles and responsibilities are related to mission safety,
reliability and success. Team membership and a few other details are in
the HQ press release at ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/2000/00-006.txt
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Like all other NASA systems, all our operating spacecraft survived the
transition to the Gregorian year 2000 without a hitch. They’re all listed
at http://spacescience.nasa.gov/missions/opmsns.htm . For a little
background on calendars, try
http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Things/gregorian_calendar.html
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Finally, the American Astronomical Society is meeting from January 11-15 in
Atlanta, Georgia. Many exciting scientific results will be announced at
this conference; some of them should be in my next message, next week. You
can learn more about the conference at the AAS website,
http://www.aas.org/AAS-homepage.html . They are planning a live webcast of
2 sessions, one on Chandra results and one on Comet Hale-Bopp, this Friday
and Saturday.
