From: Craig Tupper (dtupper@hq.nasa.gov)
Greetings, universe fiends,
Here’s what’s new in the last week or so at http://spacescience.nasa.gov/ :
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In perhaps the best news, our Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft has
had a couple of successful engine firings, as it closes in on the asteroid
Eros. Rendezvous date is still February 14. I guess we’re trying to make
a real public-affairs bonanza out of this Valentines Day angle; there’s a
press release with some syrupy language and an excellent description of the
whole affair at ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/2000/00-022.txt .
Soon, the highest-resolution pictures ever taken of Eros will be released.
You can see those and follow the action at http://near.jhuapl.edu/
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SOHO recently discovered its 100th comet. SOHO is the most prolific comet
finder in the history of astronomy. http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/
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The first images from the European X-ray Multi-Mirror mission were released
today, and are available at http://sci.esa.int/missions/xmm/ . We
contributed some hardware to XMM, a mission that complements our Chandra
X-ray Observatory nicely.
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Launch of Astro-E has been delayed a couple of days, once by weather and
once by a problems with a tracking station. Launch is now scheduled for
8:30 pm EST tonight.
NASA page: http://lheawww.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xray/astroe/astroe.html
Japanese page (in English):
http://www.astro.isas.ac.jp/xray/mission/astroe/astroeE.html
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The President’s FY 2001 Budget request for NASA was released Monday,
including the portion for Space Science. Of course, Congress will put their
own spin on our budget, but it sure is nice to see plans for NASA that at
least keep pace with inflation, instead of continuing to shrink as our
budgets have for much of the last decade. If you’re having trouble
sleeping, check out http://ifmp.nasa.gov/codeb/budget2001/ , and the Space
Science portion at
http://ifmp.nasa.gov/codeb/budget2001/PDF/11_sat_space_science.pdf
(requires Acrobat Reader)
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Autonomous Nomad Robot Successfully Finds Meteorites in Antarctica – I
mentioned this effort a while back, it’s nice to see that it worked, it has
a lot of promise.
http://whatsnew.andrew.cmu.edu/RoboticsEngineering.qry?record=33227
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Our Sun-Earth Connections theme seeks to understand our star, and its
interaction with Earth and the near-Earth environment. Among other reasons,
this understanding may be important for frequent airline flyers. There’s
no reason to be an alarmist about it, but it is an interesting story.
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TRAVEL/NEWS/02/03/airlines.radiation.reut/index.html
Cheers!
