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Дата: 22 апреля 1998 (1998-04-22) От: Alexander Bondugin Тема: Announcement Of 3rd Cydonia Observation By MGS Привет всем! Вот, свалилось из Internet... From the Mars Global Surveyor home page: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/target/update4-20.html Announcement of Third Cydonia Observation 20-APR-98 11:00 AM PDT The Mars Surveyor Operations Project is proceeding with the implementation of its third and final cluster of targeted imaging at Mars. This cluster will again target the two Viking Lander sites, a refined Mars Pathfinder landing site, and a new area in Cydonia. On Tuesday, April 21st, at 1:43 PM PDT and on Wednesday morning, April 22, at 1:22 AM PDT, MGS will again attempt to image the sites of the Viking Landers on two consecutive orbits. Recall that on the first attempt, Viking 1 was slightly outside the camera's field of view. However, on the second attempt the site was in the image, but it was not possible to see the lander. The Viking 2 site has been covered with clouds on both previous attempts. Then on Wednesday afternoon, April 22 at 1:00 PM PDT, MGS will again attempt to image the site of the Mars Pathfinder landing. This site was missed on the two previous attempts. On Thursday afternoon at 12:17 PM PDT, MGS will again image a portion of the Cydonia region. Global Surveyor will again target to capture an image of the features known as "The City". This area contains features identified as "mounds", "city square", "pyramid" and the "fortress". The image will be targeted to capture portions of the "pyramid" and the "fortress", as well as "mounds". As with the two previous images of the Cydonia region, the camera will be set to produce an image 1024 pixels wide so that the length of the image can be maximized to include as many features as possible. With a range from Cydonia to the spacecraft of 392 kilometers (244 miles), this will enable a resolution of 3.46 m/pixel (11.4 feet/pixel) and an image 3.5 km (2.2 miles) in width by 33 km (20.5 miles) in length. The same probabilities of success of 30% to 50% will apply to each of these attempts based on navigation uncertainties and spacecraft attitude control performance. Experience with the first and second clusters of targeted images has shown that winter weather in the northern hemisphere of Mars at this time causes haze, dust storms, surface frost and heavy cloud cover to be significant factors in the success of seeing the targets clearly. The weather effects are not included in the probability of success estimates. Results of the Cydonia imaging will be posted on the Internet, in the same manner as following the first and second observation attempts, at approximately mid-morning Pacific Time on Friday, April 24th. (When the playback of data from the spacecraft occurs overnight, as it does in this case, the image will be released shortly after the opening of business the following day.) If the landers are within the resulting images and can be identified, the image(s) containing it (them) will be released. Hа сегодня все, пока! =SANA=

Дата: 22 апреля 1998 (1998-04-22) От: Alexander Bondugin Тема: NASA Astronomers Find Planet Construction Zone Around Nearby Star Привет всем! Вот, свалилось из Internet... MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov Contact: Jane Platt FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 21, 1998 NASA ASTRONOMERS FIND PLANET CONSTRUCTION ZONE AROUND NEARBY STAR NASA astronomers using the new Keck II telescope in Hawaii have discovered what appears to be the clearest evidence yet of a budding solar system around a nearby star. Scientists released an image of the probable site of planet formation around a star known as HR 4796, about 220 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. The image, taken with a sensitive infrared camera developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows a swirling disc of dust around the star. Within the disc is a telltale empty region that may have been swept clean when material was pulled into newly formed planetary bodies, the scientists said. "This may be what our solar system looked like at the end of its main planetary formation phase," said Dr. Michael Werner of JPL, who co-discovered the region, along with Drs. David Koerner and Michael Ressler, also of JPL, and Dana Backman of Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA. "Comets may be forming right now in the disc's outer portion from remaining debris." The discovery was made on March 16 from the giant 10-meter (33-foot) Keck II telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Keck II and its twin, Keck I, are the world's largest optical and infrared telescopes. Attached to the Keck II for this observation was the mid-infrared camera, developed by Ressler at JPL and designed to measure heat radiation. The four scientists reported their discovery in a submission to Astrophysical Journal Letters. The disc was discovered independently and contemporaneously at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile by another team of scientists, led by Ray Jayawardhana of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, and Dr. Charles Telesco of the University of Florida, Gainesville. Koerner of JPL said the finding represents a "missing link" in the study of how planetary systems are born and evolve. "In a sense, we've already peeked into the stellar family album and seen baby pictures and middle-aged photos," Koerner said. "With HR 4796, we're seeing a picture of a young adult star starting its own family of planets. This is the link between discs around very young stars and discs around mature stars, many with planets already orbiting them." "This is the first infrared image where an entire inner planetary disc is clearly visible," Werner said. "The planet- forming disc around the star Beta Pictoris was discovered in 1983 by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), and also later imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope, but glaring light from the star partially obscured its disc." The apparent diameter of the dust disc around HR 4796 is about 200 astronomical units (one astronomical unit is the distance from Earth to the Sun). The diameter of the cleared inner region is about 100 astronomical units, slightly larger than our own solar system. HR 4796 was originally identified as an interesting object for further study by Dr. Michael Jura, an astronomy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The star, HR 4796, is about 10 million years old and is difficult to see in the continental United States, but is visible to telescopes in Hawaii and the southern hemisphere. The discovery of the HR 4796 disc was made in just one hour of observing time at Keck, but the JPL team plans to return to Hawaii in June for further studies. They hope to learn more about the structure, composition and size of this disc, and to determine how discs around stars in our galaxy produce planets. They plan to study several other stars as well, including Vega, which was featured prominently in the movie, "Contact." The Harvard/Florida research team that also found the HR 4796 disc included Drs. Lee Hartmann and Giovanni Fazio of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Scott Fisher and Dr. Robert Pina of the University of Florida. JPL's use of the Keck telescope is supported by NASA's Origins program, a series of missions to study the formation of galaxies, stars, planets and life, and to search for Earth-like planets around other stars that might have the right conditions for life. The W. M. Keck Observatory is owned and operated by the California Association for Research in Astronomy, a joint venture between the University of California, the California Institute of Technology and NASA. Use of the Keck Observatory for Origins research is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL is a division of Caltech. The research of both teams was supported in large part by the NASA Origins Program, with additional support to the Harvard/Florida team from the National Science Foundation, the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, and the Smithsonian Institution; and with additional NASA support for the Caltech/JPL-Franklin & Marshall team, including use of the Keck Observatory. The Keck II image of HR 4796 is available on the web at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/98/hr4796.html . The image and information on the MIRLIN camera is available at http://cougar.jpl.nasa.gov/mirlin.html A false-color image of the HR 4796 disc is available at http://www.astro.ufl.edu/news/ . Information on the Keck Observatory is available at http://www2/keck.hawaii.edu:3636 . Information on the Origins program is available at: http://origins.jpl.nasa.gov . ##### Hа сегодня все, пока! =SANA=

Дата: 22 апреля 1998 (1998-04-22) От: Alexander Bondugin Тема: NASA Hosts Web Chats For "Take Our Daughters To Work Day" Привет всем! Вот, свалилось из Internet... Brian Dunbar Headquarters, Washington, DC April 20, 1998 (Phone: 202/358-0873) John Bluck Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA (Phone: 650/604-5026) RELEASE: 98-66 NASA HOSTS WEB CHATS FOR "TAKE OUR DAUGHTERS TO WORK DAY" Hundreds of thousands of young people from around the globe are expected to use the Internet to "chat" with prominent women on April 23, "Take Our Daughters to Work Day." Ten women will be interviewed via World Wide Web chats enabled by NASA. During the chats, young people will use computers to converse with the women by typing questions and reading responses and dialogue via the World Wide Web. "We have designed this event to give young people who cannot otherwise speak with women in the work force the opportunity to meet on-line and discuss opportunities in a variety of careers," said executive producer Tish Krieg of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, where the event will originate. "The women also will provide insight into the professional and personal aspects of their lives." The one-hour web chats will take place on Thursday, April 23, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., EDT. The Internet URL is: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/women/intro.html The women include: Judy Woodruff, Cable News Network anchor; Jessica Stern, expert on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, who was the model for the film "The Peacemaker"; Chitra Divakiruni, novelist and author of the best sellers "Arranged Marriage" and "Mistress of Spices"; Leslie Ann Jones, multiple Academy Award winner for film scoring at Skywalker Sound; Donna Shirley, manager of the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA; Kim Polese, Chief Executive Officer of Marimba, Inc.; Lynda Plettner, professional dog musher and six-time finisher of the Iditarod race; Loretha Jones, executive producer of "The Parenthood" weekly television show; Stephanie Herman, Principal Ballerina and founder of Esprit de Danse; and Susan Kovalik, author and pioneer in the brain- compatible learning movement. Participation is easy. "If you have a personal computer with Internet access and web browser software, you can log onto the NASA site to see a schedule, background information about the women, chat instructions and pre-registration materials. Then, on April 23, go to the chat room, and follow directions," Krieg said. "Because the capacity for interactive questions is limited, a first-come, first-served pre-registration via the Internet is necessary for youngsters to be able to chat," she said. "All others can observe the conversations, which will be very informative and exciting experiences in themselves," she said. The Daughters' Day virtual event is sponsored by the "Women of NASA" project, one of many interactive projects provided by NASA's K-12 Internet Initiative at Ames. The "Women of NASA" project includes weekly chats with NASA women, said Ames' Learning Technologies Project manager Karen Traicoff. The Learning Technologies Project supports Women of NASA and the other projects. "The overall mission of our projects is to bring NASA into the classroom," Krieg added. "We sponsor on-line, interactive Internet activities that connect students with NASA people and their work. If we can give children opportunities to personally interact with professionals, then learning becomes an exciting experience," she said. The Learning Technologies Project is managed by NASA's High Performance Computing and Communications Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC. -end- Hа сегодня все, пока! =SANA=

Дата: 22 апреля 1998 (1998-04-22) От: Alexander Bondugin Тема: SJI's Sky and Space Update - April 15, 1998 Привет всем! Вот, свалилось из Internet... SAN JUAN INSTITUTE'S SKY AND SPACE UPDATE Summary information about the night sky and recent findings and events in solar system exploration and science. Updated every 2 weeks. LAST UPDATED: WED. APR. 15, 1998 Prepared by: Dr. Bruce Betts and Andre Bormanis OBJECTS TO LOOK FOR IN THE NIGHT SKY (MID-NORTHERN LATITUDES) MERCURY is visible low in the east just before dawn during the last week of April. VENUS lies low in the east-southeast before dawn, looking like an extremely bright star. JUPITER lies to the lower left of Venus shortly before dawn. On the morning of Apr. 23, Jupiter lies only half a degree (the diameter of a Full Moon) from Venus. The crescent Moon lies just two degrees to the lower left of the planetary pair. SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE OBSERVERS: Planets located in the southern part of the sky for northern hemisphere observers will appear higher in southern hemisphere skies; those in the north will appear lower. Mercury will be well above the horizon for observers in the Southern hemisphere in the pre-dawn hours through mid-May. THE MOON Last Quarter Moon occurs Apr. 19 at 12:53 p.m. PDT (UT - 7 hours). New Moon occurs Apr. 26 at 4:41 a.m. PDT. HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT UPDATE NEXT SPACE SHUTTLE MISSION The U.S. space shuttle Columbia is scheduled to lift-off from the Kennedy Space Center at 11:19 PST on Thursday, Apr. 16. The seven member crew will conduct experiments that will help scientists better understand fundamental neurological processes. The Spacelab / Neurolab payload includes pregnant mice, as well as 1,514 crickets, 135 snails, 152 rats, and 223 fish. The overarching goal of the biological research mission is to determine how the nervous system of humans and various other animals is affected by weightlessness. Understanding how weightlessness changes the nervous system will be crucial to future plans for lunar colonies and human missions to Mars. The Neurolab researchers will specifically study how a brain grows in space, and whether the absence of gravity slows down cell reproduction. For more information on the space shuttle program, see http://shuttle.nasa.gov. MIR SPACEWALK Mission Commander Talgat Musabayev, 47, and flight engineer Nikolai Budarin, 44, ventured outside the Russian space station Mir for a spacewalk on Saturday, Apr. 11, the third of five scheduled for the month of April. Australian-born NASA scientist Andrew Thomas, 47, manned the controls inside the station during the cosmonaut's EVA. Musabayev and Budarin removed and jettisoned a propulsion unit used to maintain Mir's orientation in space. The station's solar cell arrays must be correctly aligned with the Sun in order to generate power. The propulsion unit, which weighs some 1,800 pounds, had been running low on fuel and then failed completely last Monday. A substitute propulsion unit was soon brought on-line. A new replacement unit will be installed during two spacewalks scheduled for later this month. The cosmonauts were also scheduled to fit an airtight cap over the exhaust vent of one of Mir's oxygen generating systems, in preparation for a later repair effort. But an unidentified foam-like substance was discovered covering the cap. Russian Mission Control told the cosmonauts to postpone this task until the substance could be identified. The twelve-year-old Mir space station is expected to remain in orbit at least another one or two years. NASA has been utilizing Mir as a test bed for constructing and operating the International Space Station (ISS). The first element of ISS is scheduled for launch later this year. For more information on Mir and NASA's involvement in the Mir program, see http://shuttle-mir.nasa.gov/. PLANETARY SPACECRAFT UPDATE STUDENT SPACECRAFT The Student Nitric Oxide Experiment (SNOE) spacecraft was successfully launched by a Pegasus XL rocket on Feb. 26. This is the first mission launched under the auspices of NASA's University Explorer-Class (UnEx) program, managed by the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), a private, non-profit space research organization. The UnEx program funds spacecraft designed and built by university students under the direction of their professors. The University of Colorado at Boulder built and operates the spacecraft, with assistance from Ball Aerospace and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. SNOE is designed to investigate how variations in solar radiation and X-ray emission affect the density of nitric oxide in Earth's atmosphere. For more information on SNOE and other USRA missions, see http://www.usra.edu/. MARS LOSES FACE The U.S. Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft recently obtained high resolution images of the region of Mars called Cydonia, home to the notorious "face" on Mars imaged by the U.S. Viking orbiter spacecraft in the mid 1970's. The MGS Cydonia image shows a rough-hewn field of boulders on a low plateau that bears little if any resemblance to a human face. The lighting angle and relatively low resolution of the Viking cameras returned an image of this feature that bore some similarity to a face staring up at the sky. It's now clear that the feature is a purely natural assemblage of rocks, and not the artifact of an ancient Martian civilization, as a small number of people outside the planetary science community had proposed. To view an MGS image of Cydonia and the defunct "face," see http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/. THESE WEEKS IN SPACE HISTORY APR. 23, 1992: The U.S. Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft detects the first evidence of structure in the residual radiation left over from the Big Bang that created the Universe. APR. 24, 1967: Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir M. Komarov dies as his Soyuz spacecraft returns to Earth from orbit, the first and so far the only space explorer to perish during re-entry. APR. 25, 1990: The Hubble Space Telescope is released into Earth orbit by the space shuttle Discovery. RANDOM SPACE FACT The average distance between stars in the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy is currently estimated to be seven light years, or sixty-six trillion kilometers. This distance is equal to roughly 443,000 times the distance between the Earth and Sun. ********************************************************************** The San Juan Institute (SJI) is a non-profit corporation headquartered in San Juan Capistrano, CA with divisions there and in Tucson, AZ. SJI carries out research and education in planetary and Earth sciences and astronomy, with funding provided by government grants and private donations, which are always needed. Partial funding for the SSU has been provided by NASA's Office of Space Science. San Juan Capistrano Research Institute Ph: 714-240-2010, Fax: 714-240-0482 31882 Camino Capistrano, Suite 107 Email: educate@sji.org San Juan Capistrano, CA 92675 Web site: http://www.sji.org Hа сегодня все, пока! =SANA=

Дата: 22 апреля 1998 (1998-04-22) От: Alexander Bondugin Тема: NASA To Support El Nino Prediction Studies With Supercomputers Привет всем! Вот, свалилось из Internet... Cynthia O'Carroll Cynthia.M.OCarroll.1@gsfc.nasa.gov April 20, 1998 Goddard Space Flight Center Office of Public Affairs (Phone: 301-286-6943) RELEASE NO: 98-46 NASA TO SUPPORT EL NINO PREDICTION STUDIES WITH ONE OF WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL SUPERCOMPUTERS NASA's Seasonal to Interannual Prediction Project (NSIPP) will use an upgraded CRAY T3E-600 supercomputer at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., to support scientific and computational efforts to predict seasonal to interannual climate variations. The augmented CRAY T3E will enable NSIPP to run models capable of predicting phenomena such as El Nino and its associated atmospheric effects felt in many regions around the globe. The NSIPP and a science team of investigators from universities and other institutions will have access to 512 new processors in the upgraded CRAY supercomputer at Goddard. The total system of 1,024 processors, 131 billion bytes of memory and 1.2 trillion bytes of online disk space will perform nearly 400 billion floating-point operations per second (400 gigaflops) on a standard benchmark, ranking it among the world's five most powerful supercomputers. Goddard's CRAY T3E can do in one second what would take every person in the United States using hand-held calculators over 40 years to perform. "We plan to enhance these computational capabilities in support of our Earth Science objectives and establish Goddard as the lead center for Earth science supercomputing internationally," said Dr. Ghassem Asrar, NASA Associate Administrator for Earth Science. "The challenge is to implement large-scale Earth system models, run them in a timely fashion and then transfer the technology to the operational agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration." NSIPP scientists will combine comprehensive satellite observations with global climate models. Since the ocean, with its large heat capacity, contains the memory of short-term climate variability, the project will build a new ocean data assimilation system to ingest the satellite data and provide the initial conditions for predictive model runs. Experimental predictions using past El Nino events for verification will assess the ability to forecast future events. "The new technology will enable us to develop the best system_coupled climate models and data assimilation system_for taking full advantage of NASA's satellite observations for this problem," said Dr. Michele Rienecker, NSIPP's principal investigator. "We will be able to conduct ensembles of runs to give a realistic statistical characterization of uncertainty in the forecasts." NSIPP has developed a global general circulation model that couples models of the oceans, atmosphere, land surface and sea ice. The parallel model, capable of running on many computer processors, is a product of research funded by the Earth and Space Sciences Project of NASA's High Performance Computing and Communications Program. "This system upgrade can be seen as an Agency commitment to scaleable parallel computing for operational supercomputing," said Lee Holcomb, NASA Chief Information Officer. "It culminates more than 20 years of NASA investment in parallel computing technology development." Climate models divide the globe into a grid of layered columns, solving the relevant equations in each column layer and then assembling the full results. With 512 processors, NSIPP will be able to use a finer grid resolution than possible so far, with a column 1/2-degree wide (or 30 miles over the continental United States) in the atmosphere model, for example. "We know that model resolution impacts the ability to simulate the ocean as well as the atmosphere and land surface in a realistic manner," Riene