Space Science News from NASA HQ

Greetings!

A few new things posted in the past week at http://spacescience.nasa.gov/ :

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Our Stardust spacecraft has successfully completed a three-part deep space
maneuver designed to keep it on target for an Earth gravity assist in
January 2001. After whipping by the home planet, Stardust will head for a
meeting with comet Wild-2 in January 2004.

status report: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/status/std/sd20000126.html

Stardust home: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/

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Mission managers have decided to send another set of commands to Mars to
investigate the possibility that a signal detected by a radio dish at
California’s Stanford University came from Mars Polar Lander. There’s no
real hope that any science can be salvaged, but it would be interesting to
know that the spacecraft landed successfully.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/marsnews/mpl/status/mpl20000125.html

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Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, as made dramatically evident in
stunning new celestial pictures of remote galaxies and a colorful dying
star released Monday. I often stay away from superlatives, but I just
gotta leave that “stunning” in there for these images, especially that
“dying star”.

galaxies: http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2000/08/index.html

dying star (Eskimo nebula):
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2000/07/index.html

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Several new images from Chandra were released last week, including:

Chandra Images Seething Cauldron of Starburst Galaxy (M82) –
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/cycle1/0094/index.html

Chandra Finds ‘Cool’ Black Hole at the Heart of Andromeda (M31) –
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/cycle1/0007/index.html

Chandra Discovers X-ray Source at the Center of Our Galaxy (looks like a
black hole) – http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/cycle1/0204/index.html

Chandra Finds Oxygen Ring in Ashes of Exploded Star –
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/cycle1/0015/index.html

Chandra Finds X-ray Star Bonanza in Orion Nebula –
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/cycle1/0054/index.html

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We have decided to delay the High Energy Transient Explorer (HETE-2) launch
to the mid-May time frame, in order to perform additional testing. Once we
get it up there, HETE-2 will go about its business of detecting and
localizing gamma-ray bursts (enormously energetic cosmic explosions).
Learn more at http://space.mit.edu/HETE/